I’ve explained time and again why I believe XC’s approach is wrong. Here I go again!
If they’re looking to appoint the best candidates for the job, they’re missing a trick by only looking within the industry.
I joined the railway industry, along with many others, directly as a trainee driver. We have all performed the role to a high standard. In my years of doing the job I’ve seen some truly shocking “internal” candidates enter the grade, perform terribly, and be swiftly removed from it.
I’ve been informed by managers and trainers that they actively prefer external candidates for the driving grade because they aren’t institutionalised, they’re a “blank canvas” and they frequently go on to perform better in the role.
That doesn’t mean that there aren’t some internal candidates who would make excellent drivers.
My point is simply this: if you want the best candidates for a job, you should pitch the vacancy to the widest possible audience. That’s where XC have gone wrong by restricting the audience to those working within the industry.
They want 14 people, I think it is - they can easily find 14 suitable candidates from within. There will be more recruitment next year and the year after that and so on. They are new to recruiting unqualified trainees, and they feel they’ll find it easier to train from within, so that’s what they are doing - it’s that simple. Add to that; CrossCountry has been haemorrhaging staff of different grades to other businesses, experienced staff at that. You may not like what has been done, but it’s being done out of necessity. You’ve just got the blinkers on, looking at it from your own experience from within your grade at your employers, without even trying to understand what has happened elsewhere; which you’ll hopefully be the first to accept you know nothing about! I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect they lack the resources to actually deal with the inevitable 15000 applications from the ‘huge-salary but don’t give a fig about the job brigade’ they’d get if they did open this up to the entire world right now too, which would also be a consideration.
We’ve all seen people have incidents; I’ve seen both inexperienced non-railway background folk and experienced people drop clangers. To err is to be human after all. I don’t know that anyone has ever done any studies into likelihoods of incidents so both sides of that debate are going on limited and inconclusive evidence there.