Building a National Job Hub: Digital Solutions for Inclusive Employment

Veynuus was contracted by IOM Somalia to work with the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs on the development of a national job portal: a single place for government job announcements, youth opportunities and contract postings. The platform is live at jobs.gov.so. Veynuus led project management, user research, content design and stakeholder coordination, working with Zifala Technologies, a Somali technology company, which led backend development.

Somalia's labour market is fragmented, and young people frequently find themselves disconnected from the pathways that lead into work. Part of that is structural and part of it is informational. When public sector vacancies are announced through whichever channel each institution happens to use, opportunity becomes a function of proximity: those who know someone inside an institution hear about a post, and those who do not, do not. That is a transparency problem before it is a technology problem.

The same fragmentation limits what institutions can see. Without a common record of what is being advertised and who is applying, government has no reliable view of where skills mismatches sit or how workforce demand is changing, and employment policy has to be made on impression rather than evidence.

The portal therefore had four jobs to do at once: centralise public sector employment opportunities, create visibility into skills mismatches and job trends, support public-private dialogue about labour needs, and provide a basis for data-informed policy. Those requirements pull against each other. A platform optimised purely for applicants would minimise the information it asks for; one optimised for labour market analysis would maximise it. Resolving that tension was the central design question.

The first decision was about the division of labour. Zifala Technologies led backend development while Veynuus held project management, user research, content design and stakeholder coordination. Keeping the engineering with a Somali technology company mattered for the platform's long life: a system built locally can be maintained locally, and a national portal that depends on external contractors for every change tends to stop changing.

User research came before interface decisions. We conducted youth consultations specifically to test accessibility, because the assumptions embedded in a well-designed portal are frequently wrong for the people it is meant to serve. The questions that mattered were practical: what a young applicant is actually browsing on, how much data an application costs them, how long a form can be before it is abandoned, whether a listing written in administrative language communicates anything at all to a first-time reader.

Private sector consultations ran alongside, for market relevance. Employers and government institutions describe the same role in different vocabularies, and a portal that adopts one exclusively makes itself less useful to the other. Bringing both groups into the design also served the platform's dialogue function: a shared place for advertising work is a shared reference point for discussing what work exists.

Content design resolved the tension between applicant experience and analytical value. Tools to track skills gaps between listings and applicant profiles only function if both sides of that comparison are structured. A vacancy uploaded as an attachment is invisible to any analysis; the same information captured in structured fields can be compared. The taxonomy of job categories, the required fields and the way postings are composed were therefore designed as the instrumentation layer of the platform, not as presentation. The interface was then built to serve three distinct users: applicants, employers, and the administrators inside government who publish and manage postings.

Delivery ran as a coordination exercise across three constituencies that do not usually build software together: a federal ministry, a UN agency and a private technology firm, each with its own decision cycle and definition of done. Project management meant holding a single specification all three were working from, and keeping consultation findings connected to build decisions rather than filed as background.

The build itself covered a centralised portal for government vacancies and tenders, the tools that compare listing requirements against applicant profiles, and separate views for applicants, employers and administrators. Content design produced the vacancy structure, the category taxonomy and the language the platform speaks in, which for a government service is a considered choice: a posting must be accurate enough to be authoritative and plain enough to be understood.

Stakeholder coordination continued through to launch readiness, since a portal that centralises government vacancies only does so if institutions actually post there. Bringing the Ministry's counterparts in during development, rather than presenting them with a finished system, was part of how that commitment was built.

The engagement produced one national job portal, built with one technology partner, consulted with three stakeholder groups, and now live at jobs.gov.so as the central point for government vacancies. With leadership from MOLSA and support from IOM Somalia, it gives effect to a commitment to digitised governance, inclusive growth and youth employment that had been easier to state than to demonstrate.

The platform was built to evolve. Analytics are built in, the architecture is modular, and the stakeholder relationships formed during development remain open. It can therefore scale to support skills mapping, internship matching and the tracking of job placement success, each of which turns the portal from a noticeboard into an instrument that tells government something it did not previously know about its own labour market.

This sits in our Research, Data and Policy practice rather than in a technology one, and the reason is visible in the design. The portal's value to the Ministry is not that it is a website; it is that it converts an unrecorded activity, the advertising of and applying for public sector work, into a structured record that can be analysed. Every decision about fields and categories was a decision about what the state would later see.

• Job portal platform development
• User research & youth consultations
• Private sector consultations
• Content design & UX
• Stakeholder coordination