Why Is It Hard To Find A Job In The Maritime Industry? Part I

Scroll the maritime message boards of Facebook, Reddit, and beyond long enough and you'll notice a trend. Mariners asking things like - Where do I look for such and such maritime position? Why can’t I find blank job anywhere?

Meanwhile, speak to a hiring manager at any maritime outfit and they'll likely ask the same question in reverse — where are all the mariners?

The fundamental problem is clear: a disconnect between employers and the people they're trying to hire, made worse by platforms that were never built for this industry.

The mariners exist. The employers are looking for them. How did this happen?

At BrightBoard, we have some theories, and we'll be exploring them across a few posts. To start, we want to look at how companies seek new employees in the first place. Our goal is to pull back the curtain on some of the bottlenecks in the hiring process so that job seekers understand what's happening on the other end — and can adjust their strategies accordingly.

The Big Platforms Weren't Built for Us

Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LinkedIn are genuinely useful services that help millions of people find work every day. But they weren't designed with the maritime industry in mind, and it shows.

The most significant issue is location. When an employer posts a job on one of these platforms, they're required to categorize every position as either on-site, hybrid, or remote. This works fine for office jobs, but it breaks down fast for sailing jobs. Indeed's own definition of "remote" means a job that can be performed completely from home — not "fly to meet a vessel in any port." An HR manager at a shipping company posting a billet offshore has no good option. If they pick a physical location, the algorithm filters results by geographic radius and the job may never surface for a mariner sitting in Seattle or Cleveland. If they pick "remote," they're shoehorning a seagoing position into a work-from-home category that means something completely different. The vocabulary the platform offers simply doesn't match how maritime work operates — and mariners pay the price for that mismatch.

As mariners, we know better than most that where you live and where you work are often two completely different places. We fly to work. We're gone for weeks or months at a time. Our job searches shouldn't be constrained by the same logic that applies to someone looking for a desk job downtown.

This is one of the core problems BrightBoard is working to solve. We're aggregating maritime jobs from across the country in one place, and building out job posting tools that don't force employers to attach an arbitrary location to a seagoing position.

In the Meantime: How to Search Smarter

Until the industry catches up, there are a few ways to work around these limitations on the big platforms.

• Use a VPN. Since many job platforms filter results based on your detected location, connecting through a VPN and setting your location to a major port city — Houston, Seattle, New Orleans, Baltimore — can surface jobs that your home address would otherwise filter out. It's a simple workaround that can meaningfully expand your results.
• Search "Remote." When a hiring manager needs to post a maritime job on a platform that demands a location, many of them default to listing the position as "Remote" — it's often the closest available option for a job that doesn't have a fixed address. Search that term alongside your license type or vessel type and you may find postings that wouldn't turn up in a standard location-based search.
• Think like an HR manager. The person posting the job may not know the difference between an AB and an OS, or what a DPO does. Try searching the terms they might use rather than the ones you'd use — "marine crew," "vessel operations," "offshore personnel," or even just the vessel type. If you're only searching your exact credential, you may be missing listings where the job is buried under generic language.
• Go straight to the source. Many maritime companies don't post on the big platforms at all — they list openings directly on their own websites, or through industry-specific channels. If there's a company you want to work for, their careers page is worth a regular visit.

There are more jobs out there than the algorithms would have you believe. Sometimes you just have to know where to look — and how to look. And as always, we'll keep doing the work of bringing as many maritime opportunities as possible together in one place at BrightBoard.

Check in next week for Part II of this series.

Happy Sailing!