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 would perform well in these roles, which means 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,” says Heine Bellingan, co-founder and CEO of JOBJACK. “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 exclusion is measurable. Stats SA has found that 58,7% of unemployed young people report having no previous work experience at all, which leaves them with almost nothing to put on a CV. Applying is also expensive. Research by Youth Capital in partnership with JOBJACK, drawn from a survey of more than 10 000 young people, put the cost of looking for work at up to R1 469 a month. Of that, roughly R700 is spent on transport, leaving eight in ten young job seekers to choose 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, and trade accounts for 23,6% of all youth employment, with elementary and sales and services occupations making up close to half. Youth unemployment still rose by 1,5 percentage points to 47,4%, with 5,0 million young people out of work. The national rate reached 33,6%.
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, and from 50,3% to 62,4% among 15 to 24 year olds.
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%, and sales and marketing highest by discipline at 28%, while replacing an employee in these sectors is commonly costed at 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,” he says. “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.”
Assessing candidates before a CV is read is possible, and some employers already do it. Testing numeracy, reliability and service orientation directly gives a store manager a comparable score for every applicant, including those who have never been employed, and applying the same test across a group keeps branch-level decisions consistent and visible to head office.
JOBJACK’s version of this is JobFIT™, which scores every applicant on those measures and treats work history as one input among them rather than 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, which is 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.
“Every one of those appointments was made by the employer,” says Bellingan. “JobFIT™ scores 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, including in someone who has never been employed,” says Bellingan. “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.”