I applied for the TUI one and got to the last 40 out of 7000 applicants (!!). There was:

Application pack.

Online interview, answers recorded, predictable questions.

Online assessment centre - various nonverbal reasoning tasks, maths tasks etc. The one element I thought was missing (and might help them pick the right candidates in future - see below) was some sort of spatial awareness/visual perception test.

Observed assessment centre. Various teamwork tasks, exam on basic flight knowledge that they sent in advance for us to learn, role play with captain about weather and pax issues.

Full motion flight simulator - 1hr briefing, 1hr in the sim doing basic manoeuvres with no visibility (instrument hand flying), 30min debrief. I found this far harder than I expected and wasn’t surprised to hear I’d failed to get a spot. I couldn’t get used to how the artificial horizon moved the ‘wrong’ way in my mind. Someone who had done some flight sim practice would have had a big advantage but they specifically said not to do that. To be fair, I’m not sure practice would have helped! I think they took on 25 people. I fed back that I got to the last round thanks to being good at exams and good at teamwork - but these are (to an extent) teachable skills that people without 20 years’ work experience or a broad and diverse set of life opportunities may not have. I suggested they incorporated spatial awareness into the online assessment to help them pick the ‘right’ people earlier, and improve diversity.

Regardless, spending an hour in a full-motion 737 sim with TUI’s training captain is probably the one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

Perhaps serendipitously, I’ll soon be working as a lawyer for the law firm who helped with designing the scheme.