Referrals to the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration (CCMA) have risen by roughly 4 500 cases to 193 069, though no sector increased its share. Private security came down from 18% to 13% and business and professional services from 15% to 11%, while five of the eight largest referrers, including retail, transport and mining, held exactly where they were.
Employers who hire at store level start and end more employment relationships than most. Grocery, clothing and quick-service chains sit within a trade industry that employs close to 3.4 million people and, alongside FMCG and manufacturing, records the highest permanent labour turnover of any industry grouping. What none of them count is the cost of the appointments that produced all that churn.
With unfair dismissal making up 51% of all CCMA referrals, industrial psychologist and head of research and development at JOBJACK, Ashleigh Nel, contends that a share of those endings was set months earlier, at the point of hire. “A misfit is a person put into a role they were never suited to. The cost of it arrives months later as absenteeism, a disciplinary hearing, retraining and another vacancy to fill.”
“Entry-level work at store level is low autonomy,” she explains. “A worker is told what to do and does exactly that, every shift. Someone whose instincts run the other way spends the whole day overriding them just to hold the job down. That shows up as burnout, as an early exit, as work done slowly on purpose, and sometimes as stock going out the door.”
A manager watching it happen sees an attitude problem. An employee who processes things internally starts arriving late without a clear reason, stretches breaks and forgets tasks, often before registering that they have checked out. Someone more vocal raises it directly, usually about growth they were promised at interview. Either way, it enters the disciplinary record as conduct.
Those costs compound, with disciplinary spend climbing while productivity on the floor falls, but they sit in different parts of the business. Absenteeism belongs to operations, shrinkage to loss prevention, dismissals to HR and legal. Recruitment sees none of it, so nobody is asked to bring the number down and the same hiring decisions keep getting made.
A CV would not have flagged the mismatch. Employers hiring at this level have long relied on a candidate’s previous jobs and how close they live to the store, largely because the alternatives were out of reach. Assessment tools have been expensive, built for desktop use, heavy on data, dependent on digital literacy and available only in English.
Conscientiousness is the one personality dimension that predicts job performance consistently across occupations, although the relationship is modest rather than deterministic, and Nel’s team assesses it alongside a measure of counterproductive tendencies. Both can be measured before anyone is appointed, while a misfit still costs nothing to avoid.
Proving the effect is difficult, because employers deal with disciplinary matters internally and seldom pass the outcomes back to anyone. Where clients have shared figures, one KFC franchise group recorded a 44% drop in dismissals over twelve months.
Nel sets limits on what screening can deliver. Results vary widely by client and are sharpest where onboarding and team structures are already stable enough to isolate what changed. Pay, commission structure, working hours, transport costs, safety and how a manager behaves all drive early exits, and a well-matched person in a badly run store will still leave.
Job fit also cannot address what she calls early career shocks, which she identifies as a growing driver of early turnover. “Many entry-level hires are the first in their family to hold formal employment, so nobody has prepared them for what the work involves. The version of work people see online looks nothing like an entry-level shift, and the distance between the two is where the despondency starts.”
“Job fit is much better than picking someone at random, and it is still not a guarantee,” cautions Nel. “Someone can have the potential to do the job well and still choose not to.”