The International Labour Organization is piloting an AI-driven Job Hub in Bosnia and Herzegovina to help public employment services improve the matching of jobseekers with available vacancies and strengthen labour market intelligence. In the Western Balkans, job vacancy information is often scattered across multiple private job portals, while many employers advertise outside public systems. This fragmentation makes it difficult for employment counsellors to access a complete overview of job opportunities, forcing them to manually search various websites and slowing down the process of connecting jobseekers with suitable positions.
Supported by the ILO Innovation Challenge Fund, the pilot platform was introduced in 2025 to address this challenge by automatically collecting and harmonizing real-time job advertisements from major national and local job portals. By bringing vacancy data together in a single system, the platform enables employment counsellors to access a broader and more up-to-date pool of job opportunities, improving the efficiency of job mediation and helping to overcome gaps in labour market information.
The platform uses artificial intelligence to analyse job descriptions and identify the skills required for each vacancy. Through a text-to-skills interface, it maps these requirements to the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations framework while also identifying transversal and emerging skills that may not be included in standard classifications. This approach promotes skills-based job matching rather than relying solely on traditional occupational categories, reflecting the changing nature of modern labour markets.
In addition to identifying skills, the system also incorporates job quality indicators aligned with international decent work principles. By analysing job advertisements, the platform can detect information related to contract stability, working hours, pay transparency, occupational safety, and potentially discriminatory language. This helps employment counsellors ensure that jobseekers are matched not only with available positions but also with opportunities that meet minimum quality standards.
The user interface allows counsellors to search, filter, and analyse hundreds of vacancies by occupation, location, sector, and job quality indicators. If the pilot proves successful, around 300 public employment service counsellors could use the platform daily to support Active Labour Market Policies and improve job placement outcomes. Over time, the system is also expected to create a valuable dataset that can support labour shortage analysis, education planning, and long-term policy development in Bosnia and Herzegovina and potentially across the Western Balkans.
