By Wasana Nadeeshani Sellahewa
(Commonwealth) _ You can’t afford to lose talented seafarers just because you don’t have an appropriate opening in today’s candidate-driven market. In terms of recruiting, this entails creating and sustaining a talent pool. Rather than creating fresh candidate pipelines with each new marine job opening, you may expedite the process by reaching out to your current talent pool or network.
Continually nurturing this community of potential applicants, graduates, and other promising seamen and women helps you to speed your hiring process. Employers and manning agents may find it difficult (if not impossible) to place crew members if they lack a talent pool. Because of predicted labor shortages and a dearth of qualified workers, talent acquisition must become more intelligent, timely, and cost-effective. Building a talent pool is one method of more efficiently recruiting since it keeps exceptional seafarers at your fingertips and lets you to access it with a few keystrokes. A talent pool should be included in any long-term recruitment, succession planning, or strategic workforce planning strategy.
Finally, each of these tactics relies around ensuring that you have the right quantity of people with the right skills in the right place at the right time. If you have access to a talent pool consisting of skilled employees, you may take their profiles into account while developing your long-term strategy.
An effective hiring strategy requires the development of a talent pool. The more candidates you have in your pool, the easier and less expensive it will be to fill openings. Yes, a talent pool has numerous advantages for marine recruiters and crewing managers, but it has even more advantages for the maritime sector. Shipping is a fascinating and competitive labor market, even if it is not well reported. While most maritime labor study focuses on seagoing people, the industry also offers excellent prospects for office workers. Are there any unique credentials that predispose a “good applicant” to cope with and flourish at the job’s demands, whether onboard or ashore?
The industry is moving away from the conservative attitude of demanding “a 10-year experience at the age of 25,” according to Mr. Simon Frank, Chief Human Resources Officer, Thome Group. New candidates, on the other hand, appear to be more conscious of what is occurring in terms of technical breakthroughs. You may add qualified sailors to your talent pool (database) using the Recruitments tool in case you wish to recruit them in the future. As you add more exceptional applications, your talent pool grows deeper.
Then there’s the Assignments function, which ensures that you’ll always have competent people to pick from anytime you need a team. When a specific seafarer is employed on a specific contract for a specific vessel, an assignment is utilized. In other words, you are filling a vacancy with a sailor.
Meanwhile, panelists noted that soft skills appear to be becoming increasingly important as the business progresses, despite the industry’s continued emphasis on credentials and degrees. Soft skills are more difficult to develop than hard talents since they have less to do with knowledge or competence. In this environment, soft skills education begins at the top, with seminars and virtual training being valuable assets.
Meanwhile, remote training is a major trend influencing the current scene, with COVID-19, of course, creating new circumstances for the learning process. Spending 8 hours in front of a screen to study is not an easy work for a sailor or a student, and the globe is still unsure when the pandemic will stop. Every facet of daily life is being revolutionized by digitalization, and conventional education will most certainly be transformed in the near future.
Remote training is more effective, costless, and time-efficient since it connects numerous individuals in various areas of the world – requiring only a device and an Internet connection- and many firms and employees prefer it over traditional classroom education, according to experts.
