Caitlyn…Carrie…um, Clarke?

I’m Carrie-Ellise Poirier — though depending on the era, the outfit, or the identity crisis, you might know me as:

Caitlyn Rogers (pen name)

Layla (stage name)

Jasmine Pfeiffer (Hollywood misadventure), or

Ellette Morgan (ugh, don’t ask).

Names are my favourite accessories. In all, I’ve tried on, worn, and immortalised at least 12 names. Some of which I now have to explain at every future customs inquisition — because, yes, some have their own passports.

There was a Clarke in there somewhere, but only by pure accident and thankfully it never made it onto my credentials.

(Oh wait, is this site a credential? Never mind.)

It’s safe to say, I’ve had a complicated relationship with identity, which explains why I’ve racked up almost as many names as I’ve had flight attendant interview rejections.

My pen name, Caitlyn Rogers made her debut in 2005 when I auctioned my flight attendant interview research on eBay — hiding behind a pseudonym, of course, because I had zero expectations. Except…the auction went viral and, just like that, my alter ego became an author and an overnight success.

Since then, Caitlyn Rogers has taken on a bit of a bad-ass reputation for herself, through six editions of this, my best-selling book “The Cabin Crew Interview Made Easy”.

My factory setting — and the name stamped on my Emirates certificate — is Carrie-Ann, but I never use that name.

If this is all sounding a little crowded — don’t worry. When it comes to cabin crew, just call me Caitlyn. She’s the overnight success, after all.

But I was not an overnight success. The Cabin Crew Interview Made Easy was not so-called because it was easy for me.

In fact, I have a confession:

I am a serial reject…

…Nineteen rejections, to be precise.

Yes, nineteen, not exactly the kind of thing you embroider on a tote, I know. It’s a number that makes people exchange uncomfortable glances. Which is why it has been my dirty little secret for twenty years.

Being a serial reject comes with its curiosities (applicants), hecklers (Gordo), and exasperated sighs (Dad). No one expects someone who failed nineteen interviews to still be smiling, let alone trying, after seven years. (thirteen years when you count my teen prep).

Many people ask, how do you keep going after so many rejections? If it’s an applicant asking, what they’re really saying is: Please tell me I’m not doomed. If it’s Gordo or Dad, there’s usually a job centre flyer involved. Folded. Thumbed. Definitely highlighted. If it’s a recruiter: Oh no. You again.

So, why should you listen to me?

Well, allow me to lead by example and rephrase my introduction to something a little more inspiring:

I have a unique view of the airline recruitment process because I reverse-engineered my way from the bottom of the rejection pile and into the elite ranks of Emirates, one mascara-streaked rejection at a time.

In layman’s…

Interview 18 — I couldn’t even walk through the door.
Interview 19 — I walked out halfway through.
Interview 20 — Got the Golden Call.

So, what changed everything? You’re asking the right question — now things get interesting.

But, where to start? Ah yes…

…The measurement of failure:

♥︎ 183bpm

I finally admitted I was not cut out for this job at interview number eighteen. Rather poetically, in the same spot it all began, three years earlier: right outside Virgin Atlantic Headquarters, Crawley, West Sussex.

There I stood, nose to glass, staring at a flock of Virgin flight attendants.

Everything mirrored my first, and second, and third, (and 4th…6th…8th…9th…) and on through my seventeenth interview: the building, the grey sky, even the perfume lingering in the doorway — save for one difference:

I glanced down at my Polar watch, where a furious little heart emoji flickered away with a resting heart rate of:

♥︎ 183bpm

I was motionless — but my body was already legging it down the M5 back to Bristol.

I was having my first

♡︎ panic attack

After years of dreaming, scheming, manifesting, prepping, preening, pretending — that tiny screen, lit in cold clinical LED clarity, served up the first honest and concrete feedback I’d ever received.

