Facilitating Seafarers Employment Using a Common Database

A key part of the maritime crewing agent business is the employment of seafarers (apart from drafting contracts between ship owners and seafarers), finding suitable personnel to fill the job vacancies advertised by ship owners. Maritime crewing agencies generally keep records of seafarers in their own databases. However, those databases often happen to fall short of the requested professionals (officers) and/or the support staff. In such cases, agencies spend a lot of time on finding the personnel possessed of the required qualifications and experience. This paper researches the positive and negative sides of a common database of seafarers, their meaningfulness or drawbacks, and the attitudes of maritime crewing agencies relating to common databases. A survey was conducted among Croatian maritime crewing agencies in order to obtain information on their operations and opinions concerning the proposed common seafarer database.