SUMMER 2007 is an exciting and busy time for us folk at Spinnaker. We celebrate our tenth anniversary in a couple of months and have been looking back at how things have changed since the late nineties when our Chairman Phil Parry and MD Steve Cox shared a telephone in Phil’s spare bedroom, handed out fliers at railway stations and did a bit of freelance journalism for Lloyds List to make ends meet.

It seems amazing to think that as recently as 1998 we were early adopters of the internet with the launch of shippingjobs.com. Back then we were really only just moving from fax to email and would spend late nights at the fax machine feeding shortlists through to clients. Shippingjobs.com has grown to become an established brand in its own right, regularly attracting over 12,000 weekly visitors. We’ve seen OneSea, ShipDesk, LevelSeas, CargoBiz, Maritime Direct and many more come and go. They spent millions of dollars of investors’ money on the dot com dream and although they didn’t make any money they did make shipping sexy again. Many young, and not so young, bucks doubled their salaries overnight and the inimitable Johnny Kulukundis rose to fame as the creator of the brilliant shippingbabes.com. (By the way, congratulations to Johnny and the beautiful Dominique on their marriage this month.)

Pop goes the weasel and so went the dot com bubble too, but shipping became sexy yet again after a short hiatus as freight markets shot through the roof on the back of China’s surging economy. Soaring market demand for shipping services led to huge demand for technical and commercial staff as too many jobseekers and not enough jobs became too many jobs and not enough jobseekers.

That demand has kept us busy as have our loyal clients to whom we are eternally grateful. So, bursting at the seams, we are moving this month to new offices we’ve had purpose-built in a converted warehouse. We’re very excited about that and equally excited to welcome on board three new members of staff including two highly experienced recruiters, whose only experience of our old offices (thankfully!) was their interviews.

And just to make sure we’re not taking our eye of the ball, we’ve been visiting our clients in Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai and Norway this month and we’re re-organising the way we run our business to improve the service we offer our clients and jobseeker candidates and ensure that all of our staff can genuinely claim ever higher levels of expertise. More of that another time.

We’ve previously mentioned the Tanker HR Forum, a group of leading tanker owners, managers and traders on whose behalf we have established a salary, benefits and HR benchmarking association. As secretariat of the Forum, Spinnaker will be inviting a number of additional companies to join the founding members over forthcoming weeks. If you have previously requested information on the Forum you should receive an application pack shortly.