The new “improved” UN job application website

Anyone who has every applied for a job at the UN will feel a sweat break out on the back of their neck at the mention of the 90’s-style faux-Latin-named job application site “Inspira”. (Remember when things were all called “Exceptimus” and “Ignitor” and stuff? Ugh.)

Anyway, the site’s been down for a few days for modernisation, and the new improved site came back up on Friday. (They had a FOUR DAY outage! This alone is enough to make me suspect that the people who designed the website didn’t know what they were doing. Outages should measured in minutes or hours, not days.)

Given my experience of large organisations and their ability to procure IT which isn’t grossly overpriced and absolutely terrible (for which see Britain’s NHS, Barclays’ several iterations of terrible online banking websites, any government department in the world ever) it’s no surprise to see that the fundamentally broken Inspira has been given little more than a lick of paint.

Still present are the absence of a “Back” functionality, because the site doesn’t use URLs to control location, visible meaningless Javascript all over the place (hovering over a link to my job opening reveals “javascript:submitAction_win4(document.win4, ‘HRS_CE_WRK_HRS_JOB_LINK$21$$0′” which gives just a hint of the horrors people meeting the website’s code for the first time must experience), Windows 98-style icons and the overall user-experience and look and feel of being dragged by chain up a muddy slope by a slow moving tractor.

But my personal favourite is the built-in spell-check function. (Note to developers: people don’t develop their own spell-check functions any more. Browsers do this now.) My entire cover letter passed the spell-check with flying colours bar one exception: It suggests I replace the word “in” in the opening sentence with the admittedly more emphatic, but perhaps overzealous “IN”.

I’m not even joking.