Here is what you are actually walking into.
Applied, 2024
Selected
Nothing I can teach you changes those proportions. What the course does is narrower and real: four in five of the applications that fail here are out before any written test or interview, either at screening or between screening and the shortlist, and the course teaches you what each of those stages looks for, so you are not guessing at it.
Here is the arithmetic. In 2024 the UN Secretariat received 263,708 applications for the professional, director and field service posts in this lane, and made 1,714 selections. That is the system you are applying to, and almost nothing written about UN careers says it out loud. I have drawn it from the Organization’s own report to the General Assembly, and I have kept the four limits that report puts on its own numbers, because a figure without them is not an honest figure.
The report’s own summary of the five years to 2024: more than 1.4 million applications for 8,652 job openings, resulting in 9,538 selections, with “less than 1 per cent of all applications being selected”.
- ‘Screened’ here means screened IN, not merely processed. In 2024, 65.1 per cent of applications were screened in; across the five years to 2024 the average was 60 per cent.
- The population is job openings that ended in at least one selection. Applications to cancelled and unfilled openings are excluded, so the real odds facing an applicant are worse than this, never better.
- This is one lane, not the whole system: Professional, Director and Field Service posts under ST/AI/2010/3. Roster-creating and temporary openings are excluded, and the geographical-posts lane has its own separate figures.
- Every share above is a share of applications submitted. Of the applications that survive screening, a different and larger majority never reach assessment; the two answer different questions and neither may be quoted without its denominator.
Separately, and not to be read against the totals above: 162 applications per job opening in 2024, and about the same across the five years. Applications per OPENING, which is not applications per selection: an opening may result in more than one selection, or in none.
The figures · drawn to scale
Drawn to scale.
Choose any stage, or drag the handle, to re-base the shares on it.
- 263,708100.0%
Applications submitted for the openings in this lane.
- 171,57065.1%
Passed eligibility and the manual suitability review. The rest never reach a hiring manager.
- 53,87620.4%
Reached a written assessment or an interview.
- 3,0561.2%
Recommended by the panel and endorsed for selection or a roster.
- 1,7140.6%
Offered the post.
- ‘Screened’ here means screened IN, not merely processed. In 2024, 65.1 per cent of applications were screened in; across the five years to 2024 the average was 60 per cent.
- The population is job openings that ended in at least one selection. Applications to cancelled and unfilled openings are excluded, so the real odds facing an applicant are worse than this, never better.
- This is one lane, not the whole system: Professional, Director and Field Service posts under ST/AI/2010/3. Roster-creating and temporary openings are excluded, and the geographical-posts lane has its own separate figures.
- Every share above is a share of applications submitted. Of the applications that survive screening, a different and larger majority never reach assessment; the two answer different questions and neither may be quoted without its denominator.
Photographs on this page, all via Wikimedia Commons and modified:
- Jennifer Woodard Maderazo, CC BY 2.0
- CEPAL, Public domain (PD-Chile)
