South African employers are good at counting what happens when an employment relationship goes wrong. Dismissals reach HR, absenteeism lands with operations and disciplinary hearings generate records of their own. What’s much harder to see is whether the problem began months earlier, when somebody was hired into a job that never suited them particularly well.
The CCMA’s 2024/25 annual report shows that the Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration received 193,069 referrals between April 2024 and March 2025, up from 188,619 the year before. Unfair dismissal remains a major part of that caseload, but a CCMA referral records the point at which an employment relationship has already broken down. It tells us considerably less about how that relationship began.
Ashleigh Nel, an industrial psychologist and head of research and development at JOBJACK, argues that employers hiring large numbers of store-level workers should be looking further back. “A misfit is a person put into a role they were never suited to,” she says. “The cost of it arrives months later as absenteeism, a disciplinary hearing, retraining and another vacancy to fill.”
There’s an obvious commercial interest in the argument. JOBJACK sells a recruitment system built around candidate-to-role fit, including psychometric assessment, so its case for measuring fit before somebody is hired also supports the product it sells. The more useful question is whether businesses have become too accustomed to treating recruitment and the eventual cost of a failed employment relationship as unrelated events.
The cost appears somewhere else
High-volume store-level recruitment creates a particularly awkward version of the problem because the person making the appointment may never see much of what follows. Recruitment records a filled vacancy, while a store manager later deals with lateness or poor performance and another department becomes involved if the problem develops into a disciplinary case.
Those costs then scatter across a business. Absenteeism can sit in an operations budget while shrinkage is dealt with by loss prevention, disciplinary proceedings move through HR and a replacement eventually becomes recruitment’s problem again. Unless those systems speak to each other, an employer can repeatedly make similar hiring decisions without seeing whether those appointments are producing similar outcomes.
Nel argues that some mismatches become more obvious in entry-level jobs with little autonomy. “A worker is told what to do and does exactly that, every shift,” she says. “Someone whose instincts run the other way spends the whole day overriding them just to hold the job down.”
That doesn’t mean an employee who dislikes repetitive or structured work is destined to become a disciplinary problem. It does suggest that a person can be perfectly capable of doing a job while still being poorly suited to the way that job has to be done, particularly when the work offers little scope to change the routine around their preferences.
Disengagement can then look like something else by the time a manager sees it. Nel says an employee may begin arriving late, stretching breaks or forgetting tasks, while someone more vocal may directly challenge promises about progression or development that were made during the interview. The disciplinary record captures the behaviour, but not necessarily everything that produced it.
A CV has limits
Employers hiring at this level haven’t traditionally had a huge amount of information available to them. Previous employment, location, availability and an interview can help decide whether someone is employable, but they don’t necessarily reveal how that person will respond to tightly structured work over months or years.
JOBJACK’s JobFIT system attempts to add behavioural information to that decision. The company says its system combines assessments with operational requirements and hiring data to measure how closely a candidate fits a particular store-level role, rather than relying primarily on a CV and the judgement of an individual manager.
Nel says conscientiousness is one of the personality dimensions the company examines, alongside measures intended to identify counterproductive tendencies. The point isn’t that a psychological assessment can tell an employer exactly how somebody will behave. It gives the employer another signal before appointment, at a stage when avoiding a poor match is considerably cheaper than dealing with one after months of employment.
JOBJACK points to results from employers using its system as evidence that the approach can affect what happens after hiring. Nel says one KFC franchise group recorded a 44% reduction in dismissals over 12 months, although that result needs to be treated as an individual customer outcome rather than evidence that every employer will see the same effect.
Employers also don’t consistently return disciplinary data to recruitment platforms, making it difficult to establish across a much larger sample exactly how strongly a hiring assessment predicts what happens months later. That missing information also makes it harder to separate the effect of hiring from everything that happens once an employee actually starts working.
A well-matched employee can still leave
Hiring for fit can become a convenient explanation for problems created by the employer. Someone can be perfectly suited to retail or quick-service restaurant work and still decide that the salary, working hours or cost of getting to work make the job unsustainable.
Those aren’t theoretical concerns for workers at this end of the labour market. South Africa’s frontline workers already report financial pressure, transport problems and concerns about progression at work. A behavioural assessment can’t make a dangerous journey home safer, reduce the price of getting to work or turn a poor manager into a good one.
Nel acknowledges those limits. She says JOBJACK sees its clearest results where onboarding and team structures are already stable enough to separate the effect of changing recruitment from everything else happening inside a workplace.
That makes the quality of the workplace part of the analysis rather than background noise. If employees who score well for a role still leave quickly or repeatedly enter disciplinary processes, the answer can’t simply be to refine the hiring system until it finds people willing to tolerate whatever is happening after they arrive.
There’s another problem at the beginning of working life. Nel describes an “early career shock” among some first-time employees whose expectations of formal work bear little resemblance to the repetitive schedules, limited autonomy and management structures they encounter once they start.
“Many entry-level hires are the first in their family to hold formal employment, so nobody has prepared them for what the work involves,” she says. “The version of work people see online looks nothing like an entry-level shift, and the distance between the two is where the despondency starts.”
Screening can identify whether somebody appears suited to a role, but it can’t make that person want the reality they discover once they’re doing it. Nel puts the limitation more plainly: “Job fit is much better than picking someone at random, and it is still not a guarantee. Someone can have the potential to do the job well and still choose not to.”
The more useful opportunity for employers may therefore be less about finding a test that prevents bad hires and more about connecting information they already collect at different points in the employee’s time with the business. Recruitment knows who was hired and why, while operations knows who stopped showing up and HR knows which employment relationships eventually became disciplinary problems.
Put those records together and employers can begin asking a much better question. If the same hiring profiles repeatedly end in early exits or disciplinary action, recruitment may need to change; if people who should be suited to the work keep leaving regardless, the problem is probably waiting for them after they’ve been hired.