UN Job List: About the UN Job List
March 10th, 2007
The page basically collects vacancies from UN organisations, stores them in a database and presents them on a single page. You can search the list for Duty Station, Organisation and / or any keyword in the title of the post. At this time I collect vacancies from UNOPS, UNDP, UNFPA, Unicef Supply, WHO. [Update: It is now pretty much the whole UN].
The page is set up to support RSS feeds so you can easily include the page results in your favourite RSS reader or your Google homepage. Even better is that you can define your search and bookmark the page and thus easily do your search again later. The page stores your query in the URL, so every time you visit the page the search will performed again – this is a great way to stay on top of the vacancies in your most desired duty station, your favourite organisation, your area of expertise or any combination of them. Of course there is an RSS feed for the search pages, too. Check it out at http://unjoblist.org.
Why did I come up with this page?
The reason I came up with the page is that I was not really satisfied with other pages that display UN vacancies. Also, and this is probably the main reason for doing it, I wanted to find out how easy it is to program a robot that extracts vacancies, a database that keeps them and a page that displays them. I know so many colleagues who are annoyed with the pages that exist that I thought I’d give it a try. Well, after doing the page I realise it’s not all that simple, but slowly the page is shaping up.
I’m planning to expand the number of organisations on my page quite a bit. [Update: That one is done] Then I would like to introduce some more sophisticated search options: I’m thinking of mapping the different job levels to the ICSC classification and offer search on that. [Update: That one is almost done]
If you have any suggestion on what to improve, which organisations to add or any other general comment, just drop me a line via the comment box below.
March 12th, 2007 at 8:14 am
net schlecht Gruß Max
April 10th, 2007 at 11:53 am
Super praktisch, vielen Dank!
April 26th, 2007 at 11:00 am
Fantastic tool! Great job!
April 30th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Congratulations for the very useful and handy web page.
What about adding IOM (International Organization for Migration)?
It would be nice to link also IOM London office: www.iomlondon.org should be the web site, if I remember well.
Thanks,
Cris.
April 30th, 2007 at 5:02 pm
Hi Cris,
thanks for your suggestion. The IOM is (partly) on the page already: Check it out at: http://unjoblist.org/lists/Organisation/IOM
You can see all organisations on my page at:
http://unjoblist.org/lists/Organisation/
But the page you pointed me to is not on my list yet and also I just saw that I dont get the National / General Service posts yet. So I will add the IOM London and the other pages once I get some time (I’m quite busy at work these days).
Thanks again… Also, if there are more organisations out there - keep those suggestions coming
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:13 pm
Hi Sebastien,
Very good initiative.
But I think that you can it by making the website more attractrative.You can also ,put a countrer to have an idea about how many times people are coming to visite your website.
Take care and all the best in this initiative
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:48 pm
Thanks for this very useful website. Working as an independent consultant, it’s good to be informed about advertised consulting opportunities with the UN. Information about consulting opportunities with bilateral donors would, of course, also be very interesting.
May 6th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Great job, Sebastian!!
May 9th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Really great and practical, congratulations !
May 10th, 2007 at 8:32 am
Hi there,
Congratulations on your website. My work involves assisting expatriate spouses/partners of UN staff find vacancies in the UN system and elsewhere.
The issue is that the vacancy must be one that is open to external applicants (or in other words not only open to applicants already in the UN system). Is it possible to filter your results with this criteria?
Many thanks
Filip
June 5th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Dear Sirs/Madam,
I am very interested to join the UN Agencies/Special Agencencies to develop my career starting in my home town, Unfortunately, there is no any vacancy annoucement here in your vacancy list on Ethiopian Development Projects. Let me know please, if you have any.
Best regards,
June 5th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Hi Aregay,
just to make sure we are on the same page: I (and that is me personally) will never put up any UN vacancy. It is only the UN organisations that put them up. All I (or my page) does is to display the UN jobs in a nice format - that’s all
In other words: I’m NOT affiliated with / speaking on behalf of / doing anything in the name of any UN organisation here.
Ok, having said that - sure, if there is a VA in your town, my page should feature that, too. If I miss out on any VAs, please let me know.
Cheers, Sebastian
June 17th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Dear Sebastian,
Your site is really great. I hope you will not give up this work in future.
You can use the following links to do extend beyond the UN-
http://missions.itu.int/~italy/vacancies/vaclinks.htm
Russell
June 23rd, 2007 at 11:56 am
Hi Russell,
thanks a lot for your kind words - and - I have no intention giving up working on the UN Job List.
The link you provided is indeed very useful. I took it to program the UN Job List robots when I programmed the site a while back.
Cheers, Sebastian
July 16th, 2007 at 9:42 am
You currently have a feature which will show “The 50 Newest Jobs”, which is great. I think it would be useful if within the advanced search options there is a way to perform similar queries with however many jobs the person is interested in. For example, show the most recent 100 jobs, or 150 jobs. Keep up the good work!
July 16th, 2007 at 9:50 am
Hi Cameron,
thanks for the feedback - very good point. Will think about that and try to implement in the days to come…
Sebastian
July 18th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Dear Sebastian,
Great site and very practical. Congrats!
