The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (BZ) aims to increase the proportion of Dutch nationals in important positions abroad, including at the UN, EU, NATO, and World Bank. One way to achieve this is by setting up a job board through which Dutch nationals can apply for open positions. BZ uses more than 100 external job boards, collects and enriches the information, and offers it through its own channels. These are the National Coordinator for International Functions (NCIF), which proactively looks for candidates for strategic positions at international organizations, and WerkenbijdeEU, which works on behalf of the Dutch government to promote the influx of Dutch nationals into the EU.
The collaboration with Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe began in January 2019, after winning a European tender. The focus of the project was the realization of more than 100 connections with external job boards. By scraping these websites, processing and normalizing the data, a proprietary database is built containing an overview of many relevant vacancies, which is integrated into the websites of NCIF and WerkenbijdeEU through a custom web interface.
The technical details
The job board consists of docker containers, each with its own function. The scraper retrieves job information from external job boards, normalizes it, and then stores it in a MongoDB database and Elasticsearch search index.
There is a separate web interface for managing the system. This allows, among other things, manual adjustment of the vacancies. This information can be accessed via the Django REST framework. The web interfaces of NCIF and WerkenbijdeEU are built in React. They use the REST API and Elasticsearch to allow users to search easily and quickly.
The result
The International Job Board project for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was a project tailored to Goldmund, Wyldebeast & Wunderliebe. Technically challenging, complex, and innovative. Collecting, processing, and presenting large amounts of data is one of GWW's specialties.