Over the past weeks, I have written a number of posts on the Peace and Collaborative Development Network.
So far, the following posts exist:
1) What you need to know about the UN system
2) UN contract types and job levels
3) Which jobs should you go for?
There will be more posts over the coming weeks. Let me know if you have ideas on how to improve these posts. Thanks!
When you are considering a career in the UN make sure you bring some patience for the process because applying will take you effort and time. But before we start, let’s clarify, that this post is neither trying to criticise nor defend the UN’s recruitment policies but merely outlining some of the elements of the process. Also, understand that I’m not representing the UN in any way and the information provided below is merely information from my experience running the UN Job List.
To begin with, let’s be clear that there is not just one organization being the UN but rather a family of different organizations forming the UN. Consequently, there is also not only one recruitment experience, so things can vary from organization to organization and even within organizations based on duty station or department.
What are the key factors that influence the time it takes for recruitment for an applicant?
The above outlines what happens in cases when we are talking about a standard recruitment. The process may be quite different for programmes like the Young Professional Programme (YPP) in the UN or the Junior Professional Programme (JPO) and may be very different for very high level posts. If you want to make sure you understand the process that would apply to your application, check with the organization which advertises your job.
A few considerations to keep in mind during this process:
The bottom line is: If you apply for a job in the UN do some research on the recruitment time of your organization. When applying, be patient it can take a little while. Also, once you are done with your application, keep applying to relevant other vacancies and don’t be discouraged if it does not work out on the first try. Good luck!
Update: I closed the comments. To discuss this topic – please join the FORUM and ask your question over there.
The ambition of the UN Job List is to cover the UN system vacancies as much as possible. To get an overview over the organisations which are part of the UN system, have a look at the UN organizational chart.
The UN Job List features vacancies you find on the official job websites of the different UN organisations as far as they are advertised centrally. To get an overview over the different organisations as they appear on the UN Job List have a look at this list: http://unjoblist.org/lists/Organisation/
The reason for this kind of focus is simple: It’s a matter of choice and simplicity. Choice because I just happen to believe in the UN Charta and simplicity because I’m able to build more effective filter and search tools since I can focus on UN contract types and contract levels, only.
Please note that the UN Job List’s focus on the UN does not mean that there are no other valuable job vacancies out there in fact there are many other valuable and really great NGO and other jobs out there, too.
It’s time to renew the UN Job List’s overall design. The following is a preview to the new design of the UN Job List which will be launched very soon.
Since 2007 the UN Job List has been well known for its clean and minimalistic design. But lately there have been challenges with the existing UN Job List design. These challenges are a result of the expanding scope of the UN Job List which has happened over the past years. In the beginning the List was intended to be a resource for those “in the know”. It was intended to be for people who know the UN system and know exactly what they are looking for. That’s why I built powerful search and email alerts; sophisticated RSS feeds and I relied on a high degree of automation and speed in finding the jobs.
But times have changed. With more and more people using the List more questions came. Not only from people who didn’t know the UN system but also from expert UN job seekers who wanted to know their chances of getting into the UN system. That’s the reason I posted more resources on how to find your way through the system and also added the interest indicators to individual jobs.
To make sure all this can be understood, I started to redesign the UN Job List. What you see below is the new header of the site:
As you can see it is structured into four distinct sections. The first section “How it works” deals with background information on the UN system, what contract types exist in the UN and how to go about job hunting. The second section “Job Listings” is pretty much what you know from the UN Job List right now. It deals with the lists of UN vacancies by duty station, by organization, lists the latest jobs and features the powerful search function of the site. The third section “Analytics” deals with overall vacancy analytics. Here you can now find which organization has been advertising how many jobs. The last section is “Tools and Resources” which is where you will find the UN Job List Widget and other tools.
What do you think of this structure? And do you like the new header layout? Thanks for letting me know below in the comments.
With July well underway it is high time to look back at the first half of this year and see which are the big players in terms of jobs in the UN system. The line-up of the organisations is no surprise with UNDP clearly leading the pack, followed by UNICEF, UNOPS, IFC and the World Bank. The graph below outlines the situation as per the UN Job List data from July 24th 2011.
