Your CV is your dockwalk

I have read a few thousand CVs off a passerelle. Most of them standing up, most of them in under a minute, plenty of them while somebody waited. Here is exactly what happens to yours.

Thirty seconds on the passerelle

I read in this order: photo, name, position sought, nationality and visas, certificates with dates, then experience. That is the whole scan. If one of the first five is missing I do not go hunting for it. I go to the next CV.

The photo does more work than the rest of page one. Head and shoulders, plain background or the sea behind you, crew shirt or plain polo, hair tidy, looking at the camera, smiling like a person rather than a passport. This is not vanity. A yacht is a small steel box and I am deciding whether you fit inside it with nine other people.

Two pages. Two. One page if you are green and honest about it. Three pages tells me you cannot judge what matters, and judging what matters is most of the job.

Keep the colours quiet. One accent colour, nothing that fights the photo, no sidebar of skill bars rating you at eighty percent for teamwork. And no objective statement. Nobody has ever read a paragraph that opens with "a motivated and passionate individual seeking". Give me a two line profile made of facts instead: who you are, what you have done, what you want.

From the bridge: There are three CVs in my drawer right now. All three are green crew who wrote one honest line about what they did before yachting. That line is why I called them.

The yachting norms, and what kills a CV

A yacht CV is not a land CV. The differences are small and they are the entire difference. These are what boats expect as of 2026.

• Position sought sits at the top, under your name. "Deckhand". "Junior Stewardess". Not "seeking opportunities".
• Certificates listed with issue and expiry dates, STCW and ENG1 first. A certificate without a date reads as a certificate you do not hold.
• Visas held, with expiry. B1/B2, Schengen, whatever you have. That single line often decides whether I call you.
• Nationality and languages. The crew mix and the flag state paperwork both depend on it.
• Vessels listed with length, type and your role, including daywork. "42m motor yacht, daywork, six days" is real experience. Write it down.

Date of birth, smoking and tattoos are the awkward ones. Plenty of crew put all three on, because plenty of boats still ask. In several countries an employer cannot legally ask you, and on a yacht it comes up in the first interview regardless. My honest view: leave date of birth off, write "non smoker" if you are one, and be straightforward about visible tattoos when the question comes rather than surprising a chief stew on day one.

What kills a CV in ten seconds is short and consistent. A cropped night out selfie with somebody's shoulder still in the frame. Three pages. A paragraph about being a hard working team player with a passion for excellence. Certificates listed with no dates. A file called CV_final_v3.pdf sitting in my downloads folder with forty others.

Where to build it

I built SeaPapers (seapapers.com) because I got tired of reading good people who had been rendered badly.

It is a free editor. Six department templates: deck, engineering, interior, galley, officers, and a junior template for people with no yacht time yet. The fields are the yacht ones rather than the office ones, so it asks you for vessels, for certificates with their dates, for visas and for references, and it holds you to two pages instead of letting you drift onto a third. There is a live preview, so you can see the thing I will see. I built it, so treat that as my bias, stated plainly.

The same account holds your papers. The document folio takes your STCW, ENG1, passport, visas, references and testimonials, keeps them dated and checked, and gives you one link to send when a captain or purser asks for everything. Boats ask for everything.

Use it or use Word. What matters is that tomorrow morning you hand over a two page yacht CV with dated certificates and a photograph that looks like a crew member. Build it tonight.