Built the hiring and seafarer career workspaces

Situation. The commercial argument for a maritime professional network is hiring: companies need crew and officers, and seafarers need berths. Both halves already existed on the platform in the wrong shape — companies were in the directory, professionals had profiles, and there was nothing connecting a vacancy to the person qualified to fill it. Qualification is the hard part, because in this industry it is certificates, ranks and documented sea time rather than a job title.

Task. Vacancies, applications and verifiable seafarer credentials had to be modelled properly rather than as free text on a profile.

Action. Two domains got built. The hiring side runs to 32 tables and 118 functions covering vacancies, applications, shortlisting and the employer’s view of its candidates. The career workspace carries 16 tables and 33 functions holding certificates, rank progression and sea time, with document upload and a reviewer queue so a credential is checked rather than claimed. Modelling progression as a graph rather than a list is what makes the matching useful — a rank is reachable from another rank given certain certificates and enough recorded time at sea, and that structure is what lets a vacancy be matched against a career rather than against a keyword. The career workspace ships behind a feature flag and has not been fully released; the hiring side is live.

Result. A vacancy can be matched against documented qualifications instead of a self‑described job title, which is the whole difference between a job board and a hiring tool in this industry. Verification is the bottleneck, deliberately — a reviewer queue does not scale the way an automated check would, and an automated check would certify people who should not be certified.