Most job candidates can hold a polished persona together for a 45-minute interview, but almost nobody can hold it together through a casual lunch with a stranger they don’t realize is evaluating them. United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby built his pilot hiring process around exactly that gap, and he says character over credentials is the whole point.
Kirby described the system in an interview with McKinsey global managing partner Bob Sternfels, published April 2 as part of the firm’s “Brilliant Moves” series. “I started a new process. I asked our head of flight operations to select a dozen of our pilots who were well-liked by everyone,” Kirby said. When candidates come in to interview, those pilots escort them around the building, eat lunch with them, and walk them between meetings.
In other words, the friendly pilot showing you where the conference room is? That’s part of the job interview.
A simple question with a telling answer
The instructions Kirby gave his dozen pilots were simple. “Your job is just to assess: Is this interviewee someone I would like to take a four-day trip with? And if you say no, then they’re out. You get a veto vote,” he said. For pilots, a four-day trip is the job itself, long stretches of close quarters with the same crew, so the question is less hypothetical than it sounds.
“The idea is to pick people who care about others, who you want to hang out with, who you want to be with,” Kirby explained in the interview.
The approach reflects how Kirby thinks about talent across the airline. He told Sternfels that United remains one of the few employers where someone with a high school diploma can build a career as a flight attendant, gate agent, ramp worker, or technician and eventually reach a six-figure income with benefits. “There just aren’t many careers like that left,” he said. The skills, in his view, are teachable. “We can train them to do the jobs, but how do you build a process to pick the right people and keep them excited?”
The scale of interest in those jobs makes the filtering question urgent. “When we open up our flight attendant hiring for 2,000 to 3,000 positions, we get about 75,000 applications within a couple of hours,” Kirby said in the McKinsey interview.
Skill is important, but so is likability
A clip of Kirby describing the veto system spread widely on social media in the weeks after the interview, drawing both praise for prioritizing temperament and pushback from people who worried that likability could crowd out skill. Kirby’s framing suggests he sees no conflict there. Technical ability gets you into the room. The dozen pilots at lunch are checking for everything else.
His larger philosophy on careers came out in the interview’s closing moments, when Sternfels asked whether becoming CEO was part of a grand plan. “I never had a grand plan,” Kirby said. His advice came in two parts: “Don’t have a plan,” and “If you’re not having fun, do something different.”
