In 2007, a 20-year-old deck officer from Kherson looked at how seafarers found work and decided it was broken. Contracts came by fax. Agencies sat between a captain and his next ship like toll booths, each one taking a cut and adding a week. Pavel Manchenko had been on the other side of that chain, on the bridge, waiting for a call that never came on time. So he founded Marine MAN to fix it.
Nineteen years later, he is still not 40, and the fix has become an ecosystem: recruitment offices in Ukraine, Georgia, India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines under one Marine MAN umbrella, connected on a single platform where AI now makes the first contact with a candidate and a human makes the decision. The numbers behind it: 200,000 seafarer profiles in the database, around 750 seafarers on board client vessels at any moment, and more than 35,000 seafarers who found their job through the platform. He holds a Master’s degree from the Kyiv State Academy of Water Transport and is a certified DPA, CSO and MLC 2006 auditor, and he uses all of it: he still consults and mentors shipowners and crews on compliance, and he looks at every crew list the way an inspector would, because he has stood on the deck those inspectors walk.
Then came February 2022. Marine MAN’s head office and most of its core staff were in Kherson, the first regional capital in Ukraine to be occupied. Of all the crewing companies in the country, Pavel’s was the first to find out what war actually means: colleagues behind the front line, phones that stopped answering, a company that had to be rebuilt piece by piece from wherever people managed to get out. Through all of it, the vessels stayed crewed and the seafarers got paid. That is not a line in a brochure; it is what Pavel’s team actually did in 2022.
Ask him how, and the answer is short: “Never retreat, never surrender, and keep faith in God.”
He has the energy of a founder half his age and the experience of one twice it. If you want to talk about how your fleet is crewed, talk to Pavel.
Let’s discuss cooperation. Want to know how our team can help your business? Contact us: b2b@marineman.eu
