wilsonhalligan expands recruitment offerings

Earlier this month, superyacht crew recruitment agency wilsonhalligan’s co-owners Terry and Lin Halligan retired, leaving the company under the ownership of Liam Dobbin, managing director, and Nicola Morgan, director and recruitment manager, both previous employees at the company. Lulu Trask caught up with Dobbin to discuss the agency’s vision for the future and how the new mission statement will be more appealing to crew.
 
In the past wilsonhalligan has been known in the industry as offering ‘large yacht recruitment’. Under your co-ownership will this continue?

We’re actually going to change that. We’ve got a reputation of just dealing with large yachts, and the tagline ‘large yacht recruitment’ doesn’t really help, but we do recruitment for yachts 40m and upwards. So our plan for the future is to remove the ‘large’, just to make people aware that’s not all we do. Some of our clients have 100m yachts, but they also have 30m yachts, and we help them as well.



You also have a reputation for working on lots of large new-builds. Will you keep doing that?

We aim to do even more. I believe there are 18 yachts in build at the moment that are 100m or larger [source: SuperyachtIntelligence.com], so we’re going to be concentrating on those. But it’s not just new builds. We’re going to focus more on the charter side, which we haven’t really done before. A lot of the younger crew and people new to the industry want to work on charter yachts, to be busier.

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What is the message you want to put out to crew?

We will be more active in the market. We have an excellent team here – a mix of great recruitment backgrounds and seagoing experience. We want to make it clear that we can offer a service from people who have been there and done it – we can actually give you first-hand advice. Our mission statement – we haven’t chosen the exact wording yet – will be along the lines of really being there for the candidates. Without them, we wouldn’t have clients, and some of these candidates are potential clients for the future.

We aim to be an approachable company, free to contact at any time. All of our contact details are on our website, and there is direct access to free advice. People should be using this and we are happy to be the ones offering this service.

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