Entry-level hiring can grow South Africa’s talent pipeline
By Tarryn-Leigh Solomons
Businesses are struggling to fill entry-level roles at the same time as millions of young people remain outside the labour market.
That disconnect is raising questions about whether the problem lies only with jobseekers, or whether employers are making it harder to find the talent they need.
Rene Rademeyer, Client Relations Manager: Business Development at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator (Harambee), says many companies still rely on recruitment practices that favour candidates with formal work experience, established networks and conventional CVs.
“It doesn’t mean that suitable young talent is absent. It means employers and work-seekers are not always able to find, understand and access one another effectively,” she says.
One of the clearest pressure points is the way entry-level jobs are defined.
Businesses often advertise junior roles but still require previous experience, immediately narrowing the available pool.
“The mistake is calling a role entry-level and then designing the process for an experienced hire,” Rademeyer says.
That has a direct impact on talent pipelines. Companies end up competing for the same group of experienced candidates instead of bringing new entrants into the workforce and developing them internally.
It also creates a cycle for first-time jobseekers, who are expected to show experience before they have had an opportunity to gain it.
Long job specifications can worsen the problem when employers fail to separate what a candidate needs to know before appointment from what can be taught through onboarding and workplace training.
Rademeyer says employers should be more deliberate about which requirements are genuinely linked to performance.
Qualifications remain important in regulated and technically specialised roles, but they do not always provide the clearest measure of whether someone will succeed in a junior position.
Communication, problem-solving, reliability, adaptability and the ability to learn can carry equal weight in roles where technical knowledge can be developed on the job.
Traditional CV screening can also hide useful experience.
A young person who sells products in their community may already have customer service, sales and cash-handling skills, while someone who regularly looks after homes or pets may be demonstrating reliability and responsibility.
Those capabilities are easily missed when recruitment is built around formal job titles and previous employers.
This is where SA Youth comes in. As South Africa’s largest online youth recruitment platform, trusted by more than 3,500 employers across sectors, it gives businesses unmatched access to the country’s largest network of entry-level talent.
Its matching tools look beyond a standard CV by assessing skills, potential and behaviours, giving employers richer insight into candidates and supporting smarter, faster hiring decisions.
For companies, the case for widening entry-level recruitment goes beyond social impact.
First-time hires can give businesses access to a larger talent pool and allow them to develop employees around their own systems, service standards and operating models.
That can also create a stronger internal pipeline into supervisory and team leader roles, reducing the need to recruit externally every time a vacancy opens.
Global Business Services is one sector already creating entry points into customer service, sales, finance support and technology-enabled work.
Retail and wholesale, tourism and hospitality, construction, manufacturing, logistics and parts of the green economy also have capacity to absorb younger workers where recruitment is linked to real demand.
The mismatch, however, is not only about skills.
Location and transport continue to shape whether a candidate can realistically take up a job.
Employment remains concentrated in economic hubs, while many young jobseekers live far from those opportunities.
A person may meet every requirement for a role but still be unable to afford the daily commute or reach an early shift. Short-notice interview requests can create the same barrier.
She adds that recruitment needs to account for where jobs are based, when shifts start and whether candidates can reasonably access the workplace.
Rademeyer believes the biggest shift would be to remove unnecessary experience requirements from entry-level roles and replace them with structured assessments of potential and capability, supported by recruitment tools such as SA Youth that make it easier for employers to discover more talent, simplify hiring and reach candidates across the country.
