2011 was an important year for Maritime Connector. The company has experienced some major changes as well as achieved some of its most important strategic goals. Let's have a quick look at what we have been doing and how we have done it in 2011:

Revenues increase

Despite the ongoing economic crisis that affected the maritime industry, the company maintained its ongoing trend of growth and has increased its revenues by close to 30%  compared to 2010.
How did we manage to sell recruitment marketing services in times when the companies are cutting costs in all segments? Well, we have demonstrated in practice to our clients that advertising their positions at Maritime Connector did not actually increase their costs, but enabled them to decrease the cost of crewing by 20-60%, depending on the number of seafarers they employ as well as the variety of locations and different nationalities they employ.

New clients

We established partnerships with a great number of new clients in 2011. Long-term agreements with Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, V-Ships Croatia and the new joint-venture Golar-Wilhelmsen Management have been reached. We have also partnered with a number of companies on short term basis depending on their crewing needs. Most of them decided to keep using our services in the future.

New Offices

Due to the expansion plans and recruitment strategy for 2011-2012, we have moved to new office locations in April. The company  remained in Rijeka, Croatia; the demand for change was a result of a need for better equipped  and larger office space.

Expansion of our team

Another important event of the year was the expansion of our team; we have acquired a new employee responsible for the sales and marketing activities of the company.

Recognized as the leading world’s job board for maritime employment

We have been recognized as the leading job board for maritime employment by Marine Insight. This international recognition was an important motivator to keep doing our best and constantly adapt to the ever changing maritime industry in order to stay on top.

Increased number of seafarers' CVs in the database

The number of registered seafarers that use our website and browse through job adverts increased to 47.000 by the end of 2011. Most significant increases have been noticed by the seafarers from Ukraine, Russian Federation and Baltic countries, and, United Kingdom.

Events Calendar

We have developed an impressive network of partners in 2011. Maritime Connector supports more than 30 maritime events scheduled for 2012. All the important maritime trade shows and conferences that would be of interest to a professional in the industry are listed in our “Events” section.

Launch of the new platform

The most important event of the year was the long expected launch of the new, redesigned platform. This has been expected for more than a year. We have invested much of our financial and human resources into the development of the system that would be more efficient and user friendly both to the seafarers as well as the crewing managers.
The seafarers can upload photos and certificates to their virtual resumes to facilitate the process of validation for the recruiters. The CVs can be downloaded in .pdf form now.
The major new feature we have introduced is the CV hunter option; the crewing manager is notified by e-mail whenever a new seafarer that could match the profile he is looking for registers to our system.

Overall, 2011 was a great year for Maritime Connector. We expect 2012 to be the year of exponential growth, due to the arising need of maritime companies of finding new ways to cut on all operating costs, including recruitment, in times of the growing deficit of deck and engine officers. Maritime Connector has set up some important fundamentals for remaining the industry leader in the future. We are on a good path on making our innovation a standard for the recruitment in the maritime industry.