Whilst I was performing confidence, it was recording collapse and calling me out as a fraud, because…

My reflection in Virgin’s glass stared back. I tried focusing on the flight attendants in their stunning red, but I couldn’t visualise myself wearing that dream uniform anymore — not with my fake flight attendant scarf flapping and choking the last bit of fantasy out of me.

It had been flailing and flapping in the breeze all damn morning. I’d bought it to “look the part” and thought blue made me look less desperate. But there I was — wheezing, overdressed, mid-palpitations — finally seeing the truth: I looked like a proper wally. And, on top of all that, I might have to ask Virgin’s recruiters for the defib.

That was the moment I finally ditched my dreams at the curb like a dirty old fag butt, not realising I was standing in the seam between failure and success.

I told my boyfriend I’d failed the reach test. He bought me chips and gravy, then introduced me to his favourite airline: Emirates. This wouldn’t have made any difference, except Emirates made no mention of swimming in its requirements. Nothing at all. Had I finally found an airline that didn’t measure my suitability by the metre?

That was enough to push me towards one more interview. If only I could enter the building.

I set my sights on an Emirates open day.

Binge-Watching Failure

…and, wait, what just happened?

A week after abandoning my Virgin Atlantic interview, I found myself herded — no, corralled — into a hybrid conference-ballroom-banquet-hall situation at the London Edwardian Hotel.

I stationed myself next to the nearest exit. Except, I was soon shepherded into the middle of the room, into the middle of an aisle, and into the middle of a tightly packed row. No leg room. No window seat. No emergency exit. Trapped.

This time, it wasn’t my watch setting off alarm bells.

183bpm had become 183aia (applicants in attendance)…

…give or take. I didn’t perform a head count. But someone did because the recruiters, somewhat politely, asked everyone still standing to leave — they’d run out of folding partitions and the 4-in-1 ballroom had reached and exceeded maximum capacity.

Just like that.

Pffoofff

183 became 100

That was my first mass culling, and I “made it through” purely because I’d been shoehorned into a chair.

Watching those applicants leave, I envied their rapid departure. I didn’t want to stick around for my first mass humiliation.

But, no such luck.

For me, it was: Welcome aboard the absurdity that is an Emirates Open Day.

The Infinity Mirror

Looking up and down my row, it was like staring into an infinity mirror.

All around me, across five, ten, fifteen rows of applicants, I was one of the dozens of identical black-suited, red-lipped, hair-doughnutted, beaming, Pan-Am smiling applicants.

Then, as soon as the Emirates video concluded, I was stunned to silence as dozens of identical arms shot up. Each one asking a variation of the same identical question I had tucked up my identical sleeve. I saw what happened when everyone follows the same advice.

For the next thirty minutes,

I saw everything.

On loop.

One hundred times over.

And then I saw it all again — echoed in every one of my failed attempts.

Back at Virgin, I’d stared at my own reflection and seen a fraud. This time, I saw the choreography. We weren’t just making the same mistakes. We were trapped by the same rules:

• Smile wide.
• Speak often.
• Perform confidence.
• Project charm.

• We wore the same scarlet accessories.
• Recited the same laminated model answers through the same brittle, overbright voices.
• With our stiff buns tugged so tight it vacuum-packed all trace of individuality.

And I had followed so many damn rules, I moved with doll-like precision, and was even monitoring my eye-accessing cues.

Trying to be perfect was exhausting and ineffective.

Then another number occurred to me.

The statistic that casts a great big shadow over every hopeful applicant…

99%

I’d heard about the 99% failure club. But I’d never stared that number down in the flesh. And if the numbers were true — if 99% really did fail — then the outcome had already been decided.

Ninety-nine of us were walking out with nothing. Only one would leave with a job.

Which meant:

we had already been mass eliminated. We just didn’t know it yet.

That was the change. I figured, if I was doomed anyway, there was no point in trying. The pressure to perform lifted. I had nothing to lose because I had nothing to gain.

