Pressure on SA youth to manipulate job qualifications increases

You only need to look at South Africa's youth unemployment rate, which currently stands at sits at 62.4 percentTo know how hard it is to find jobs locally. This means that those applying for jobs have become desperate and in their desperation fraud is becoming common.

This is as per the 2025 MIE Background Screening Index (BSI). For those unfamiliar, MIE Specializing in background screening, psychometric assessment and talent verification services, and for BSI, looked at data from 3.2 million background screening transactions conducted over the past year.

According to MIE, of the approximately 4.8 million unemployed youth in SA, about 58.7 per cent had no previous work experience. This means millions of candidates are competing for relatively few opportunities, so “the pressure to embellish, exaggerate or completely falsify credentials has never been greater,” the company told Hypertext in a release.

Its data said, “Individuals aged 18 to 34 accounted for more than 58% of the 3,236,039 screening transactions processed during 2025, the largest single demographic to proceed through formal employment checks in South Africa. The 25 to 29 age group represented the single highest concentration of screening across the year.”

Looking closer at the data, MIE also revealed that it conducted 627 863 qualification verifications during 2025. The risk rate associated with those checks increased to 7.78 percent, a significant increase from the 6.59 percent recorded in the previous year.

This means that approximately one in every 13 cases was identified as having some type of eligibility problem.

“The National Qualifications Register (NQR), owned and operated by MIE, now holds more than 5.5 million qualification records and verifies more than 10,000 qualifications per month, highlighting the scale of the problem,” it highlighted.

“The stakes are real. The South African Qualifications Authority (SAQA) has investigated 1,776 qualifications and found that 1,276 of them, including both local and foreign credentials, were fraudulent,” it continued.

MIE also cited growing problems of fake qualifications in regulatory bodies, including in Umalusi where fake institutions are selling fake certificates.

While it is easy to understand the pressure to falsify information in order to increase employment prospects, its potential effects are difficult to ignore. Here, since 2019, misrepresenting qualifications is a criminal offense in South Africa, punishable by up to five years in prison, MIE stressed.

“BSI data shows that deterrence is not working. Employers who do not undertake verification are leaving their organizations and the public dangerously exposed,” it concluded.

How this growing issue can be addressed remains unclear, but as youth unemployment continues to rise, solutions are in short supply. Either way, organizations posting vaccines or conducting interviews need to be even more vigilant in terms of screening.

(image – Photo by Getty Images on Unsplash)