If you thought it was a struggle securing tickets from Taylor Swift’s wildly successful Eras Tour, then spare a thought for the tens of thousands of flight attendant hopefuls who have been trying to access the Delta Air Lines careers website on Wednesday after the application window opened for the first time in more than a year.
It appears that Delta wasn’t quite prepared for the number of people who wanted to join the Atlanta-based airline as flight attendants and the careers website keeps crashing as people desperately try to submit their applications.
In the run-up to Delta reopening its flight attendant hiring window on Wednesday, the airline has been heavily advertising the rare opportunity to join the airline’s inflight crew. However, the level of interest still appears to have taken the airline by surprise.
Despite complaints that new-hire flight attendants struggle to make ends meet and, in some cases, even resort to living out of their cars, there seems to be no shortage of keen applicants wanting to join Delta.
One of the reasons that Delta’s careers website has been so overwhelmingly inundated might have something to do with a recent flight attendant hiring event carried out by rival US carrier United Airlines.
In late August, United also opened a flight attendant hiring event for the first time in more than a year, but the Chicago-headquartered carrier made little noise that keen flight attendant wannabes would soon be able to submit their application.
As it turned out, United kept its hiring window open for less than 24 hours. By the time most prospective applicants heard that United was hiring flight attendants, the window had already been slammed shut.
There was, however, one glimmer of hope…. There was news that Delta was due to open its flight attendant application window on September 4.
Thankfully, Delta has moved to reassure frustrated applicants that it isn’t about to pull a United, and the application window will remain open for days at the very least.
Unfortunately, that’s where the good news ends. After hiring a record number of flight attendants as the airline industry emerged from the pandemic, Delta is set to make the hiring process a lot more challenging this year and can afford to be very selective with who it hires.
In fact, before the pandemic, Delta used to boast that, statistically speaking, at least, it was easier to get into an Ivy League school than it was to become one of its flight attendants.
Delta no longer makes that claim, but what is pretty evident is the fact that competition is going to be fierce with so many people clamoring to submit an application.
The airline is yet to announce how many flight attendants it plans to hire in this recruitment program but we can be pretty certain that its going to less than the thousands it recruited in 2022 and 2023.
Delta’s beleaguered IT department (who struggled so badly to recover the airline’s computer systems following the CrowdStrike outage in July) appear to have got the careers website back up and running, although the airline admits that the process might take longer than applicants are expecting.
Patience, it appears, is critical.
As a point of reference, Delta says it was deluged with more than 35,000 applications in the first week of the recruitment window being opened in 2022 and this time around, it wouldn’t be surprising if that number was easily surpassed.
Conclusion
Delta has admitted that its careers website is struggling under the pressure of so many people apply to become a flight attendant after the recruitment window opened for the first time in more than a year.
Part of the blame might be to do with United’s very short recruitment campaign that lasted for less than 24 hours last month, although it’s clear that there is no short supply of interested applicants eager to submit their resumes.
Thankfully, Delta is reassuring applicants that they’ll have plenty of time to submit their resumes so keep on trying.
Delta’s IT department has serious issues, and that’s why they took several days more than other airlines to recover after an IT hack of Crowdstrike, which affected many companies that used their services. It affected passengers, crew and other departments. They only made a profit of 4.6 BILLION, after paying. Their CEO, Ed Bastian more than 34 MILLION in 2023. Bastian decided it was more important to enjoy the Olympics in Paris, rather than hang around while thousands of passengers, crew and agents suffered through the week of dealing with Delta’s inability/unwillingness to upgrade their IT systems. Not the least bit surprised that their employment IT system is a frigging mess.