Build a profile: tickets, sea time, references, availability, and the boats you have actually run. It takes about twenty minutes if your certificates are to hand.

Then a person reads it. Not a keyword filter — someone who knows the difference between forty metres busy and forty metres quiet, and who will ring you if something in your history needs explaining rather than assuming the worst.

If you are green, say so. Green is not a problem. Green pretending to be experienced is a problem, and it ends the same way every time.

Certificates get verified against the issuing body. Medical fitness and expiry dates get logged so neither of us is surprised the week before a crossing. References get taken up by phone, because nobody writes down the thing you actually want to know.

We are straight with clients about gaps in a history, and straight with you about what a client has said. You will not be sent into an interview knowing less than the person across the table.

Tickets tell us you are allowed to do the job. They tell us nothing about whether you will last a season on a boat with a hot-bunked crew mess and an owner aboard eleven weeks a year.

So we ask the client the awkward questions before you have to. Watch system. Crew mess size. Rotation, or no rotation. Cruising or marina-bound. Whether the last person in the role left, or was landed.

You get told the answers. A placement that ends at six weeks helps nobody — not you, not the boat, not us.

We put you forward only with your agreement, and we tell you which vessel before we send your details unless the owner's privacy prevents it — in which case we tell you that, and you choose.

Interviews are usually a call with the captain, sometimes a trial day. We brief you beforehand and we chase the answer afterwards, so you are not left reading silence for a fortnight.

When an offer comes, read the contract. Check the wage, the notice period, the leave, the repatriation clause and the flag state. Ask us anything that reads oddly — we would rather lose a placement than watch you sign something poor.

Flights, visas, joining instructions and the name of whoever is meeting you at the dock. We keep your certificate expiry dates and remind you before they lapse, because renewing an ENG1 in a foreign port at short notice is nobody's idea of a season.

Then we stay in touch. Not to sell you the next boat — to know how this one is going. If it turns out badly, tell us. That information changes who we send there next.