Then, I got curious.

If only 1% succeed, who was that one? And, more importantly, how do recruiters figure it out?

Recruiter Mode

The room felt less like a recruitment event and more like a departure gate during a delay — restless bodies all elbowing for acknowledgement. And the recruiters moved through the crowd with the same elegant detachment as cabin crew dealing with a flight full of entitled business-class upgrades: swift, polite, professionally disinterested.

• Smile.
• Nod.
• Next.

So I stopped watching the hopefuls and started watching them.

• What made them perk up.
• What made them tune out.

I looked for the tiny cues: a flicker of a wince, a smile so sharp, it slashed a name off the roster.

Not that we had names…

…We didn’t even have numbers.

And it dawned on me — the anonymity went both ways.

I’d been operating under the grand illusion that this was all about me: my answers, my dream, my bloody outfit — that I’d never once considered the people behind the clipboard. I hadn’t asked what they might need, or how they make a decision.

Had there been a moment of breath to ask a question that day, mine probably would have been, “Um, wait, who are Emirates?”

I knew — and lived by — all the so-called rules, but I knew nothing about the airline, and misunderstood the job. I had no customer service experience because I’d job-hopped my way through 30+ jobs. And somewhere along the way, I had lost sight of my real goal and the real me.

The silly rules I’d followed seemed ridiculous, and I felt ridiculous.

I wasn’t wearing that awful blue scarf this time. No. I’d upgraded my delusion. I’d dressed like I already worked there alright. I’d done it all, all the way down to the cream parchment resume with red headings. I was one sewing needle away from embroidering an Emirates cartouche onto my interview lapel.

I was trying so hard to be someone else, there was no space left for me. If I didn’t walk out now, I’d be escorted out — by legal with a cease and desist stapled to my rejection slip.

Whilst applicants queued for the CV handover, I slipped out the exit then rushed home and used what the personality test labelled a handicap, my introverted nature, to research, study, and unpack the process like a combination lock.

For two years, I tested. I peeled back the polish, poked the soft bits, and found out where the system bends and where it snaps. In dismantling the system, I learned how the system is designed to dismantle us, to find out where we bend and where we snap.

So, I changed my habits and shaped my instincts. I stockpiled a variety of customer service experience. Learned to swim (or so I thought). Researched the airline. Validated every rumour and regulation. Binge-watched Airline. By the end of it, I had a revamped CV and 400 pages of rejection notes turned interview prep.

It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t sexy. But it worked.

When I approached Emirates for a mock interview, I stopped playing by the imaginary rule book. I showed up as someone no one else could imitate: Myself. No red lipstick. Hair long and loose, trailing past my waist. And because it was “just” a mock, I let myself have a little fun — a little rebellion. I reached into the back of my wardrobe and pulled out my old school shirt. And that’s what I wore to my Emirates interview. Yes, really. Powder blue.

Collars so wide they looked like they could generate lift — or pierce an eye.

Those ridiculous collars made me smile — Not that brittle, compliance-coded Pan Am smile I’d been straining to perfect for years. I made it through the first elimination round — and yet, that’s when I took my most humbling walk of shame: past a mob of 30 or so rejected applicants flanking the exit.

Even though it was the first time I’d been truly myself, I felt like a fraud. And by the looks I got, I wasn’t the only one who thought so. One woman even muttered, “Why did they make it?” And honestly — fair question. She was right to ask and be confused because I’d broken every “rule” they tell you to follow.

• I managed only one half a comment in the group discussion.
• Wore the “wrong” clothes.
• I blundered through that round, and seven more after that
• — all the way to the Golden Call where I had seven sets of photos rejected.
• And then, in week three of SEP training, my team had to fish me out of the ditching pool when it became painfully clear I couldn’t swim after all.
• Which, according to the “Old Wives,” should’ve disqualified me.

I sat shivering and alone in the raft, bracing for rejection #20.