"DP experience required" appears on almost every offshore vacancy that crosses this desk. It is one of the least informative lines in the brief, because it can mean four quite different things and the candidate has no way of knowing which.
Four different requests, one phrase
- Certification: the candidate holds the relevant DP certificate and the logged time behind it
- Class familiarity: they have worked a vessel of the same DP class and understand its redundancy
- Operational context: they have done this kind of work on DP — supply, dive support, cable lay, walk-to-work
- Equipment familiarity: they have used this manufacturer's system, on this generation of hardware
A candidate can satisfy the first two completely and still be the wrong hire for a project that needed the third. That is not a failure of screening. It is a failure of the brief.
The question that fixes it
We ask owners to describe the worst day of the job rather than the qualification. What does this person have to hold together when the weather turns, and what would you want them to have already seen once before? The answer names the requirement far better than a certificate reference does.
Describe the day you are hiring for, and the shortlist writes itself.
What we screen on once the brief is clear
With the operation described rather than abbreviated, the screening becomes concrete. We are looking for time on the desk in comparable conditions, evidence that the person has worked through a degradation rather than only read about one, and a clear account of how they handled the last time the system did something they did not expect.
- Logged DP time, and how much of it was on watch rather than in transit
- Vessel class and the redundancy concept they actually operated under
- The operations they have run — supply, dive support, cable lay, walk-to-work, heavy lift
- Manufacturer and generation of the system, where the project depends on it
- Their account of a drive-off, a drift-off or a consequence-analysis alarm they have personally worked
That last item is the one that separates people. It cannot be prepared for and it is very hard to fake, because the detail of a real event has a texture that a rehearsed answer does not.
Be honest in the advert, too
A brief that is specific to the owner should be specific to the candidate as well. People leave offshore jobs they were sold wrongly, and they leave in the middle of the campaign — which is the most expensive moment for everybody and the one that does the most damage to an owner's name in a small market.
