The best-kept secret of recruitment
Why should you use only one recruitment agency for crewing your yacht?
The mechanism of recruitment is at times misunderstood and can become messy when too many players are involved. This, of course, is not ideal and can create headaches for the client, so the aim is to make the recruitment process as smooth as possible.
The challenge that faces captains and senior yacht crew is to build united, highperformance crews capable of delivering the ultimate guest experience on board their yachts. The secret to achieving that consistently is for a yacht to give exclusivity to one recruitment agency. Why is that?
Engaging multiple yacht-crew recruitment agencies for the same job will not only be incredibly time-consuming and frustrating, it can also be very costly. Working exclusively with one agency, on the other hand, means the chosen recruiter will get to know you and your needs well over time, resulting in faster searches and a more suitable selection of candidates.
Remember, the goal is to hire the right candidate quickly so you want to minimise the amount of administration and correspondence that will inevitably happen if you work with multiple agencies at the same time.
Your recruiter needs to be your partner in the recruitment process
Serious recruiters concentrate their efforts and dedicate their time to clients who they are working with in partnership and who show commitment. In recruitment, it takes two to tango and recruiters will certainly work harder for those clients who use them exclusively or who will perhaps put them in competition with only one other agency. It’s a total fallacy to believe that recruiters will work harder when they are in competition.
Think of your recruiter as that trusted middle person whose role is to advise both parties and navigate towards a common ground and positive resolution, managing expectations because, most of the time, recruiters know best – of course we do, it’s our job. We spend our days talking to crew, to clients, to the market.
Clients might think that they get a better selection of candidates when they enlist various crew recruitment agencies but mostly they won’t because this just creates a race, resulting in them getting lots of inappropriate and duplicated CVs.
Clients will spend their precious time reading these CVs, contacting candidates, only to find out it’s all been a big waste of time. In contrast, one well-connected recruiter working exclusively on a job will absolutely want to find the best solution and will do a thorough job to source a few suitable, interested and available candidates and might even have time to headhunt. This recruiter will have the incentive to build an effective shortlist of candidates deserving of an interview.
That’s why it’s so important to make your recruiter your partner, a person who you can trust to know exactly what you require and is able to deliver quickly whenever there’s a need for new crew.
What can you expect from your recruiter?
The responsibility to find the right candidate lies entirely on your recruiter, and for them to be able to do that it’s important to brief them efficiently.
Getting off to a good start will often involve writing down a good job description, a concise summary of the role. If this is your first time working with a paricular agency, this should also include some insights into the specifics of your yacht, the culture and value on board.
Once this is done, the job description will become a valuable and reusable tool, requiring only minor updates from one season to the next. Recruiters love professional job descriptions and will use them to truly champion your vacancies with candidates.
Your recruiter will discuss your expectations and how they fit with the market. Will it be a struggle to fill the job because of an unrealistic salary in a candidate-short market? Is your leave package competitive enough? Are you asking too much in terms of skills when perhaps on-board training can be a solution?
Recruiters know unicorns don’t exist and will be transparent about that with the client. What is necessary is to build a strong team on board, so looking at individual strengths and evaluating what the new crewmember will deliver as part of an already successful team will be vital.
Working exclusively with one recruiter will shift the the responsibility for success to that recruiter. If the job is given to only one recruiter, we own the problem; the client can focus on their own workload and outsource finding the right talent to the experts. After all, that’s what yacht crew agencies are there for ...