National Maritime College of Ireland

Flagship Management – Seafarers Week

Who are Flagship Management?

Flagship Maritime Consultants Ltd, trading as Flagship Management, provides specialist recruitment, staffing and executive search services to the maritime, energy and offshore industries. From its base in Kinvara, Co. Galway, the company provides services covering markets in  Ireland, the EU, Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. The company works across many sectors of the industry including the oil and energy majors, leading ship owners, leading shipyards, classification societies,  maritime regulatory agencies and maritime finance and insurance services. Flagship Ireland is one of the principal suppliers of senior management for major shipbuilding projects in China and South Korea.

Flagship has established itself overcoming many competitive challenges. It was a new entrant into a highly competitive and established market with numerous competitors spread across Europe. The Flagship model had already proven itself in the US, Canada and South America, and was now to target two of the largest maritime marketplaces: Europe and the Asia Pacific. In order to claim market share we are focusing on our competitive advantages that are difficult for our competitors to replicate:

 

• We focus on employing staff with extensive experience in the maritime industry adding skills and knowledge that our competitors cannot offer. Our staff are ex-­‐naval architects, master mariners, chief engineers and bunker traders amongst others.

 

• In addition to their expertise, our staff offers a more mature profile in an industry dominated by a very young and very transient workforce.

 

• Everything is in the ‘Cloud’. Our cloud-­‐based infrastructure allows our personnel to work remotely in real-­‐time just as if they were still in the office. Our office phone numbers follow us wherever we go, allowing an “always-­‐ on” service for our clients.

 

• Our service offering: in addition to the above, our services follow a six-­‐point process that provides a structural approach for both ourselves and our clients. By following this process we have an industry leading retention rate of professionals placed with our clients.

Our knowledge, our network, working for our clients and candidates

 

We are professional recruiters with real maritime know-­‐how. Our experience matters. We have worked in the industry and are vested in it and consequently our clients benefit from an intuitive knowledge of the positions they are trying to fill. Our candidates can expect dedicated support throughout the recruitment process from submission to the first day on the new job and beyond. Check out our website: www.flagshipmgt.com

Want further information on Flagship? Open this PDF : Flagship Management Profile

A CV IS NOT YOUR LIFE STORY: it’s the exciting advert for your life story coming soon to an interview room near you.

Your Maritime CV: 3 simple ways to make your CV a LOT better!

 

Every week we’re reading hundreds of CV’s and, for any given job advertised, you can bet company HR departments are also reviewing hundreds of CV’s and they have a lot less time to review them than our team. Some career advisors will tell you ‘you need to make your CV stand out!’ You might also feel that fancy formatting and plenty of colour with ‘cool’ infographics is the way to go. In our opinion the following is much more productive:

1. Standard formatting: Personal details, Employment (most recent to oldest), Education (Always include from-to dates, type of degree/dip/cert and University/Educational Institute), Skills (IT, personnel, HSEQ training, short courses, languages, etc) and Interests.

If the HR manager has 100 CV’s to review, 6 annual performance management interviews, a union dispute, and any amount of payroll, pension or new employee inductions to carry out that day then they are not going to appreciate having to work through your infographics, diagrams and colourful pictures to find out if you’re actually qualified to do the job, particularly if you’re number 99 and they’ve already found 5 guys they can call to interview. It’s a lot easier for them to find your information if it presented in a similar format to most of the CV’s they’ll see.

2. It’s not what you’ve done, it’s how well you have done it! It’s ok to include brief information on the roles and responsibilities of each position you’ve had in the past, but it is extremely important to highlight your achievements in each role. What additional value were you to each employer? How did you improve processes or procedures? Did you make your employer more efficient? Did you save costs or earn extra revenue for your company? Did you have excellent annual performance appraisals? Did you give to your employer more than just the standard requirements of the job.
If you’re a bunker trader or marine business developer you must highlight your performance against target. If you’re a HSEQ manager you must highlight processes, incident-free records, etc. If you’re a tech super, highlight solutions that saved your employer time/money in downtime maybe in drydock. At the very least you should be able to say that your annual performance reviews were excellent.

3. Keep it short. Too many guys were speak to believe that they cannot possibly fit their experience into anything less than 8 pages! We have argued this point with guys with CV’s that are over 20 pages long! A CV IS NOT YOUR LIFE STORY: it’s the exciting advert for your life story coming soon to an interview room near you. It should be 2 pages, max 3. Most employers are only going to be interested in what you’ve been doing over the past 5 years, provide detail on your last 2 to 3 positions and list out everything else.

Good luck in your job search!