A Handy Hack To Streamline Your Maritime Recruitment Process

If you’re a shipowner, ship manager or crew manager we thought you might like to know about a Martide feature that can simplify and streamline your maritime recruitment process.

Because as we all know, the easier you make it for candidates to apply for your jobs at sea, the less chance there is of them ghosting you and dropping out of the process halfway through.

And there's nothing more annoying than being 'ghosted' once you've found the right seafarer - it makes meeting your crew change dates even more stressful for one thing!

Martide's secret hack for making maritime recruitment easier

So let's get on to a handy little hack called 'ex-crew' in Martide’s platform which allows you to decide if you want candidates that you've already employed to skip certain stages of the maritime recruitment process.

Read more: Introducing Our Crewing System's Candidate Forwarding Feature

The ex-crew setting makes it easier and quicker for trusted candidates to apply for your seafarer jobs and allows you to fill your vacancies faster and more efficiently.

The candidates you’ve lined up for previous contracts will be able to bypass everything from the English Test to Document Validation to the Negotiation stage right through to the Interview.

How to use the ex-crew feature

The ex-crew feature can be found in your Assignment Pipeline settings. You can read a complete step by step guide to Pipelines on our support website here and you can read a blog post about our maritime recruitment pipelines here.

You can also read a support guide to Assignments here.

For this post we're just going to be taking a look at the ex-crew setting, so here's where to find that.

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First of all, log in to your Martide account and click on Settings in the menu on the left hand side of the screen and then on Pipelines:

That will take you to a page that looks like this:

On this page you can do a number of things, including:

• Look for an existing Pipeline in the Search box.
• Add a new Pipeline.
• Edit or delete existing Pipelines.
• Sort Pipelines from A-Z or Z-A by clicking the pyramid icon next to the word 'Name'.

So we can see the ex-crew function, we're going to add a new pipeline. To do that, we're going to click on the blue +Add pipeline button in the top right corner (see the image above.)

Now you need to choose a name and select a type for your Pipeline. For example:

As you can see above, we're calling our new Pipeline 'Chief Officer' and we've selected the type as Assignment.

Note: Only Assignments have the ex-crew function.

Recruitment and Assignments are similar apart from one distinct difference:

• Assignments: this is where you hire a specific seafarer for a specific vessel on a specific contract.
• Recruitment: this is where you add seafarers to the database so that you can potentially hire them in the future.

Back to our Pipeline. We've clicked Save and now we can see our new Chief Officer Pipeline and can set the stages we want to include in this maritime recruitment Pipeline for the vacancy:

As you can see there are 3 default Stages named Negotiation, Contract Sign, and Hired.

You can edit or delete Negotiation by clicking the pen icon (edit) or trash can icon (delete) next to it. You cannot edit or delete Contract Sign or Hired.

How to add a new Stage to a Pipeline

To add a new Stage to a Pipeline click the +Add stage button. You will see a pop-up box.

In the pop-up box you can:

• Select a Stage from the Stage drop down box.
• Enter an alternative name for the Stage in the Display Name box (optional).
• Select the Step this Stage should appear in your recruitment process.
• Select Required Before if you want this Stage to be completed before another Stage.
• Choose whether you are insourcing or outsourcing the recruitment.
• If you're outsourcing, choose whether to outsource to a manning agent, client or both. Activate Outsource Client if you want your client (if you offer crew management services) to be able to edit specific Pipeline Stages. If you don’t select this they can only view the candidate’s information.
• Choose whether you want ex-crew members to be able to skip this Stage.

To select an option, slide the button across in the bar. When it shows blue, that option is activated.

So, for example, if your ex-crew option is showing blue, it will not show that stage in the recruitment Pipeline to any candidates who are in Martide's system and have previously worked for you.

And that’s it. Now the seafarers you like working with will find it even more convenient to apply for your vacant seafarer jobs and you’ll be able to get those empty jobs at sea filled faster, and in good time for your change over date!

Read more: Enjoy More Efficient Maritime Recruitment for FREE!

And while we’re on the subject of Martide’s useful functions, did you know that we also give you - the shipowners, ship managers  and crew managers - the option of letting us know what would make your life easier when you’re using our crew planning and maritime recruitment platform.  

Our Suggest a Feature function can be found in the menu on the left hand side of the page, just under Settings, when you’re logged in to your Martide account:

Click this and you’ll be able to instantly email us with any brainwaves you have that you think will make your (and other users’) lives easier. If we like your idea and can see it making Martide an even better place to find and plan crew, we’ll ask our Developers to start working on it.

No need to thank us - it’s all part of the service!

Meanwhile, we hope you find the ex-crew feature useful but if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us here.

This blog post was originally published on August 28th 2019 and updated on August 3rd 2021 to reflect changes in Martide's design.