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:

1. UNDP – 2561 views
2. UNICEF – 2309 views
3. UNOPS – 1661 views
4. WHO – 1257 views
5. FAO – 1110 views
6. UNEP – 734 views
7. IFC – 729 views
8. IMF – 713 views
9. UNON – 570 views
10. World Bank – 539 views

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!

Earlier today I was mentioning in a tweet that there seems to be a long tail (also see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail ) for UN Job List vacancies. To illustrate what I mean, have a look at the graph below. The chart shows external views of vacancies listed on the UN Job List over the past 7 days. There are a few vacancies on the very left side that are excessively high in demand. And then interest seems to fall off pretty quickly.

My take: try to find vacancies that don’t show too much interest and still fit your interest. Don’t just apply because there seems to be “low” competition but be realistic about what are the odds of being “the one” of the many thousand applicants…

The UN Job List exists since I believe that great people make the UN System great. And I wanted to make it as easy for great people to find their spot in the UN System as possible. So to achieve that, I added not only offer bookmarking friendly search results pages, custom RSS or e-mail alerts but also to offer the job updates via Twitter.

@UNJobList has been pumping out jobs via Twitter for a while and to take care of different tweet formatting, I added @UNJobList_DL and @UNJobList_DS at a later point, too. Whenever I found interesting resources to share, or implemented any new thing on the UN Job List, I threw these news into the existing streams.

However, there are people out there who are not interested in the jobs directly but want to get the updates and others who just want to get the jobs and not the updates. Also, there are a lot of jobs and so there is a flood of job tweets which makes it hard to follow the news tweets. It was time to do something about this setup and so as of today there will be a new account @UNJobList_news which is dedicated to conversations with UN Job List users and the occasional news announcement.

In a nutshell this is what the setup looks like:

• @UNJobList_news: Conversations, news, announcements, questions interesting links.
• All jobs land on Twitter as soon as they are discovered by the UN Job List

1. @UNJobList: Tweets carry Post Title & Job Level
2. @UNJobList_DL: Tweets carry Post Title & Application Deadline
3. @UNJobList_DS: Tweets carry Post Title & Duty Station

Note: All three job feeds carry the same content, the only difference is the formatting so no need to follow more than one.

I personally recommend you following the @UNJobList_news and any of the other feeds according to your taste to get the full coverage. But make sure you follow @UNJobList_news to stay up to date with what is happening on the UN Job List.

Talk to you soon,
Sebastian

PS: Just to make things perfectly clear: Everything I say on Twitter (and on Facebook and also here on my blog) is my own. I don’t speak for neither my employer nor for anyone else.