There is always a mountain of paper work to complete, people pestering them on the phone for a job, hundreds of emails to respond to and on top of that, stacks of resumes arriving daily to plough through. Not to mention the hundreds of crew members coming and going every single week of the year. Madness!

For this reason there are some important "Do's and Don'ts" that you absolutely must adhere to when you begin contacting cruise lines for a job. And if you follow them, it will ensure that your application gets through to the right person and actually gets looked at.

Here's a few:

DON'T telephone a cruise line company, unless they specifically ask you too. Phone calls are their absolute LEAST favorite way of being contacted! They're busy enough as it is, without fielding hundreds of phone calls from people pestering them for jobs!

Instead follow the application procedure that they have put in place. This is usually via an online application form, a postal address or email.

DO drop them a short friendly email informing them that you've just posted your resume to them or that you have just applied via their website.

Sending an email like this has a couple of advantages. Firstly, it can signal you out from the crowd as someone polite and 'customer aware'. Secondly, it also gets your name recognized and they might just give your resume that extra bit of attention when it arrives.

DON'T send your resume as an email 'attachment' unless they've specifically asked you to. Many companies nowadays will NOT open attachments from people they don't know. The threat of viruses is too great and they will not risk it (myself included).

What's more, many companies have systems in place that will automatically delete any email not recognized, that contains an attachment. So your brilliant 'killer' resume won't even get delivered, nevermind read!

The best way of sending a resume by email is to "copy & paste" it into the body of the email.

DO send a resume package through the mail. Nowadays everybody just emails everybody, and again companies have a lot of filters in place to protect themselves from harmful virus's and SPAM, so there's a good chance that your email won't get delivered.

Not only that, a nicely presented resume package sent through the mail with a photograph will always, always get more attention than a resume sent by email.