Kindly note that if the closing date of a vacancy is e.g. 18 July 2007, you can often still apply on 18 July. However, the vacancy is already removed from your side on the 18th… Could you please check this out? (Example: ILO Vacancy notice JAKARTA/2007/10)
Cheers,
Micha
July 18th, 2007 at 12:22 pm
Hi Micha,
Good point, will work on that…
UPDATE: It is done - let me know if you experience issues…
Cheers,
Sebastian
August 11th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Hi Sebastian,
The job opportunities from the World Bank International Finance Cooperation (IFC) are not included in your website. Could you add them?
Regards,
Micha
August 11th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
Hi Micha,
Thanks a lot! Just added the IFC to the page.
Cheers, Sebastian
August 21st, 2007 at 8:50 am
Thanks for a superb website. I’ve just sent in a few suggestions for additions (UN HABITAT, UNCCD and WMO).
It would be good to have more flexibility with the mailing list, to change criteria (but I guess it gets very complex, with log-ins and all that)- or you could just tell people to unsubscribe and try again if they wish to change their search criteria.
Thanks again,
Nick
August 21st, 2007 at 9:29 am
Hi Nick,
thanks for your kind words. Yes, you are right, I should give some more options to change preferences in the e-mails. Also, I should add a line telling you what you are searching for (that will be especially helpful if you sign-up for several alerts). At this point I’m just a bit short on time. I will get to that but right now I’m pretty busy - so bear with me - thanks.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
Dear Sebastian,
First and above all many thanks for this website initiative; absolutely great.
Please allow me two questions. (i)Do we still have to surf to the individual websites, or are you capturing everything from each website? (ii) Where to find the full forms of the many abbreviations used in the adds?
Best regards, and keep up the good work.
Ludo Scheerlinck
November 6th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Dear Sebastian:
Your UN site is clean and well thought out.
I do have a suggestion. People should be able to sort by field simply by clicking the red headers, e.g. Level/Grade, Duty Station, Post Title, etc. Also, most recent positions should always be displayed at the top of the page.
In any event, very nice work.
Yours,
Henri
November 18th, 2007 at 7:29 am
Hi Sebastian,
You have done a splendid job. It shows how organised a mind can be.
I am the president of a Mumbai,India based NGO,NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR NATURAL CALAMITIES(NCNC).
I am interested in taking up any job with UNO, related to relief, rehabilitation and disaster assistance. Could you please guide me for safe landing.
Thanking you,
Anand.
July 3rd, 2008 at 1:11 pm
This is fantastic! and you might be able to live from the UN without working for it, the best of all worlds!!
On the cosmetic or the absence of it: contrarily to other comments I believe this is the main strength of your site; clean, quick (think of bad connections in many countries or people accessing only simple Internet Kiosk in Africa or other) and clear.
One suggestion: sort by column (e.g. by locations in a table).
Hope you can keep up, this will replace for me, from today, the UN Galaxy System and others
Luc
July 3rd, 2008 at 5:59 pm
Hi Luc,
thanks for your comment. I agree with you in the design question (the lesser the better, I also try to have this page accessible from the less fortune countries in this world who don’t have high-speed internet).
)
I will look into the sorting by column. One thing though: Let me stress that I do not intent to live of this page (you will notice that there is not even advertisement or a donate button here). I do this purely for fun (and I intent to keep it that way
July 8th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
[…] In the past days and weeks I was getting some comments via my comment page and e-mail that triggered me to reiterate what I have said before: The UN Job List is an independent privately owned internet page that is not affiliated with the UN. […]
August 9th, 2008 at 10:26 am
Bro,
Work like yours makes difference, this site is benefiting hundreds or perhaps millions who are seeking career in UN and its umbrella organization, keep it up bro.
My advice to you is not to expand or incorporate other organizations other than UN and its umbrella organizations; this is the uniqueness of your site.
Cheers, Manu
December 1st, 2008 at 12:20 am
Hallo Sebastian,
Du scheinst ja auch deutsch zu sein, und ich kann Dir auch auf deutsch schreiben?!
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zu der Internetseite - echt gut!!
December 24th, 2008 at 3:28 am
Bro,
Thanks for this website.
Thanking you
minmin
February 15th, 2009 at 10:18 am
Sebastian,
I agree with the other comments that your site is absolutely great and makes searching UN jobs much easier.
After dabbling occasionally in this for a year, the thing that sticks out to me is how discriminatory the UN is in its hiring practice. It’s obvious that they interested primarily in people already employed within the system. Easier for them no doubt, but simply recycling the same people without adding the dynamics from outside people is a huge mistake and shows a certain level of incompetance typical in government-run organizations. Private organizations would never do this.
Best regards,
Doug
February 15th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
Hi Doug,
well, I’m not sure if this is entirely correct.
Firstly, like anywhere (private sector or public sector) when you are an expert in something and you know a job then chances that you will get the job are higher. That has nothing to do with discrimination but is a simple matter of experience and expertise.
Also, keep in mind that a lot of the posts in the UN are rotational. This means that people have to move after 3 or 4 years. Of course this generates a lot of vacancies and often times someone who did an outstanding job, let’s say in Liberia is then moving on to a job in DRC. The stress to find a job is there for the people in the system, too and it is one of the less attractive features of being a UN staff member.
Lastly, there are many more people who want to work for the UN than there are posts. It is not uncommon to have several hundred applicants to one vacancy.
However, I agree with you in the sense that most organisations could improve their communications, clarify expectations and provide a more realistic picture of what is possible in their hiring process. It is frustrating if you submit applications and never hear back.
Cheers, Sebastian
March 10th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Hello
This is a great service. Keep up the good work@!