Cruise Ship Jobs Blog

Almost all crew members at one point in their contract or career will experience homesickness when working on a cruise ship.  Whether you are a first time joiner or someone that is nearing the end of their contract, it is normal to miss being at home.

For adults, homesickness may occur when travelling.  And working on a cruise ship can exacerbate those feelings about life back at home.  Consider the length of time away from home with contracts of 4, 6, 8, and 10 months on board.  We’re not just talking about missing friends and family, but also about the other comforts at home from sleeping in your own bed to favourite foods.  Add in the rigidity of ship rules, the cost of internet and phone calls, and your new roommate and this life may not be for everyone.  

Will you be frustrated if the ship carries only Coke and not Pepsi?  Can you get used to a different smell of laundry soap? Will you be able to handle not texting or talking to your friends throughout the day?

Although mild symptoms of homesickness may include an increase or decrease in appetite, drinking, smoking or insomnia, the most severe (yet rare) cases may lead to suicidal thoughts.

Cruise line recruiters are very interested in knowing if you are mentally prepared to work on cruise ships.  They don’t want you to get onboard and then change your mind because you can’t handle living with a roommate and you miss the comforts of home too much.

Mental preparation is the key in handling homesickness when working on a cruise ship.  And, conveying that you are knowledgeable about cruise ship life will set the interviewer’s mind at ease that you are prepared for life onboard.

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Finding a cruise ship job is ultra competitive, so applicants need to be more creative when it comes to finding their dream job.  There are a number of effective social networking websites for cruise job hunters, but how do you use them to find a job within the cruise industry?

It’s not likely that posting your resume on sites like Monster.com, SimplyHired.com, or CareerBuilder.com will actually be helpful in finding a cruise ship job.  The fact is that that the cruise lines receive so many resumes and applications that they don’t need to look for applicants on these types of websites.  

So how do you get a competitive edge by using social networking sites to find a cruise ship job?  Learning how to use popular social media websites like Twitter, Linkedin and Facebook can help applicants gain cruise ship info, learn names of hiring managers, and get in touch with other cruise ship employees. 

You can “Follow” cruise industry insiders and cruise lines on Twitter, join cruise ship crew member “Groups”  on Facebook and find names of hiring managers through Linkedin.

But while using social networking sites, be careful what you post and what personal information you make public. Remember you are trying to project a professional image.  So the pictures you post, the messages you tweet, and the people in your network are all a reflection of you.

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As you can imagine over the years we’ve seen thousands of cruise job applications. Some great, some okay and some downright poor!

Here are the 5 of the most commons mistakes we see most job seekers making time and time again:

1) Applying for more than one position in the same application (you should only ever apply for ONE job at a time).

2) Your CV/resume is longer than 2 pages in length (lengthy resumes almost never get read because recruiters don’t have time).

3) Too much irrelevant personal data clogging up your CV/resume (for example, nobody cares that you have a ‘full driving licence’ when you’re working on a ship!).

What’s more, including personal information like ‘age’ and ‘marital status’ can actually hurt your chances in this industry, a lot more than most people realize.

4) CV/resume not targeted to the specific job that you are applying for. (Everything in your application should should back up why you are the best person for this particular job. Far too many people send ‘general’ resumes in the hope that it’ll cover them for several job possibilities. It won’t!)

5) Not following up on your cruise job applications. Here’s a quote taken from our forum this week that proves everything I’ve been saying for years:

“My friend has just been employed as Cruise Staff with Carnival. She emailed in her resume and followed up with an email every week for a month. The HR guy got back to her and said he always waits until he sees resumes come in several times, because then he knows a person is really serious and committed to landing the job.”

Simply avoiding these five most common mistakes in your cruise job applications will dramatically improve your chances of landing a job on a cruise ship.

Neil Maxwell-Keys

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There’s no doubt the cruise industry is a TOUGH industry to crack. If it was easy to get a job on a cruise ship then you would not be reading this newsletter…

Instead you’d probably be working on a cruise ship right now… perhaps getting paid to travel around exciting places like the Caribbean, the Med or the Far East!

Sure, some people send off ONE job application, land an interview and then get hired right away. But I can assure you this is definitely not the norm!

For most people, it takes some determination and persistence. It takes the ability to shrug-off rejection and to pick yourself up from disappointment …and to just keep on going until you land your “dream job”.

My own journey to getting a job on a cruise ship was FULL of frustration and rejection. And I have a ton of rejection letters I could show you from lots of cruise companies, including Disney, Carnival, RCCL and a LOT of agencies and concessionary companies.

Did I let it affect me? YES, it hurt like hell! Did I give up? Never.

The dream I had of getting paid to travel the world, visiting exotic destinations, making lot’s of new friends… and just plain getting out of the rut I was in was just too strong a dream to give up on.

Giving up would have also meant that I was admitting failure and giving up on myself… and I was FAR too proud to allow that. Besides, I had already told my family and friends that I was going to work on a cruise ship… and I wasn’t going to allow them the satisfaction of laughing when I fell flat on my face!

(They soon stopped laughing when I sent them postcards from Barbados, Aruba, St Lucia, the Bahamas, Mexico, Cost Rica… or phoned them from a beach in Hawaii!)

Unfortunately, MOST people do not show the level of determination that’s needed to get hired in the cruise industry and that’s simply why they don’t get the job.

In our experience, MOST people’s feeble attempts at getting hired involves nothing more than firing off a few random, un-targeted resumes by email. When they don’t hear anything back within a week, they give up on the whole idea of working on a cruise ship and move onto something else.

(Perhaps in 10 or 20 years time they’ll look back on what might have been an amazing adventure in their lives, had they taken it seriously?)

The fact you’re even reading this email suggests to me that you are not ‘most’ people.  If you pick anything up from this message it’s this:

If you REALLY want to get a job on a cruise ship, then you need to take it SERIOUSLY and pursue it with passion, determination and persistence. Those three qualities alone won’t guarantee you the job, of course… but they’ll certainly put you ahead of 97% of the competition out there and I think you’ll find the end rewards worthwhile

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