Heine Bellingan | Co-founder | CEO | JOBJACK | mail me |
Most entry-level hiring in South African retail and quick-service restaurants still begins with a CV. That first step removes the majority of people who could perform well in these roles. As a result, employers reporting difficulty filling store-level vacancies are working with a far smaller pool than they think.
Employers might believe they cannot find the right prospects for the roles they’re advertising. Yet, at the same time, they are filtering out a bulk of appropriate candidates before anyone gets assessed. A CV tells you who has worked before and who could afford to keep applying. Neither of those tells you who is likely to do well behind a till on a busy Saturday.
The cost of CV screening
The exclusion is measurable. Stats SA has found that 58,7% of unemployed young people report having no previous work experience at all. That leaves them with almost nothing to put on a CV.
Applying is also expensive. Research by Youth Capital in partnership with us drew on a survey of more than 10 000 young people. It put the cost of looking for work at up to R1,469 a month. Of that, roughly R700 goes towards transport. This leaves eight in ten young job seekers choosing between searching for work and buying food.
The most recent Quarterly Labour Force Survey also shows how these decisions play out. Trade added 70,000 jobs in the second quarter of 2026, more than any other industry. Trade accounts for 23,6% of all youth employment. Elementary and sales and services occupations make up close to half.
Youth unemployment still rose by 1,5 percentage points to 47,4%. That leaves 5,0 million young people out of work. The national rate reached 33,6%.
A decade of youth unemployment
The approach has not improved over a decade. Stats SA’s ten-year review shows youth unemployment for 15-to 34-year-olds climbing from 36,9% in 2015 to 46,1% in 2025. Among 15- to 24-year-olds, it rose from 50,3% to 62,4%.
Bellingan says the cost of not screening shows up in churn rather than in recruitment budgets. Remchannel’s labour turnover research puts FMCG, retail and manufacturing at the highest permanent turnover of any industry group at 16,4%. Sales and marketing ranks highest by discipline at 28%. Meanwhile, replacing an employee in these sectors commonly costs 30% to 50% of annual salary.
If you hire on a CV, you are hiring on a signal that is hard-pressed to predict performance in a store. The person leaves in three months, you run the whole process again, and the cost sits in operations rather than in HR, where anyone would notice it.
Measuring candidates before CV screening
Employers can assess candidates before reading a CV, and some already do it. Testing numeracy, reliability and service orientation directly gives a store manager a comparable score for every applicant. This includes applicants who have never been employed.
Applying the same test across a group also keeps branch-level decisions consistent and visible to head office. Our version of this is JobFIT™, which scores every applicant on those measures. It treats work history as one input among them rather than as the entry requirement.
Of the candidates employers appointed through the platform this year into roles advertised as requiring prior experience, 41% did not have that experience. That represents 3,208 appointments against the 4 594 who met the requirement. Close to a thousand of them had no work history on their profile at all.
Rethinking CV Screening
Every one of those appointments was made by the employer. We score each applicant against what the role demands. So, a first-time job seeker lands on the same shortlist as someone with two years’ experience. Without a score, a hiring manager has a CV and a hunch.
Whether someone shows up on time, handles a difficult customer and works accurately under pressure can all be measured directly. This includes someone who has never been employed. There are millions of people who could do this work and will never be assessed for it. Reaching them does not mean lowering the bar. It means measuring the right thing.