A yacht CV is the short document, usually one or two pages, that crew send to yachts, captains and crew agencies when applying for a position on board. CV stands for curriculum vitae, and in yachting it is the standard term rather than resume, because the industry grew out of British and European maritime hiring where CV has always been the word.
That is the definition. It tells you nothing about what actually happens to the document after you press send.
I spent three years as ETO on MY WedgeToo and years more on other boats after that, and part of the job was sitting down with the Chief Engineer to go through CVs for the position below mine. So this is not advice about layout or fonts. This is the process your document is about to walk into, described from the side of the table that decides.
Your CV is a filter, not an introduction
By the time your CV reaches a boat, nobody on board is reading it to get to know you. They are reading it to find a reason to move it to the other pile.
On the boats I worked on, screening ran in a fixed order, and the first pass had nothing to do with skills.
First, we looked at how long you stayed. Not where you worked. How long. If a CV showed four yachts in eighteen months, two to four months on each, that CV went aside straight away, no matter how impressive the vessels were. The reasoning was always the same, and it was blunt: a person who moves every three months will move again. If another boat offers three hundred or five hundred euro more per month, they are gone, and we are back to reading CVs in the middle of a season with a position open and a system nobody else on board knows.
Bringing a new ETO up to speed on a boat's systems takes months. Nobody wants to do that twice in a year.
Second, we looked at what you actually know. Which vessels, what size, and above all what equipment. Not brand names copied off a manufacturer's website, but systems you can be questioned about on a phone call: the AV distribution, the network, the switchboard, the specific control platforms. Anyone can write that they know a system. Ten minutes on the phone with somebody who works on it daily settles that question quickly.
Third, and this is the step most crew do not expect, we called your references. Not an email. A phone call to your previous Chief Engineer or Captain, one professional to another, short and very direct. That call has ended more applications than any formatting mistake ever will.
Fourth, if the references held up, we emailed the candidate and then spoke by phone. A few questions, mostly to hear how somebody talks about the problems they have had rather than the problems they have solved.
Fifth, the CV went to the Captain. He gave the last green light. Not the Chief Engineer, not me. The Captain.
Five steps, and your document is present at every one of them. That is what a yacht CV is: the thing that has to survive five separate filters, applied by different people, for different reasons.
The passport problem nobody writes about
Here is something I can tell you because I lived it, and most CV advice will not.
I am Croatian. When I first tried to get into yachting, my CV could not stand out at an agency no matter what was written on it. Agencies and yachts want crew with a British passport first, then EU, and only after that do they start looking at the rest of us and what we have actually done. That is not a rumour. That is the order the pile gets sorted in.
I did not solve that with a better CV. I came in on a recommendation from Chief Engineers who knew my work, onto WedgeToo, and I stayed three years. That boat was my stepping stone, and everything after it came from having those three years on paper.
If you hold a passport that is not first in the queue, this changes your strategy, not your document. The CV still has to be right. But your first boat will probably come from a person rather than from an application form.
Then why does the CV matter at all?
This is the fair objection, and it is the one I put to myself while writing this. If so many crew get hired through recommendation, what is the document even for?
Two reasons.
A recommendation gets your CV read. It does not replace it. When I left WedgeToo, the Captain asked whether I knew anyone who could fill my position. I recommended a former classmate. He got the job, and he stayed on that boat for five years. But he was not hired on my word alone. His CV went through the same tenure check, the same equipment questions, the same call to the Captain at the end. My recommendation moved his document from the bottom of a pile to the top of a desk. The document still had to hold.
Which also means that when somebody finally does recommend you, the thing they forward is your CV. If it is not ready, the opportunity arrives and dies in the same afternoon.
And there is a reason boats ask their own crew before they ask an agency. Money. If a yacht hires a candidate an agency proposed, the yacht pays the agency a commission, in the region of one month of that person's salary. So a boat trying to control costs asks the departments first: does anyone know somebody. Recommendation is not only a favour culture in this industry, it is a line item that gets avoided.
That is the shape of yacht hiring in one sentence. The network opens the door, and the CV is what walks through it.
What this means for how you write yours
Everything above turns into a fairly short list.
Show tenure honestly, and explain the short ones. If you have a two month stint, say why in one line: delivery, seasonal contract, boat sold, yard period finished. An unexplained short stay reads as flight risk. An explained one reads as normal industry life.
Name equipment you can be questioned about, and nothing else. A shorter truthful list beats a long one you cannot defend on the phone.
Give real references, and warn them. Somebody is going to call, so make sure they know your name is out there and that they are willing to pick up. A reference who sounds surprised is worse than no reference.
Keep it to two pages, with a photo. In this industry the photo is expected, and a CV without one often does not get read at all. That is not a matter of taste, it is a convention, and fighting it costs you interviews.
Write the version you would want handed to a Captain by a friend. Because sooner or later that is exactly what will happen to it.
If you want the specifics for a particular position, there are separate pages on what to include for a deckhand CV, a stewardess CV, an AV/IT Officer CV and an ETO CV. Before a first contract you will also need the paperwork, and the two that catch people out most often are the ENG1 medical and, for anything heading to the United States, the B1/B2 visa.
dajCV builds yacht crew CVs in the format captains and Chief Engineers expect, laid out so the things they check first are the things they see first. It was built by somebody who sat on the hiring side of that table. You fill in your details and you get a finished CV and cover letter you can send the same day.