Interesting in comparison to earlier data (http://unjoblist.org/resources/) is that the WHO, IAEA as well as UNDPKO are not making it into the top 10 this time.
When looking at the numbers please keep in mind, that the numbers reflect vacancies, which includes both staff and non-staff contracts. Further, the data does not show the INSPIRA vacancies (UN Secretariat) consolidated into one organisation and also does not speak to actual posts filled (vs. just advertised).
Behind the UN Job List stands the belief that good people contribute to a great UN system. And The List is an attempt to help as many people as possible to access as many UN job vacancies through technological means.
With this in mind I’m very happy about the growth the UN Job List has experienced over the past months: Both access numbers for the site as well as UN Job List email alerts have been growing constantly. In fact the email alerts have been growing so much that the internally set limit for alerts to be sent out was reached and so a several hundred of you who signed-up over the past two or three weeks didn’t receive their email alerts. I would like to apologize for this inconvenience and assure you that the issue is now fixed. I increased the UN Job List’s capacity to send emails so you will all get your alerts going forward.
I know that some of you signed-up several times since the system didn’t sent the alert. Please unsubscribe from any UN Job List alert that you don’t need to help me use my resources most economically. Thank you for your help.
In other news I also fixed the UN Job List “New Jobs” RSS feed. One of the most popular pages on the UN Job List is the “New Job” page and the corresponding “New Job RSS” feed is now working better than ever (there were data issues which have been resolved now).
For both of these improvements I want to thank the UN Job List community and more specifically Alexander and Jean who pointed me to the issue and helped me find out what went wrong. Thanks a lot!
Please let me know if you see something fishy on The List, I might not have the time to reply immediately but I will make an effort to fix issues as they arrive.
Recently I got a number of questions regarding the number of days a job is advertised to the public for the different UN agencies. I did a quick and dirty rundown of the numbers based on my 2010 data and they stack up as follows: On average a UN job is advertised for 35 days. The minimum observes was 12.59 days (UNISDR) and the maximum was UN OLA (124.5 days). And between the department / funds / programmes are significant differences. If you want a post with UNISDR (12.59 days), UNDP (14.2 days), IMF (14.89 days), UNOPS (15.23 days) or IFC (16.25 days) you better be quick.
So it is a good idea to start applying as early as you possibly can. Not only you do make sure that the application gets through on time (think system downtime which may strike at any given moment) but also you have chances being looked at early in the process since some long listing processes start while the application is still open. To give you an idea how the overall situation is have a look at the chart outlining the different average advertisement periods.
UN Job List users were telling me that they would prefer to have new jobs directly in Facebook, too. So I started to integrate the listing of new UN jobs into the UN Job List Facebook page. Have a look at the site and let me know what you think: http://unjl.org/fbapp
Thanks! Sebastian
If you don’t know Reliefweb I suggest you take a moment, head over to their page and check them out: ReliefWeb is a great resource for everything humanitarian. Aside from maps, reports and a whole universe of other resources ReliefWeb carries a lot of humanitarian jobs. And as of today the UN Job List will start listing an increasing number of these jobs, too. Since there are many more NGOs and other organisations on ReliefWeb, this is how it works:
Note, that ReliefWeb carries a lot of jobs also from NGOs and other non-UN organisations. The UN Job List focusses on UN Jobs only and thus there will be only ReliefWeb vacancies from UN organisations listed on the UN Job List
Please let me know in the comments what you think of this addition and if you have any other suggestions on how to improve the UN Job List.
PS: Are you interested in getting selected vacancies in a weekly job alert per mail? It’s easy, first, search what you need, then sign-up: http://unjoblist.org/lists/advancedsearch/
With the introduction of the interest indicators for jobs a few weeks ago, not only applicants have the ability to see what kind of interest there is for a job, but also I can now see which UN organisations are the “most wanted”.
I did a quick and dirty calculation and these are the top 10 organisations and number of views on all their active vacancies on the UN Job List over the past days:
Of course these are just very initial figures. I will work on getting them down to a “views per day per vacancy” figure to eliminate influences like duration of posting (which is very short for UNDP and thus means fewer views), number of vacancies (where UNDP gains views) so that you have a good indicators which organisation’s UN jobs are most wanted.
If you have ideas for analysis you would like to see, please leave them in the comments below – thanks!