Catch your new staff in the web

24th April 2001

Is recruitment the next dot.com boom area? You could think so given a flurry of new ventures being established in Britain over the last couple of months.

Some are being run by former staff from Internet ventures while others are trying to find work for those made unemployed by dot.bombs.

Take Ron Crean, general manager of newly created Headway Recruitment. Last year he was helping accounting and consultancy giant PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC) with its globalmarinehub.com. Following the demise of that project, the former James Fisher Tankships, NYK and Nautilus Shipbrokers man has been making a living out of placing other people in jobs.

The dot.com experience with PWC has not been wasted.

He says much of the growing client base is coming from the screen and pretty much all of the basic donkey work, matching potential recruits with job vacancies, is being done via computer models. Stephen Cameron is another former shipping executive. He is a past director of OT Africa Line, who has set up his own business, Cloverleaf Resource, offering recruitment.

Cameron, previously a seafarer, provides a complete consultancy package so that shipping companies wanting to set up a new line, for instance, can come to Cloverleaf and get everything from research on the commercial opportunities to a new management team put in place.

These two new recruitment firms join a tiny number of well-established companies that specialise in maritime employment. One such is Spinnaker, run by former Ince & Co solicitor Phil Parry. He says he has noticed the increased competition but remains unworried. "There is room for more," he says but warns anyone thinking they can make a quick buck should forget it. It's hard graft, he claims.

Shipping has been late on the scene when it comes to the use of third-party recruitment agencies.

It is common to have specialist companies in many other sectors but maritime hiring has tended to be done through word of mouth or through shipowners posting their own staffing vacancies in publications such as TradeWinds.

As we know, shipping faces a particular problem with recruitment because it is not seen as a particularly attractive sector. It has lower wages, a lower profile and lower prestige than, say, investment banking or general media.Unlike the Internet phenomenon, the growing new recruitment sector is unlikely to attract hundreds of copycat companies. Nobody will be going to a new agency for share options built round some potential stock market flotation.

There is an obvious opening for more efficient and focussed recruitment although everyone is disadvantaged by a poor image created by some agencies in the non-marine field.

For instance, in legal recruitment, where agency competition is intense, employers have found themselves bombarded by speculative CVs and ill-equipped candidates turning up for interviews. Agencies have a lot to offer but, like any other transaction, you need to make sure you know who you are dealing with.

Conversely, if agencies do not work hard to understand your business before they take on any work from you, it is a reasonable presumption they will be unable to meet your staffing needs.

terry.macalister@guardian.co.uk