I had a little time over the weekend so I implemented an advanced search for UN Job List. You can refine your RSS feed / bookmark now by searching the United Nations job opportunities on UN Job List e.g. for everything that has “communication� in the job title but exclude “technology� if you are interested in real communication jobs and want to avoid the IT vacancies.
Check it out at: http://unjoblist.org/lists/advancedsearch

Leave me a comment below and tell me how it works. On the long run, I think this will become the only search on UN Job List.

It has been a while since my last post on UN Job List and many things happened so here we go: At this time the page lists vacancies of 58 different organisations [UPDATE: there are more organisations now] and 1000+ jobs.

I’m getting faster and faster in adding new organisations, however the bigger UN organisations are all on the page so what is missing now are only a handful smaller setups that have maybe one, two or even no vacancies at all listed. In addition to that, there seem to be some projects which advertise locally only and I’m thinking of ways to add them, too. If you happen to know any of these local sites please let me know via a comment below so that I can add these last pages, too.

My focus is on UN organisations at this time, thus I’m currently not adding other international organisations, NGOs or IFIs to my list. If you are interested in those jobs I recommend having a look at Relief Web which is rather comprehensive in these areas (but then again doesn’t cover the UN jobs as comprehensively as the UN Job List).

Not all organisations provide all information that I would like to list easily, e.g. some vacancies don’t mention a duty station, some carry “multiple” as duty station. The page lists information wherever it is provided but if there is nothing on the original vacancy page the page leaves that field in the database blank. Open vacancies are marked with “0000-00-00″ as closing date.

Next on my list is an even more sophisticated search e.g. allowing Boolean search operators [UPDATE: That’s done now].

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.

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.