7 Tips to make your UNHCR application stand out

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is always hiring in different occupational areas, locations and levels. The interest for these jobs has been huge. INTALMA wants to give you the best possible chance to land the job that matches your career profile. Our Director Talent Acquisition has put together a list of the skills and experiences that make your application stand out.

UNHCR recently launched a large recruitment campaign, 75 career opportunities. The interest for this campaign from our users are massive and already more than 100’000 individuals has visit the list of all UNHCR jobs. We have asked our Director Talent Acquisition to give the best possible advice on how to land a job at the UN Refugee Agency. He started by giving expert advice on how to pitch your application for the UNHCR emergency recruitment campaign. Now he wants to give you some extra tips how to make your job application stand out, please see below. 

7 Tips to make your UNHCR application stand out

1. Make sure you fulfil general requirements

Start to read the requirements of the job you are interested in and make sure that you are eligible, meet all the requirement (years of experience, degree and language).

2. Make sure you have specific language skills

Next step, ensure you meet the UNHCR specific language requirements for professional career. Don’t take this lightly, your languages skills will be tested. As a highly mobile Organization operating in more than 100 countries, UNHCR is deeply committed to the principle of multilingualism and requires its international professional staff, upon recruitment, to demonstrate competence in at least two official UN languages.

Therefore, candidates aspiring to join the international professional category must be able to demonstrate, at a minimum, proficiency at an advanced level (C1 or above) in either one of the two working languages of UNHCR (English and French) as well as knowledge of a second official UN language at an intermediate level (B2 or above). Read more here.

All organizations contacting us these days are looking for Arabic speaking talent, so applying having Arabic as one of your languages is extremely competitive.

3. Read the job description carefully!

When you know that you have what it takes, next step would be to carefully read the job description. In order to understand what the profile require and how you fulfill the areas of importance, I suggest to use the T-table method to identify the most important functions/deliverable of a job description and pair it with own relevant experience; Read more about this method here.

4. Use the same terminology as in the job description

When reviewing the job description ensure that you utilize the same terminology as used in the description. It is common that recruiters use free-text search and often they use a similar or exact terminology used in the job advertisement. A sample could be learning, if the organization talks about capacity building change all your functions/results including learning to read capacity building. When the recruiter makes a free-text search, s/he will get several hits. The more hits the better.

5. Show proof of mobility

Recruiters are reviewing talent for field based positions differently than if the positions were headquarters based. Before reading your application, word-by-word, the recruiter will make any effort s/he can to find signs of sincere commitment and passion to field work and humanitarian work. Careers at UNHCR entails field based work and you are expected to move between field locations. Proof of mobility is a skill that will certainly help your application. This skill is also highlighted in this episode of UNjobfinder Career Podcast.

6. Bring attention to experiences that shows commitment

The recruiter would quickly go through the work experience you’ve had in the past and look especially for;

• any volunteer experience?
• any field office experience?
• any hardship experience?
• any refugee camp experience?
• any language combinations that would be an advantage?
• any UNHCR experience?
• any experience from other refugee organizations like IRC, NRC, DRC, IOM etc?
• any professional UNHCR staff experience?
• any other professional UN staff experience?

The more of the items above the recruiter can check mark, the more competitive will your application  Read more: These are the skills the development sector value highly.

7. Make an impressive application pitch

For you as an applicant it is important to get your message across, to make your pitch (motivational statement/ cover letter) to the point and concise. There are several techniques that you can use to make your application pitch interesting. Personally I am in favor of the IPAR, when you prepare your pitch. Don’t hesitate to include numbers, amounts and results that will make your case impressive. If you can’t fit the whole story in a small pitch, use the idea of a cliff-hanger. Sample below:

“In early 2014 I created a project in Liberia focusing on clean water, after 9 months I had raised $ 9M and employed 6 project staff. Find more about this deliverable under my work experience.”