The UN Needs to Change How they Hire

The United Nations needs to change how they operate if they want to retain their integrity…and global relevance

I made a conscious and drastic effort to change my life in order to work in international development and “change things for the better.” If we, as individuals living in a society, want to actually change things for the better, international development organizations, like the United Nations, and it’s agencies, needs to drastically change the way they hire. If they do not examine and improve on these inefficient systems, it will be doomed to be ineffective and wasteful. Here a few key points that should be addressed if the UN and its agencies wants to remain a sustainable (for all) organization and gloabl peace-promoting platform.

1. Pay your interns!!!!
   If you want the best, you need to invest in early-career changemakers. I know that my Ivy League Masters Degree was a good signal for many looking at my application to intern at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. However, what UNESCO*, or any UN agency, did not consider that in order to hire qualified interns (who do A LOT more than you think) you must pay them. I was lucky enough to get a small stipend from my university, but I actually had to take out an additional school loan in order to subsidize my living expenses since I received no benefits at all. No food stipend, no transportation stipend, nothing. I hustled my butt off trying to be ruthlessly resourceful and in the midst of this, there were already documented stories of other interns going to extremes to try and still maintain professionalism even though they were literally starving students. When I hear UN officials stand on podiums and talk about what the world needs to do to better humanity, I think of all the interns that wrote that speech and have literally nothing to show for it. Pay your interns and then you can talk about equality for all.
   *Side-note, UN agencies at large do not pay interns, and although I worked for UNESCO, which already had budget cuts related to the US in 2011, this is still not an excuse.

2. UN officials should pay taxes where they live.
   When I was able to move from a non-paid intern to a slightly-paid program specialist/consultant, everyone bragged about how my paycheck would be tax-free. I get why you would want to do this but it is kind of a slap-in-the-face to the countries that house, provide transport, and services to the workers and see nothing in their tax revenue. UN workers should know the communities they live in and since the nature of their work is international, paying local taxes will at least ground them in where they are living, and help them organize along with their community when the state tries to act against their benefit.

3. Hire more diverse candidates (in all aspects!)
   This does mean that they should hire more women, people of color, and all regions should be equally represented. Yes, they have provisions, quotas, and workshops for that (that I led at UNESCO) but that doesn’t mean anyone listens. Time and time again, I would see people roll their eyes when I mentioned the benefits of hiring diverse people, but in practice, I didn’t see this. One of the major factors that are not mentioned in workshops but needs to be addressed is economic diversity!!! For the reasons I mentioned above, you basically have to be independently wealthy, a major outlier, or come from a UN family in order to work at the UN or one of its agencies. Most of the people I worked with had the privilege of going to the best schools, doing multiple unpaid internships, all while living in both low-income countries and in some of the most expensive cities in the world. No wonder the UN seems completely out-of-touch when it comes to the financial hardships of others and it seems like even mentioning it, even though I did, seems totally taboo. My definition of insanity is putting people of the same economic status in a room (since the inception of the organization) and expecting them to come up with creative solutions to global poverty, one of humanity’s greatest problems.

4. Embrace technology immigrants and technology natives
   Technology is a tool, not a crutch. As a Bay Area native, tech seems to be the end of all our problems, and in the UN, technology is where all problems begin. This fixed mindset on both ends does not do anyone any good. If the UN wants to be representative of the global population it’s serving, it needs to put technology immigrants (those that knew of a world once without technology but were able to adapt) and technology natives (ones that have always had tech integrated in their lives) and come up with a strategic plan to keep the UN as innovative as the world it is in.

5. Write job descriptions that people can actually understand
   The UN has a way of writing that is so complex, that even I, a native English speaker, had trouble understanding. This could not be more true for their job descriptions. I wrote, applied for, and analyzed so many UN job descriptions that I should have an advanced degree in how to decode them. I even reached out to people in the hiring departments begging them to explain to me what the actual job requirements were because they were filled with so many jargon-like, complex, abstract phrases, I couldn’t follow. And if you work at the UN are mad at what I’m saying now, it is because I wrote it in a way you would actually understand it. Now, reflect on that and give the same consideration to your future hires.

6. Set realistic expectations of employees and set them up for success
   Give employees real, tangible, and monitor-able ways to move up in their careers. Otherwise, they will end up bitter and if they have the money and patience to put up with this type of environment, more often than not they take it out on the next generation of workers and lament on how they didn’t have it easy themselves. We are not in this business to make people suffer, we are here to create a better world for the next generation, so if you were one of these people, make it your duty to prevent this type of behavior from happening with future hires.