New portal for Nordic jobs

The Nordic Job Portal has been developed by a Swedish company with the help of a 100,000 kronor (€10,800) grant from the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova.

Pascal Chatterjee, project leader at Threadsafe Studio in Stockholm, developed a pilot concept during the Hack for Sweden hackathon, a cooperative effort by Swedish authorities to drive innovation using open data. That website is already up and running.

“With the Vinnova funding we are now planning to develop the website and integrate information about job opportunities in all of the Nordic countries. We use computer translation which makes it possible to search for and find results in the appropriate language.“

The employment services’ data are open and the company is now visiting each country to discuss how to best make the service accessible to more job seekers. The aim is to increase the number of cross-border job applications. The portal aims to open in 2015, first with a basic version for Sweden which will be expanded towards the end of the year with new tools and countries. 

There are already several websites which advertise Nordic jobs, the largest being the European Commission’s EURES portal, which also uses open data from employment services.

“We hope to be able to provide a better user experience and also better computer translation,” says Chatterjee.