Data to Sep 2026
What the humanitarian sector hires for, year by year
Every job post on ReliefWeb since 2011, read by a language model and tagged against 65 topics. Topic trends are shown as a share of all posts in each year, so the overall rise and fall in posting does not read as a rise or fall in a topic.
All ReliefWeb job posts per year
Hot since Jan 2025
Topic trends
Pick a group, then up to six topics.
Core means the job is the topic: it is the main subject of the role, usually named in the title or purpose. Core or duty adds jobs where the topic is a substantial part of the work but not its main subject: broader, and less reliable. Core is the safer default. Four topics are counted as core only: Partnerships & partner capacity, Needs assessment & analysis, Safety & security management, and Compliance, audit & risk.
Biggest movers
Four ways to slice the jobs
Junior or senior? Staff or consultant? UN or NGO? Experience, job type and career category are what the poster chose on ReliefWeb's form. Organisation type starts from ReliefWeb's label for each organisation and splits the NGOs into international, locally based and regional, using each NGO's home country and where it hires.
Organisations
The 150 organisations that post most on ReliefWeb. Posts by several organisations count once for each.
Job posts on ReliefWeb by this organisation
Topic tilt, recent
Topic share in this organisation's posts ÷ share across all posts. 2.0× means twice the sector rate. Topics with fewer than 10 of its posts are left out.
Who's hiring for what: last 6 months
Who's hiring since 2025
How to read this
What is counted
- Advertised posts on ReliefWeb, including expired ones. Not hires, and not all humanitarian hiring.
- Every ad was read by a language model (OpenAI GPT-6 Luna) and tagged against a list of 65 defined topics, in English, French and Spanish. A topic counts when the job itself involves it, not when the word appears in the organisation's description of itself or in standard recruitment wording.
- Each tag has a level. Core: the job is the topic. Duty: a substantial part of the job. Skills asked for and passing mentions are not counted.
- A specialist topic also counts under its parent: sexual and reproductive health, epidemics and MHPSS under Health; MPCA, cash coordination and group cash transfers under CVA. Do not add a parent to its specialists.
Cautions
- Use shares for trends. Total posting fell sharply in 2024–25, around the US funding cuts, so counts fall for almost every topic.
- Unusually quiet months are flagged in the data. The cause cannot be told from this data.
- Some organisations moved recruitment to their own sites. A collapse in one organisation's volume may mean that rather than a hiring freeze.
Topics to read carefully
- The tags are a model's reading, not a hand count. In checks, 98% of its core tags were confirmed by a stronger model, and it found 87% of the core topics that model found. Counts therefore run a little low; trends are more reliable than levels.
- Core or duty is noisier: about three in four duty tags were confirmed.
- Research, studies & evaluation covers research and study roles and evaluation consultancies in general, not only rigorous impact evaluations.
- Ads with almost no text (about 0.3%) were not read and carry no topics.
- Watchlist topics are small. They are shown as counts and should be read as signals.
- Rankings need at least 20 matching posts in each period compared.