Onwura Chioma
Member
The UN has been posting home-based jobs every week — and most people in this community are using the wrong search to find them
I want to tell you about a Tuesday afternoon three years ago that changed how I think about UN job searching.
A colleague called me frustrated. She had been applying for UN positions for eighteen months. Her qualifications were strong. Her CV was good. She was getting almost no responses. She had been checking https://careers.un.org every few days, applying to whatever appeared in her field, and waiting.
I asked her to share her screen during a video call. I watched her search. She typed her professional area into the keyword field and hit search. The results appeared. She scrolled through them.
I asked: "Where is the duty station filter?"
She said: "What duty station filter?"
I showed her. She clicked Advanced Search. She typed "home-based" into the duty station field. She hit search.
Forty-three positions appeared. In her field. Currently open. Home-based. She had never seen a single one of them in eighteen months of job searching — because she had never known the filter existed.
That one afternoon conversation changed her job search strategy entirely. She received her first UN home-based individual contractor offer eleven weeks later.
The positions are there. The search that finds them is not obvious. Here is exactly how to run it — and everything else that changes home-based UN application outcomes.
Save this. Set up every alert before you close this post.
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I want to tell you about a Tuesday afternoon three years ago that changed how I think about UN job searching.
A colleague called me frustrated. She had been applying for UN positions for eighteen months. Her qualifications were strong. Her CV was good. She was getting almost no responses. She had been checking https://careers.un.org every few days, applying to whatever appeared in her field, and waiting.
I asked her to share her screen during a video call. I watched her search. She typed her professional area into the keyword field and hit search. The results appeared. She scrolled through them.
I asked: "Where is the duty station filter?"
She said: "What duty station filter?"
I showed her. She clicked Advanced Search. She typed "home-based" into the duty station field. She hit search.
Forty-three positions appeared. In her field. Currently open. Home-based. She had never seen a single one of them in eighteen months of job searching — because she had never known the filter existed.
That one afternoon conversation changed her job search strategy entirely. She received her first UN home-based individual contractor offer eleven weeks later.
The positions are there. The search that finds them is not obvious. Here is exactly how to run it — and everything else that changes home-based UN application outcomes.
Save this. Set up every alert before you close this post.
↓
