Hiring for potential: How employers can find young talent beyond the CV

Soraiya Verjee, Product Manager: Youth Technology at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator.

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Many employers are missing some of their strongest entry-level hires before the interview stage even begins.

In a labour market where businesses need people who can learn quickly, adapt to changing environments and stay the course, CV-led recruitment can be a blunt instrument. It often favours young people who have already had access to formal work experience, while screening out others who may have the behaviours, resilience and potential to succeed.

For employers, this is not only a talent challenge. It is a missed talent opportunity. This matters because entry-level hiring is not just about filling vacancies. It is about finding people who can be trained, retained and grown into the business. When recruitment processes rely too heavily on formal experience or polished CVs, employers risk narrowing their talent pool at the very point where they need it to be wider. The cost is slower hiring, weaker pipelines and missed capability. The upside is also clear: Harambee’s Breaking Barriers research shows that structured, decent work experience improves young people’s chances of staying in the labour market and securing further wage employment, while employers using platforms such as SA Youth benefit from reduced hiring friction, cost-effective sourcing at scale and stronger retention outcomes.

In South Africa, this mismatch is playing out in a labour market under real pressure. Harambee’s analysis of the Q1 2026 Quarterly Labour Force Survey shows that broad youth unemployment among 18- to 35-year-olds reached 54.6%, one of the highest levels recorded outside the COVID-19 years. For businesses trying to build sustainable entry-level talent pipelines, these numbers point to both the urgency of the challenge and the scale of the opportunity.

A stronger approach to entry-level hiring starts by widening the lens: recognising that useful skills and evidence of fit can be developed in many places, including informal work, volunteering, caregiving, community activity, self-employment and short-term earning opportunities.

This is where SA Youth provides a practical mechanism for employers. Operated by Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator as part of the Presidential Youth Employment Intervention, SA Youth connects young people to earning, learning and self-employment opportunities, while helping employers access a wide pipeline of entry-level talent across South Africa.

To date, the platform has enabled more than 1.6 million young work seekers to access earning opportunities through a network of more than 3 000 employers and continues to support more than 4.6 million young people. Its digital tools are designed not only to connect young people to opportunities, but to help employers see a fuller picture of their skills, experience and capability.

For many jobseekers, a CV is their first opportunity to introduce themselves to an employer; however, many young people struggle to articulate their skills and experiences in a way that reflects their full capability. The SA Youth CV responds to that gap by giving young people a structured way to translate formal and informal experience as well as paid and unpaid work, into clearer signals of capability.

Soraiya Verjee, Product Manager: Youth Technology at Harambee, says that unlike traditional CVs, the SA Youth CV enables young people to identify and articulate transferable skills gained across all their experiences. "We designed the downloadable inclusive CV to help bridge that gap, giving young people a professional tool that not only showcases their experience, but also encourages them to strengthen their profiles and better prepare for opportunities."

Since the downloadable CV launched in June 2025, more than 800 000 young people have downloaded their CVs, generating over 1.5 million downloads in total. The impact extends beyond CV creation. SA Youth has recorded a 57% increase in key profile information updates after CV downloads, suggesting that young people are using the tool as a catalyst to improve the information they provide on their profiles. This gives employers a broader evidence base for assessing young talent, making it easier to identify capability that may not be obvious in a conventional CV.

The SA Youth CV is only one part of a broader technology ecosystem designed to support more effective entry-level recruitment.

"Recognising that valuable skills are often developed outside formal employment, SA Youth has also introduced a feature that allows young people to capture skills gained through self-employment, informal work, volunteering and community activities. Insights from learning potential assessments and behavioural screeners that highlight workplace behaviours and problem-solving capabilities help employers identify talent beyond formal work experience alone,” says Verjee.

For employers, these tools provide richer signals of potential beyond traditional hiring filters. They help identify young people who may not have had access to formal work experience, but who have demonstrated reliability and the ability to learn. The platform’s ranking capability brings these signals together with additional data points to help employers identify a targeted pool of suitable applicants more efficiently. This makes recruitment easier and better targeted, while reducing the risk that capable young people are overlooked simply because their experience does not fit a conventional CV.

The opportunity now is for employers to build entry-level recruitment systems that reflect the talent market South Africa actually has. Traditional filters still matter, but they cannot be the only signals used to decide who gets seen, shortlisted or given a first chance.

SA Youth already shows that this shift is possible. With more than 3 000 employers using the platform, and millions of young people building richer profiles of their skills and experience, the infrastructure exists to make entry-level recruitment more targeted and evidence-led, without adding unnecessary friction.

The call to employers is clear. Use SA Youth to look beyond conventional CVs and find young people with the potential and drive to help build your business, while playing a part in solving one of South Africa’s greatest challenges.

Please click here to view a mock SA Youth CV.