Feel More Confident Applying for Land Jobs - Here Are 3 Things You Need to Know

You've found a land job you want to apply for. Your resume is ready, your cover letter is ready and you're feeling pretty good about finally getting your application out there and moving towards the next part of your life. Fantastic!

Before you start applying, though, there are a few things worth understanding about how the land-based recruitment process can work

As getting your application ready is only one part of it. Once you press submit, your application enters a recruitment process that may be quite different from what you're expecting, particularly if you haven't applied for a land-based job for many years.

Here are three things I think every crew member should know when they start applying for land jobs.

1. Apply Early

You find a great vacancy and applications close in three weeks, so technically you've got plenty of time. However, I wouldn't use the closing date as the date you need to have your application submitted by.

Depending on the company and how they recruit, applications may be reviewed as they arrive, which means a recruiter could already be screening candidates, speaking with suitable applicants and sending a shortlist to the hiring manager while the vacancy is still being advertised. If they find enough strong candidates to move forward with, your application arriving 10 days before the closing date may be joining a recruitment process that's already well underway.

This is why, when you see a job you genuinely want and you're ready to apply for it, I would aim to get your application in within the first few days and ideally within the first week. That doesn't mean firing off the same resume to every job as quickly as possible, because you still need to make sure the application you're submitting is relevant to that role.

What it does mean is being ready to move when the right vacancy appears.

Set up job alerts on LinkedIn and the other online job platforms you're using so you're seeing new vacancies when they're posted rather than discovering them three weeks later. Have your main resume and cover letter ready so you're tweaking and tailoring rather than starting again every time you find a job you want, and when a good opportunity appears, don't save it with the intention of coming back to it sometime next week if you could reasonably apply now.

The closing date tells you when applications stop. It doesn't necessarily tell you when recruitment starts.

2. The Application Process May Take Longer Than You Expect

This is probably one of the biggest adjustments when you start applying for land jobs, because you can apply and then hear nothing for quite some time. You might receive an automated email confirming your application has been received, but that doesn't tell you when somebody will look at it or when you'll hear anything further.

Two weeks later, you might be invited to an interview. You have the interview the following week, feel that it went really well and then you're waiting again. There may be a second interview, perhaps a third, or you might need to speak with someone more senior in the company before they make their decision. Depending on the position, there may also be references, background checks or internal approvals that need to happen before an offer can be made.

Every company runs its recruitment process differently, so one might take you from application to offer relatively quickly while another process stretches over several weeks. You may even have an application you assumed had gone nowhere suddenly come back to life with an interview request weeks after you applied.

This is why I wouldn't think of job searching as apply, wait for the answer, then apply for the next job. More than likely, you'll have several applications moving at different speeds at the same time. You might have applied for one yesterday, be waiting to hear after an interview for another, have a third application that's been sitting there for two weeks and then receive a rejection for something you applied for a month ago.

That can feel messy, but it's a fairly normal part of job searching, and the important thing is that you keep applying. If you have an interview for a job you really want, prepare for it and absolutely give it your best shot, but don't stop looking at other opportunities while you wait for the outcome.

A great interview isn't a job offer, being invited to the next stage isn't a job offer and being told you're a strong candidate isn't a job offer. Until you have secured the position, your job search is still active.

This becomes particularly important when you're leaving ships because your next job can start to represent much more than employment. It can mean having an income again, getting some structure back into your week, beginning a new professional direction and finally feeling as though the land life you've been planning is starting to move forward.

Understandably, that can make one promising application feel incredibly important.

But putting your entire job search on hold while you wait for one company to make its decision can leave you several weeks behind if the answer eventually comes back as no.

Keep the opportunity you're excited about moving forward while continuing to create other opportunities for yourself at the same time.

3. Don't Underestimate How Much Work Your Application Has to Do

Applying for a job can feel like a relatively straightforward process from your side. You find a vacancy, read the job description, recognise that your experience matches what they're looking for, tailor your resume and cover letter and submit your application.

Because you know your own career, you can see the connection between what you've done onboard and the job you're applying for. You know that managing hundreds of guests every week has given you strong customer service experience, that running onboard revenue programmes means you understand sales targets and commercial performance, or that managing a shipboard department has involved leadership, training, scheduling, problem-solving and working across multiple departments.

The person receiving your application doesn't start with any of that knowledge.

You also don't know what the recruitment process looks like on their side. There may be 30 applicants or 300. The first person reviewing your application may be the hiring manager, an internal recruiter, somebody in HR or an external recruitment company. They may be deciding who gets an interview themselves, or they may be creating a shortlist of candidates to send to somebody else who will make that decision.

What matters is that somewhere in that process, somebody who may know very little about cruise ship roles needs to look at your application and understand why your experience is relevant to the position they're trying to fill.

And they need to be able to see it quickly.

This is where the translation of your shipboard experience becomes so important.

If you're applying for a land-based sales role, you may immediately understand why your years working in onboard sales make you a strong candidate. But if your resume is filled with ship-specific job titles, terminology, acronyms and responsibilities that require knowledge of cruise operations to understand, you're asking the recruiter to do the translation for you.

They may not.

Not because your experience isn't valuable, but because they're reviewing your application for the job they need to fill. Their job isn't to research what your shipboard position involved and work out how those responsibilities might transfer to their business.

The easier you make it for someone to understand the connection between what they need and what you've done, the less work you're asking them to do before they can see you as a relevant candidate.

This is also why applying for land jobs isn't quite as simple as finding something you know you could do and pressing submit. There is an entire recruitment process sitting between your application and an interview, and you don't necessarily know who will see your resume first, how many other applications they're reviewing or how familiar they are with the cruise industry.

What you can control is what they see when your application reaches them. They shouldn't need five minutes of cruise industry knowledge to understand why you're relevant. They shouldn't have to guess what your job title meant or translate your responsibilities into the requirements sitting in front of them.

You can see the match because you lived the experience. Your application has to make sure they can see it too.

Applying for land jobs isn't one process with one result. More than likely, it will be a number of separate opportunities running alongside each other until one of them becomes the job you accept. So, when you find the role you want, apply while the opportunity is fresh.

Expect the recruitment process to take time, keep other applications moving while you wait and concentrate your energy on the parts of the process that belong to you.

Your job isn't to control when the yes arrives. Your job is to keep yourself in the running until it does.