Turkey’s creWin is looking to improve productivity within the global maritime sector by matching seafarers with the jobs and employers most suited to their needs and abilities.
When it comes to job satisfaction, the rates associated with the maritime industry are “much lower” than is the case with many other sectors, says Emre Ayvaci, CEO and co-founder of creWin, a Turkey-based online crew matching and candidate sourcing pre-recruitment job board. As such, the average term of employment for a seafarer is just two years, with this general level of dissatisfaction having a correspondingly negative effect on productivity.
Born of an idea in 2018, creWin, however seeks to redress this by matching seafarers with available jobs most suited to their particular abilities and ambitions. To achieve this, seafarers first need to sign up to the platform, where they can then create a detailed user profile listing their skills, qualifications and experience. During this process, they can also add any relevant certification and health card information either manually or via the creWin scanning data entry system that can population the applicable fields from a photo of the certificates pages of their seaman’s book.
Once this has been done, the seafarer can then search and apply for jobs that most closely match their preferences anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, recruiters can also sign up to the platform to post jobs and attract the most suitable candidates for openings, benefitting greatly from the platform’s reference verification system that ensures the authenticity and trustworthiness of a candidate’s supplied references.
Additionally, the creWin platform also features technically-oriented industry-specific filters that, Ayvaci says, provide reliable company and personnel profiles for the faster matching of qualified employees and a career management dashboard for seafarers that covers such matters as documentation, certificates and technical development while providing direct connections with potential employers without needing to pay a third party. On top of this, the platform also offers a regularly updated sectoral database.
Describing the platform as being at a “mature product stage”, Ayvaci reports that creWin has been busy of late further enhancing its web and mobile offerings. At the same time, it has also been conducting thorough research into the needs of both seafarers and maritime employers alike in order to better understand their particular requirements. This process has elicited much positive feedback, with the company, he says, now “planning to start with four fleet management and shipping companies that would be our champions, [bringing] us great traction and development after launching”. Indeed, these champions, he continues, are expected to bring with them 5,000 seafarers and some 500 job posts.
Having previously attended the New York Maritime Innovation Center (NYMIC) event in New York City this past January, creWin in March was accepted into the Growth Circuit Accelerator in Turkey with the possibility of subsequently going to San Francisco to establish the company in the US. “Apart from this, we are meeting with international investors that can provide us not only [with] financing, but also [with] their know-how about the industry,” he says.
