Innovation Fund company Giraffe launches free online courses to help youth become more employable

Giraffe - the South African automated recruitment platform - has launched a series of free online courses designed to make jobseekers more employable.

The impact of COVID-19 on the South African labour market has compounded an already dire employment situation - with an estimated 1.7 million net job losses in the past 12 months. 1.5 million of these are in the medium-skilled and youth segments - where people earn between R3k and R15k per month. This brings the youth unemployment rate to 45%, with over 10 million young people aged 15-24 not in education or employment (Department of Statistics South Africa, 2020). Without the necessary education or employment opportunities, this significant section of the population will remain impoverished, marginalised and vulnerable.

Although the labour market is indeed under pressure, there remain pockets of high demand in areas where there is insufficient supply of skilled labour. To help address this, Giraffe has developed educational content to help jobseekers become more employable-  using labour market insights to identify which roles and skills are in greatest demand.

The free courses are targeted specifically at young people and the medium-skilled demographic, most of whom do not have a tertiary education and may not have ever received any career guidance or work-seeking support. The courses are free, optimised for mobile phones and require no data charge on MTN and Vodacom networks. They can be accessed at www.giraffe.co.za/courses and are integrated with Giraffe’s matching platform that can target jobseekers with specific courses based on their experience and aspirations.

The courses cover a range of highly relevant topics including what careers suit your personality and how to qualify for those careers, how to find a job, how to prepare for interviews and how to behave in the workplace. In addition to career and job seeking topics, there are also courses on how to manage your money and how to manage your life- items which are very relevant to a demographic that is largely impoverished, in debt and plagued by a range of social ills that impede them from growth.

Giraffe’s free educational content portal has been developed with the support of UNICEF’s Innovation Fund and Generation Unlimited programme, which seeks to enable youth to become productive and engaged members of society. As part of this initiative, Giraffe is making both the courses and the mobile learning management system open source and free to use by any organisation around the world - either to use Giraffe’s content or publish their own using Giraffe's technology.

“We are excited to launch the new courses for jobseekers- especially at a time when youth unemployment is so high and jobseekers are desperate for work,” said Anish Shivdasani, Giraffe CEO, adding that, “by making the courses and mobile learning management system open source, we hope that we can make a far bigger impact than just in South Africa.”

“Our Innovation Fund helps us explore how frontier technologies can benefit children and young people. Giraffe is part of our investment cohort focusing on solutions that bridge learning gaps to improve employability – a challenge that has been further highlighted with the current and impending learning and economic crisis,” said Sunita Grote, UNICEF Innovation Fund Manager. "This learning portal is free to access, and open source - contributing to a collection of digital public goods that can transform lives and advance humanity."

About Giraffe

Giraffe is a contactless hiring platform that automatically screens candidates so you don’t have to. Giraffe enables South African businesses to recruit medium-skilled staff faster and more affordably than any other recruitment method. Because Giraffe has automated the boring parts of the recruitment process– candidate sourcing and screening– business owners and recruiters can focus on more important tasks like interviewing the best candidates and managing retention. Simply post a job on Giraffe. Let Giraffe automatically screen candidates as they apply. Log in, see which candidates have passed your screening, listen to their voice notes and hire the best ones.

Contact: info@giraffe.co.za