# Standardising job descriptions in the humanitarian supply chain: A text mining approach for recruitment process

## TL;DR

This study uses text mining to analyze job descriptions in humanitarian organizations and assess how standardizing terminology can improve recruitment.

## Contribution

The paper introduces a text mining approach to evaluate terminology standardization in humanitarian job descriptions.

## Key findings

- Job vacancies for managerial and financial roles align more with European standards than technical roles.
- Skills in resource management and economics are highly demanded in humanitarian job postings.
- Lack of standardization remains a barrier to aligning job descriptions with humanitarian policies.

## Abstract

Uncertainty and complexity have increased in recent decades, posing new challenges to humanitarian organisations. This study investigates whether using standard terminology in Human Resource Management processes can support the Humanitarian supply chain in attracting and maintaining highly skilled operators.

We exploit text mining to compare job vacancies on ReliefWeb, the reference platform for humanitarian job seekers, and ESCO, the European Classification of Skills, Competencies, and Occupations. We measure the level of alignment in these two resources, providing quantitative evidence about terminology standardisation in job descriptions for supporting HR operators in the Humanitarian field.

The most in-demand skills, besides languages, relate to resource management and economics and finance for capital management. Our results show that job vacancies for managerial and financial profiles are relatively more in line with the European database than those for technical profiles. However, the peculiarities of the humanitarian sector and the lack of standardisation are still a barrier to achieving the desired level of coherence with humanitarian policies.