ILO pilot hub helps employment counsellors match skills to opportunities in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ILO Innovation Day

ILO pilot hub helps employment counsellors match skills to opportunities in Bosnia and Herzegovina

An AI-driven job hub, piloted by the ILO, shifts mediation away from rigid occupational matching, toward skills-based matching-reflecting the evolving nature of labour markets.

6 March 2026

BUDAPEST (ILO News)-- The International Labour Organization (ILO) is piloting an AI-driven Job Hub in Bosnia and Herzegovina to help public employment services better match jobseekers with available vacancies and strengthen labour market intelligence.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, and other parts of the Western Balkans, vacancy information is often fragmented across multiple private job portals. Employers frequently advertise outside public systems, meaning that public employment services (PES) counsellors do not have an overview of all available jobs. As a result, they must manually search different websites and interpret job descriptions, slowing job mediation and limiting effective skills matching, especially for the most vulnerable jobseekers.

In 2025, supported by the ILO Innovation Challenge Fund, the ILO started piloting a practical innovation, an AI-driven Job Hub in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The platform automatically collects and harmonizes real-time job advertisements from major national and local job portals. By providing counsellors with access to a wider pool of real-time vacancies, the platform helps overcome fragmented labour market information.

Beyond vacancy aggregation, the platform uses artificial intelligence to analyse job descriptions and identify required skills. Through a text-to-skills interface, it maps job requirements to the European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO) framework while also detecting transversal and emerging skills that may fall outside standard classifications.

It also detects skills that may fall outside standard taxonomies, creating a richer, more future-oriented skills profile for each vacancy. This shifts mediation away from rigid occupational matching, which is predominant in the Western Balkans, toward skills-based matching-reflecting the evolving nature of labour markets.

Equally important, the platform integrates some job quality indicators aligned with ILO Decent Work principles. Through semantic analysis, it flags signals related to contract stability, working time arrangements, pay transparency, occupational safety, and potentially discriminatory language related to gender, age or disability. This ensures that counsellors are not only matching faster-but matching better.

The user interface- currently available in English and the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language (BHS)-allows counsellors to search, filter and analyse hundreds of real-time vacancies, updated daily, by occupation, location, sector and job quality dimensions. Structured vacancy views and Excel export functions enable immediate integration into daily workflows and policy analysis.

If the pilot proves successful, approximately 300 PES counsellors could use the tool daily to enhance mediation under Active Labour Market Policies (ALMPs) thanks to the support of the European Union. For jobseekers, particularly those facing barriers to employment, the platform could mean improved access to opportunities that better match their skills and meet minimum job quality standards.

The innovation builds on exchanges with EU Public Employment Services, including those of Sweden and Austria. The result is more than a pilot platform-it is the foundation of a longitudinal, skills-informed vacancy repository. Over time, this dataset can support labour shortage analysis, education planning, and policy foresight in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, if adopted more broadly, across the Western Balkans.

The AI-driven Job Hub is a clear example of how the ILO can embed AI and data analytics into real-world Decent Work initiatives at country level. It strengthens evidence-based employment policy, enhances mediation functions, and places job quality at the centre of digital transformation.

The pilot was presented at the ILO Innovation Day, on 3 March, 2026 as an example of technological innovation that solves institutional barriers, protects vulnerable jobseekers, and strengthens labour market governance.