Guest blog post by Danielle Berclouw
When I left my Amsterdam flat to head out to sunny Mallorca to ‘seek my fortune on a super yacht’ all those 25(!) years ago, I was armed with a Nokia the size and weight of a brick and a floppy disk(!) in case I needed to print off a few more CVs..
In Palma I’d check my email in a smelly internet cafe and make my calls from a phone booth, hoping whichever Captain I was speaking to would run out of questions before I ran out of clinking coins.. LinkedIn didn’t exist, Facebook was still years off from being invented, and Tweeting was still something only little birds did..
Now, of course, I’ve got a laptop that weighs less than that old phone did, a fingernail-sized memory stick with more space than every computer in that internet cafe combined, and a phone that can tell me where I am, what the weather’s doing in ‘Wagga Wagga’ and what the word ‘williwaw’ means before I’ve finished asking.
Photo Credit: User:Jjborcean Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
These days I’m WhatsApping, voice-noting, scrolling and posting all at once, half of it from a phone I’m supposed to be putting down. Work still finds me the same way it always did, just on different screens: a WhatsApp crew group, someone tagging me on Instagram, a day-work post that’s already been snapped up by the time I’ve typed ‘me!’. Before all this I’m honestly not sure how I remembered a single birthday, tracked down a long-lost deckhand or found out that a mate was three marinas over and looking for a stew. Now I know exactly what everyone’s up to (sipping a posh cappuccino, getting sunburnt, doing something adventurous or ‘living their best life’). And you can just as easily let those friends know you’re actually up to nothing, quietly hunting for a good job on a great boat, and usually one of your however-many-hundred contacts will know someone who knows of something.
I’ve found myself a few times sitting cross-legged on a creaky bunk in a skanky crew house one minute and on a jumbo jet to swanky St Barths the next, literally. The captain would be a mate of a mate, the word on the superyacht street would be that the owners are lovely and the crew are cool, and the captain would’ve been assured through others that I’m no party girl and can prep and polish like no other..
One could start to wonder if social media has finally replaced the crew agent?
I put this to a few people, one of them Lars Molin, who’s run yachtie Facebook groups for years, back when a group with thirteen thousand members felt like a big deal. These days the busy WhatsApp and Facebook crew groups run into the tens of thousands, and a post for two days of day-work will be gone in seconds, grabbed by whoever’s best suited and quickest to reply.
Lars comments: “I believe the traditional hiring process through agents is under fire. From an employer’s point of view the benefit of an agent is avoiding the ‘rotten apples’ and the headache of being flooded with spam when crew sites copy your post onto their own page. On the other side, going straight to social media leaves a Captain with real savings and a much larger pile of CVs to choose from.”
For crew looking for work, the online route is great, especially for the greenhorns who tend to get overlooked by the agencies. It gives them a chance to promote themselves and apply directly to the yachts that are hiring.
On top of that, the big crew groups let you keep an eye on the positions the agencies are posting too.
With the number of agencies on the scene now, plus the apps, the groups and the job boards, it’s basically ‘mission impossible’ to keep tabs on all of them by hand. Social really does help people stay on top of what’s out there.
When this came up in one of the groups, one member replied, rightly, “it all depends on how you use the tool.”
It’s lovely to scroll through jobs on your phone, but remember the Captain can scroll too. They might have a chuckle at that photo of you at a particularly messy dock party, bottle in one hand and a traffic cone in the other, but it can also land your CV on the NO pile faster than you can say “one last espresso martini”. And that’s before we get to the reels and stories you forgot were public.
Another member points out that this cuts both ways, because social can also tell you who not to work for. There are whole corners of the internet now where crew swap notes on boats and captains, so if you’ve had a run-in with Captain ‘Double Standard’ or First Mate ‘Barks-a-lot’, word gets around.
He completely agrees with what Lars says about green crew: “I was signed up with every agency going for more than five months and never got a single call. I don’t think social media will do away with crew agents, but it might (hopefully!) push them to actually help us newbies.”
Personally, in 25 years, I’ve never used a crew agent, not even back in those now-unthinkable pre-internet days. The hours I’ve clocked in yachtie bars drinking enough dry white to sink a small superyacht were probably terrible for my health, but that’s how I usually landed a job. So plenty social, just minus the media. 😉 I’ve always found work through friends of friends the most reassuring, because it feels like you already know what you’re walking into.
I also know there are agents out there who’ve never set foot on a boat as crew, which to me sounds a little bonkers. Knowing what it’s actually like to work onboard, from your own experience, feels pretty essential if you’re the one interviewing people and trying to find the perfect match..
Ex-yachtie Jens Oomes, MD of Invisible Crew, whose fresh and contemporary approach has grown the agency steadily over the years, agrees: “If a crew agency today is nothing more than a source of CVs, it’s going to get eaten alive by social media.” But he adds, “At Invisible Crew we use social a lot to find candidates, but once those CVs land, that’s only the start of the screening and selection process”, which is where Invisible Crew’s own vetting really comes in, helping make a more precise, better-researched decision when placing crew.
“As the industry keeps growing and expecting a higher level of professionalism, it’s a bit worrying to see proper recruiters getting skipped in favour of a quick post online. At Invisible Crew we’ve got a loyal client base who know exactly why they work with us, so we’ll be all right,” says Jens.
So to wrap it up: most agencies have made their peace with the various platforms and use them well, and as Lars says, “I don’t think we’ll see social media putting crew agents out of business, even with the pressure they’re under.”
It really comes down to how the recruiters and the independent channels live alongside each other, and honestly, how much they end up helping each other out. Either way, being active across the different channels is about the only way to keep your finger on the pulse and be first to hear about that perfect job. Because nobody wants to miss the boat, do they?
