Beyond Politics: How Employers Can Drop Experience Barriers Without Increasing Hiring Risk

ANC secretary-general Fikile Mbalula has called for experience requirements to be scrapped for entry-level jobs, arguing that young South Africans must be allowed to get experience at work instead of being blocked before they start. He’s right about the catch-22: you can’t get a job without experience, and you can’t get experience without a job.

But for South African employers, the question is not whether youth deserve a chance – it’s how to give that chance without gambling the business. Labour costs are high, margins are thin, and a bad permanent hire can be expensive and difficult to unwind. That’s why many companies default to demanding “2–3 years’ experience” for roles that could be taught in weeks.

ShiftMate’s view is straightforward: the answer isn’t lowering the bar; it’s changing the way we assess people. Trial shifts, followed by real investment in training and development, give employers better outcomes and give young people the break they need.

The “Experience” Requirement: A Broken Filter, Not Real Risk Management

Mbalula has argued that insisting on experience for first jobs “blocks young people from the labour market before their careers even begin”. Many graduates – from pharmacists to engineers, teachers to technicians – are facing that reality. They finish their studies, send out hundreds of applications, and are repeatedly told they don’t qualify because they lack experience.

From an employer’s perspective, experience has become a crude way to:

• Cope with overwhelming application volumes
• Signal “less training required”
• Try to reduce risk in a tough economic environment

The problem is that this filter is both unfair and ineffective:

In other words, experience is often an administrative shortcut masquerading as a risk-management tool.

What Business Owners Know (And Don’t Always Say Out Loud)

If you speak candidly to South African business owners, a pattern emerges:

• Many feel they were pushed into “inclusive” or “youth” policies they didn’t design, and that didn’t always work for their operations
• They’ve lived through placements that looked good on paper but fell apart on the floor
• They’ve become sceptical of anything that sounds like another compliance exercise

Yet the same owners will also tell you that the best people they’ve ever employed were often those they took a chance on – someone without the perfect CV, but with the right attitude, who grew with the business.

The gap is clear: business owners want to back people, but they need a model that protects them from expensive mistakes and fits the realities of South African labour law and economics. With the formal sector shedding 229,000 jobs in a year, every hire matters more than ever.

Trial Shifts: A Practical Bridge Between “No Experience” and Long-Term Fit

This is exactly where ShiftMate’s model comes in. Instead of making a permanent decision after a 30-minute interview, employers use paid trial shifts – working interviews – to see how candidates actually perform in the real role before offering permanent employment.

How It Works in Practice

1. Define the real job, not just a CV wish-list: You specify the core behaviours and trainable skills needed – reliability, basic numeracy, customer empathy, learning speed – not a long list of prior roles.
2. Source and screen for potential: Candidates are pre-screened for basics (right to work, location, availability) and assessed for attributes like problem-solving, coachability and temperament through neuroscience-based assessments rather than years of experience.
3. Run paid trial shifts in your real environment: Candidates work supervised shifts in your store, warehouse, call centre or branch. You track punctuality, effort, learning curve, teamwork and how they handle your systems and customers.
4. Convert only the right people to permanent: You offer permanent roles to those who prove they can do the job and fit the culture. For everyone else, the process ends after the trial, with no long-term commitment.

This turns hiring from a paper-based guess into a controlled experiment. You’re not dropping your standards; you’re changing how candidates prove they can meet them.

Why Training Your Own People Beats Chasing “Plug-and-Play” Hires

At ShiftMate, we’ve consistently seen that employers who invest in trainable people outperform those who hunt for “ready-made” experience.

When companies commit to onboarding and training candidates who perform well in trial shifts:

• Employees feel someone backed them, so they’re more loyal
• They are more open to feedback and growth, because they started in a learning frame
• They often outperform “experienced” hires who arrive with habits that don’t match the new environment

For the employer, that translates into:

It’s not just the right thing to do for the economy and for youth; it’s also a better long-term business strategy. Employers hiring workers aged 18–29 can also claim up to R39,000 per hire through the Employment Tax Incentive (ETI), stacking even more savings.

Moving Past the Debate: What Actually Matters to Employers

The public spat between senior ANC leaders over whether young people are “lazy” or “blocked” by the system makes for good headlines, but it doesn’t help you fill next month’s roster or reduce next quarter’s churn.

What matters to employers is:

• Can I find people who will show up, learn, and care about the work?
• Can I test that before I commit to a full employment contract?
• If I invest in training, will it pay back in performance and retention?

Trial shifts with a training mindset answer all three questions:

• You see real behaviour instead of debating who’s to blame for unemployment
• You unlock a larger pool of first-time workers without increasing risk
• You build a pipeline of people who are both grateful for the opportunity and genuinely suited to the work

The ShiftMate Proposition to Employers

If you’re an operations or HR leader, here’s the core offer in simple terms:

1. Stop filtering out first-time workers based on experience alone
2. Use structured, paid trial shifts to see who can actually do the work
3. Invest training and development into the ones who prove themselves

The result is a workforce that is more loyal, more productive and more aligned to your business – and a hiring process that protects you from the very real risks that South African employers face. Understanding the latest minimum wage requirements ensures your trial shifts are fully compliant from day one.