Stop Chasing Job Adverts: Let Recruiters Find You on Crew HQ

You refresh the job pages, fire off the same CV a dozen times and hear nothing back. Meanwhile the position you wanted was filled by someone a captain found in a search.

Applications are only half the job

Applying for a listed job is free on Crew HQ and worth doing. Crew who are interested reach the employer with their profile, CV and references attached, so there is nothing to scan and send. But an advert is a queue, and you join it at the back along with everyone else who saw it that morning.

The other half of hiring never reaches an advert at all. A captain needs a stew for a crossing next week, a recruiter has a brief for a sole-crew position, an owner's manager wants a name by Friday. They open crew search and start looking. Crew HQ has 9,240 members, 4,566 crew on the crew map and 50 members who list the positions they recruit for, and those people search by what they need rather than wait for applications to arrive.

What a recruiter sees when they search

Employers with Professional Membership view every crew profile in full, download CVs and references, contact crew directly, and shortlist crew and request their availability. When they do, Crew HQ emails you. You also get an email when a reference of yours is checked, and when a job is posted that matches your profile, at most one a week and only while your profile is active and set to looking for work.

Order matters in that search. Premium Membership, at £30 a year or £3.50 a month, puts you at the top of crew search ahead of all other crew. Verified Membership, £15 a year, adds a verified badge on your profile, in crew search and on the crew map, and puts you ahead of free profiles; with Premium you sit at the very top. Premium also lets you store your certificates and documents, with an email reminder about three months before anything expires, and adds an image gallery to your profile.

A profile that is thin gives a recruiter nothing to search on. Fill in the fields, add the photo, and keep your availability honest: there is a setting for employed but open to offers.

How to set yourself up to be found

Register free at https://www.crewhq.me/user/register. Then email your CV as a PDF or Word document, under 5 MB, to [email protected] from the address on your Crew HQ account. Crew HQ puts the CV on your profile in place of the old one, fills in the details missing from it while keeping what you have already written, and emails you back a button that signs you in with no password. Filling in details from a CV is free the first time; after that it is part of Premium and Professional. If you have no account yet, the same address builds you a free profile from your CV, hidden until you press the button in the email you get back.

Then check your availability is set to looking for work, tick Yacht jobs in your news emails on Edit profile, and compare what each membership does at https://www.crewhq.me/membership.