View Vacancy - Consular Assistant, Amsterdam (NLD18.713)
The British Consulate General is recruiting a Consular Assistant based in Amsterdam.
The British Consulate General provides consular advice and services to British residents in the Netherlands and over 2,000.000 annual British visitors. The consular team is part of the wider Europe Asia consular region. Our customers rightly expect high levels of service and we aim to deliver. Consular work is very rewarding – you have the chance to make a direct difference to someone’s life, often in very challenging situations. The successful candidate will be working in a busy consular assistance team often under pressure and sometimes dealing with extremely sensitive cases.
The main purpose of this role is to actively support the other members of consular team i.e. Pro Consuls and Vice Consul of the Consular Section to provide modern and efficient consular assistance and fee-bearing services to British Nationals in The Netherlands. Predominantly customer-facing, this role may include dealing with people in hospital, victims of crime, distressed British nationals, and general administrative duties when required. Data collection and analysis as part of Prevention campaigns, social media communications, communicating with British and Dutch authorities. Use of computer applications to produce Emergency Travel Documents, accuracy and compliance with guidance needed.
Main Duties / Responsibilities
Assistance and Prevention
- Handling correspondence, telephone enquiries, and counter enquiries and services
- Accepting Emergency Travel Document (ETD) applications and producing the ETD
- Maintaining information packs e.g. Prisoner pack, Bereavement information
- Performing other administrative duties as required (e.g. processing lost/stolen/recovered passports and coroner’s requests)
- Collecting and analysing data for use in Prevention campaigns
- Creating and publishing messages on social media (for example in relation with prevention campaigns)
Administrative Support
- Opening, sifting and logging all incoming correspondence daily, and answering general enquiries by phone
- Updating/ maintaining lists of local providers such as lawyers, translators, hospitals, funeral directors and notary publics
- Performing other administrative duties as required (e.g. processing lost/stolen/recovered passports and UK driving licences; dealing with lost property; preparing Prisoner Packs; front desk documents and templates, filing and weeding- Consular archive)
- Back up for producing local management information through the collection of statistical data to strict deadlines
- Back up for managing online appointments booking system
- Working as Counter Cashier, accepting fees initiating various types of Consular services.
Notarial work
- Taking fees for services and recording daily fee takings
Crisis management
- Taking part in Post crisis preparedness activity
- Assisting in Post preparation and response to football matches and other large-scale events
- Responding to mass casualty incidents or crises if deployed
- Participate in local and regional crisis training and events, keeping awareness on crises up to date
- Regional Resilience Support in crisis (voluntarily)
- Previous experience in a customer facing role and ability to response to a wide; range of costumers needs;
- Good organisational and time management skills;
- Good communication and interpersonal skills;
- Good IT skills generally and specifically, a comprehensive knowledge of Microsoft Office, especially Word and Excel;
- Flexibility, resilience, patience, and the ability to deal with difficult situations, including the ability to work out of hours in an emergency or crisis;
- Ability to display a high level of discretion and responsibility;
- Fluent English both written and spoken and good level of Dutch.
The successful candidate will be offered a 6 months temporary contract at A1 level. The base salary for this position is €2,371.17 gross per month, based on a working week of 36 hours. In addition, an 8% annual holiday allowance and a monthly travel allowance are payable. The Embassy currently applies a performance based bonus pay model for local staff.
Applicants must be legally entitled to work in The Netherlands. Please note that The Embassy is not a tax withholding employer. Consequently staff members are responsible for paying their own income tax and social security on the gross salary received.
The successful candidate will undergo a professional background check. Any job offer is also provisional to a successful security clearance check.
The Embassy encourages a culture of continuous learning. All employees have access to the Civil Service Learning platform which gives access to training to improve job specific skills. Employees are entitled to a minimum number of annual training days.
Please be advised that Consular positions at the FCO entail dealing with casework in situations that may involve death, detention, rape, assault, post-mortems, prison visits and highly distressed customers. Candidates should therefore have a high level of resilience to trauma.
Please note that the deadline for applications is 23:55 on the day mentioned in the above field “Application deadline”.
We advise you to allow enough time to complete and submit your full application, since only applications completed and submitted before the deadline will be considered.
Please be aware that the deadline for submitting applications is considered to be the time zone for the country where the vacancy has arisen.
Please be advised that the British Diplomatic Missions will not be able to meet the travel costs incurred when travelling to the interview, nor the costs connected with relocation if offered a job.
This opportunity is closed to applications.
