Update at the UNJobList

The work on functionality and number of organisations on my little pet project UNJobList.org is progressing quite well.

Since last time, I have been able to add UNIDO, UNFCCC and the IOM to the page. The list of organisations now features: CTBTO, FAO, ICC, ILO, IOM, UNDP, UNFPA, Unicef, UNIDO, UNOPS, WHO. Also, I implemented a limit of 50 jobs per page on the site since the list featuring all organisations’ jobs was getting quite heavy.

Next on my to-do list is an improved way of capturing UNOPS vacancies. My page sometimes has issues dealing with UNOPS’ page if there are a lot of listings on it.

New organisations on UNJobList.org

Over the past days I have been able to gradually add new organisations to the UN Job List. Now there is also the International Criminal Court (ICC), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) and the International Labour Organization (ILO) on the list. In total there are now nine organisations listed (CTBTO, FAO, ICC, ILO, UNDP, UNFPA, Unicef, UNOPS, WHO). The goal is still to step by step get most of the UN organisations into the database and if there is any organisation that you are particularly interested in, you can now suggest it on the UN Job List.

The page is obviously still under development and you can help shape its features, too. I already received good feedback and comments on functionality from many colleagues and if you have something to add, just leave a comment below.

UN Job List launched

Over the past weeks I have been working on http://unjoblist.org and the page is now at a stage where I can offer a first preview.

What does UN Job List do?
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.
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.

Future development
I’m planning to expand the number of organisations on my page quite a bit. 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.
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.