Recruiting graduates in South Africa has always required careful navigation. The landscape is defined by volume overload, equity imperatives, misaligned systems, and a rapidly shifting skills economy. In response, the IO Psychology community will need tobuild practices that bridge intent and action.
Recently, TTS, in conjunction with the South African Graduate Employer’s Association (SAGEA), hosted a graduate recruitment webinar, followed by a detailed cross-industry research study to better understand the challenges, and solutions to graduate talent selection and development.
In this article, we summarize the best practices and findings from these sources, including the voices of employers, insights from candidate behavior, and benchmarking data.
The volume challenge
One of the loudest signals from the webinar and research was that employers have to deal with potentially overwhelming volumes of applications:
- Many employers reported hundreds to tens of thousands of applications per intake cycle.
- The median graduate vacancy attracts 100+ applicants.
- Manual screening remains common, slowing down talent decision-making and increasing cost substantially, especially labor and opportunity costs.
Despite technological advancements, the majority of hiring pipelines are still not equipped for this scale. Automated pre-screening tools remain underutilized or mistrusted.
As a result, selection bottlenecks increase time-to-hire, candidate experience suffers, and recruiters risk burnout.
As IO Psychologists, the opportunity lies in re-engineering these systems: implementing predictive, fair, and scalable models that blend valid psychometrics, task-based screening, and automated logic, all without losing the human touch.
Candidate expectations
Drawing from the SAGEA Candidate Insights 2024 report and our follow-up research, one truth holds strong: graduates are not simply looking for a job, they are looking for a future.
Key attraction drivers for the Class of 2023 and 2024 cohorts were:
- Development and training
- Career advancement
- Employer reputation
- Positive workplace culture
- Job stability and security
These have overtaken prestige or salary as primary motivators. Notably, candidates prioritize purposeful development. This encompasses the need to have clear mobility pathways, mentorship structures, and employer commitment to ongoing learning.
Employers echoed this in our post-webinar survey: Where programmes articulate and deliver on learning and growth, retention rates improve.
Conversely, when employers rely solely on brand pull or salary, offer rejections and early employment attrition are far higher.
This may be aligning with a broader psychological shift: Graduates increasingly interpret the employment relationship through the lens of personal and professional growth, in other words, they view employment as not just a contract for remuneration but also a developmental contract.
Psychometrics, interviews, and the competency disconnect
A key discussion point during the webinar and echoed across the follow-up study, was the growing global movement towards skills-based hiring.
The logic is compelling: if we hire for what people can do (and learn), rather than where (or what)they’ve studied, we increase fairness and future-readiness.
Yet in practice, the research shows a mismatch between aspiration and method.
- Many organizations still default to generic interviews or legacy psychometric batteries.
- Few use task-based assessments, work simulations, or bespoke situational judgment tests.
- Most employers claim to assess for competencies, but lack clear, behaviourally anchored frameworks, especially for emerging or future skills.
IO Psychologists are ideally placed to design and validate assessment strategies that actually target future-critical skills.
This means revisiting competency dictionaries, clarifying definitions, and introducing multi-modal, job-relevant tools that reflect not just intention, but real-world execution.
Systemic and educational realities
Despite advances since democratic transition in South Africa, various educational inequalities that shape the graduate labour pool still persist:
- Participation in higher education remains deeply unequal across race and class.
- The throughput rate for 3-year degrees, especially for Black students, remains significantly lower than other groups.
- South African schools face well-documented challenges of infrastructure failure, teacher shortages, and curriculum delivery gaps.
This systemic backdrop means that graduates emerge from vastly different starting positions, even when they hold the same degree.
This has significant implications for recruiters and talent professionals:
- Preparedness varies, particularly in business communication, digital skills, and workplace norms.
- Employers experience tension between transformation goals and readiness expectations.
- Some organizations are responding with bridging programmes, internships, or earlier pipeline investments, but these remain inconsistent in application or adoption.
The IO Psychology response must be systemic. Practitioners should ask: How do we build selection systems that identify potential rather than privilege? How do we redesign onboarding to address learning needs, not just introduce company values?
Future skills and education
Perhaps the most future-forward section of the webinar related to “Education 4.0,” a vision aligned to global shifts in learning, technology, and work. The World Economic Forum’s Education 4.0 taxonomy identifies the following as critical skills for 2030:
- Analytical thinking and innovation
- Active learning and learning strategies
- Complex problem-solving
- Critical thinking and analysis
- Resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility
- Emotional intelligence
- Leadership and social influence
- Technology use, monitoring, and control
However, few organizations have embedded these into their graduate frameworks or job specifications.
Most are still assessing for initiative, teamwork, and communication in generic, outdated ways. IO Psychologists can play a central role in making these skills visible, assessable, and trainable.
This will require them to create future-fit competency models, translating abstract constructs (e.g. resilience, flexibility) into observable performance indicators. In addition, they can advise hiring managers in the design of developmental pathways that begin pre-hire and continue through onboarding.
Global hiring trends
The webinar also drew from global insights showing a marked shift toward skills-based hiring, particularly in early career roles:
- Employers globally are beginning to deprioritize official qualifications in favour of demonstrable capabilities.
- Digital portfolios, micro-credentials, and work simulations are increasingly used to detect and evaluate actual skills.
- The ISE (UK) and SAGEA data both suggest that while the rhetoric has shifted, most employers still default to historical prestige signals in practice (e.g. Degrees from historically privileged universities).
This opens a space for IO Psychologists to engage in evidence-based advocacy:
- Show the predictive validity of skills-focused assessments.
- Encourage the use of non-traditional indicators of potential (e.g., hackathons, open-source contributions, peer-led projects).
- Work with HR to redefine graduate success profiles based on longitudinal performance data.
Practical recommendations
Across the integrated findings, the gap is not one of vision, but of execution. The following five recommendations emerged clearly from the combined insights:
Shift from volume management to accurate measurement of talent
- Use assessment tools that isolate meaningful behaviours or skills.
- Automate first-round CV screening using weighted attributes aligned to success profiles.
- Pilot logic-based, asynchronous assessments where possible (e.g. asynchronous video interviewing).
Refresh competency models
- Revisit outdated frameworks and measure them against current and future skill requirements.
- Build new behavioural indicators for relevant skills such as digital collaboration, learning agility, and resilience.
- Train line managers and interview panelists in best practice applications of revised models.
Commit to growth and learning
- Market graduate roles as learning pathways, rather than just job titles.
- Showcase current employee stories, secondments, and structured rotations.
- Integrate reflective development planning from the first day of employment.
Rethink capacity-building
- Invest in readiness assessments and bridging modules.
- Consider situational judgement tests that equalize opportunity to show judgement over jargon.
- Design onboarding with differentiated support, not a one-size-fits-all induction.
Embed IO Psychology in larger strategy
- Partner with HR to measure pipeline performance, not just job filling rates.
- Build evaluation loops into graduate programmes to track ROI.
- Contribute to scenario planning for future roles and skills mapping.
Final thoughts
The data from this combined body of work paints a picture of a graduate hiring ecosystem that aims to do better, but is still learning how.
We see alignment on values such as fairness, development, and future skills, but dissonance in execution.
For more insights on graduate talent assessment, why not contact us at info@tts-talent.com? We look forward to consulting with you!
Sources and further reading
SAGEA (2025). The SAGEA Employer Benchmark and Candidate Insights Report.