Kenya
Health
Expanding job opportunities for disadvantaged youth in
South Africa
- Progress stage
- Dec 2025 to Nov 2028
Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford in partnership with Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator and JPAL South Africa is testing digital tools to improve job access for disadvantaged, majority-female job seekers. Building on offline trials, the project will introduce two online innovations on SAYouth, South Africa’s largest job search platform. Funding from the FID has enabled an assessment of these tools and how they can create more opportunities and help shape employment policy.
Project ported by:
Context
Youth unemployment remains a challenge with 73 million young people unemployed globally in 2022 over half of whom live in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In South Africa, 41% of young people are unemployed with higher rates among women and youth from disadvantaged backgrounds (Quarterly Labour Force Survey, 2023; De Lannoy et al., 2018). The inefficiency of the labour market often leads to a mismatch between jobseekers and the companies likely to recruit them. Furthermore, 53% of workers change jobs every year (Kerr, 2018), which creates instability, reduces productivity and increases the costs of job-seeking.
First, hiring practices tend to be exclusionary toward marginalised groups such as youth and women, who are disadvantaged by weaker signals of skills and work experience (Abel et al., 2019), smaller professional networks (Gautier et al., 2018), and fewer referrals (Beaman et al., 2018). Furthermore, jobseekers face significant financial barriers and a lack of motivation, which can hinder their job search (Caliendo et al., 2015; Falk et al., 2006; Jain et al., 2020; Posel et al., 2021). Finally, the risk of scams can influence behaviour. Indeed, these scams reduce the effectiveness of job searches, which discourages candidates from applying for potentially interesting jobs that carry a higher risk of scams.
Innovation
SAYouth is South Africa’s largest digital platform dedicated to youth employment. The project aims to improve the performance of the SAYouth platform by facilitating connections between job seekers and employers, whilst placing greater emphasis on soft skills and job seekers’ job-search strategies.
It introduces two key innovations:
The development of an improved ranking algorithm to match candidates with job vacancies, taking into account their personal skills such as initiative, perseverance and a willingness to learn. This information will be gathered through validated psychometric assessments and will complement the criteria already available on the SAYouth platform (education, experience, location, gender) to provide employers with more accurate candidate selections. The goal is to improve hiring rates, job match quality, tenure, and wages.
Jobseeker support to increase job search activity and performance. This innovation aims to improve the engagement of job seekers as well as their efficiency at all stages of their search, from applications to interviews. The aim here is to increase the rate of applications, reduce the current high risks of scams and frequent absence from interviews.
SAYouth delivers these innovations through its digital platform, WhatsApp services and a toll-free call center ensuring accessibility for job seekers across different regions and backgrounds. By leveraging digital tools the project aims to reduce employment barriers and improve labor market inclusion.
Results and lessons learned
Preliminary results (April 2026) from the evaluation of the first innovation show:
- Positive effects at every stage of the recruitment process for vacancies using the optimisation algorithm.
The algorithm incorporating behavioural skills ranking results in, per candidate, one additional interview offered, 0.77 additional interviews actually conducted, 0.6 additional job offers made and 0.5 additional job offers accepted, compared to the traditional algorithm. These cumulative effects lead to a net increase of 38% in hires compared to the standard algorithm.
- The effects are relatively stronger for young people, women and candidates with little work experience.
This is due to greater emphasis placed on soft skills, which helps to identify high-performing candidates whose profiles match the vacancies, despite having weaker formal qualifications (degrees and experience).
No significant negative impact has been observed on the employment prospects of candidates not selected by the alternative algorithm. In other words, the candidates selected do not take the place of others. The algorithm thus increases the overall efficiency of matching vacancies with profiles in the labour market. Research is continuing, analysing job retention rates among those hired, career trajectories and broader effects on the labour market.
Scaling up
In light of these preliminary results, Harambee has integrated the first innovation into the recommendation and ranking process on the SAYouth platform. The assessment of behavioural skills is now rolled out across SAYouth.mobi, and hundreds of thousands of jobseekers have already taken these tests. Similarly, the adapted ranking algorithm is applied to all job vacancies published on the platform. Since its implementation, it has been used for over 50,000 job vacancies, representing several million applications.
Projects
Projects funded by FID
