Southwest Airlines is known for rarely needing to open external applications to fill vacant flight attendant positions. Crew members at the Dallas-based carrier are pretty content, and attrition is low even by U.S. airline standards. Even when Southwest does need to hire flight attendants, it prefers to hire from its own ranks first.
But occasionally, Southwest does seek external applicants. These moments are famously rare, and when they do happen, candidates have to act fast… I mean, real fast!
But Southwest’s latest flight attendant hiring window for external candidates may just have broken the record for the shortest period that applicants have had to submit their resumes to the airline.
On Tuesday, Southwest sought a maximum of 15,000 applications for just a limited number of flight attendant positions. From that total, serving Southwest flight attendants referred 10,000 candidates, leaving just 5,000 spots for external applicants just submit their resumes.
Southwest didn’t make a song and dance about the fact that it was opening the flight attendant hiring window to external candidates. In fact, the airline tried to keep what it was doing as secret as possible and even told staffers not to let on to anyone that the hiring window was about to open.
Word still got out, and when the online portal to submit applications was opened, the airline was immediately inundated with submissions. Southwest reached its quota in just 38 minutes.
Anyone actively in the process of completing their application within the Southwest portal learned how ruthless the airline could be when it came to closing the hiring window just as it had reached its target.
Some candidates ended up being booted out of the online portal before they had time to submit their resumes. They were simply too slow.
Consider that in 2021, Southwest opened its flight attendant hiring window for four hours, and that was considered an express event. At the time, Southwest was desperately trying to bolster its workforce after letting go of veteran staff at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Southwest’s takeover by activist investor Elliott, along with big changes to its business strategy, has seemingly done little to dampen anyone’s eagerness to land a job as a flight attendant with the airline.
That could be, in part, due to Southwest’s generous flight attendant contract that tops out at an hourly pay rate of $84.60 by the end of the contract’s term in 2027.
Although it can be difficult to compare pay rates between U.S.-based airlines, Southwest’s flight attendants are considered some of the best, if not the best, paid crew members of any airline in the United States.
