33,000 people apply for 150 jobs at one South African company

Hyundai Automotive South Africa received 33,000 applications for its Youth Employment Service (YES) learnership programme. 

While the company said this highlights the strong appeal of the Hyundai brand among young job seekers, it also noted that it highlights the severity of South Africa’s unemployment crisis. 

Hyundai’s human resources director, Christine Masinga, said 5,000 applications were submitted within the first hour after entries opened. 

“We received a remarkable 21,058 applications from Gauteng, 9,161 from KwaZulu-Natal, and 2,845 from the Western Cape,” Masinga said in a statement. 

Hyundai’s YES learnership programme officially kicked off on Monday, 4 May, with individuals aged between 18 and 34 being placed across various departments from sales, marketing, after-sales, and human resources. 

Some of the individuals will also be placed across the company’s national dealership network.

The programme is an annual initiative from Hyundai, placing an average of 150 participants, with around 30% securing full-time employment afterwards. 

Hyundai is not the only entity to experience overwhelming demand for its limited number of job opportunities, with companies and the state seeing similar trends. 

In October 2025, over one million South Africans applied for 5,000 jobs advertised by the South African Police Service (SAPS). 

Such examples contradict opinions from some high-profile business leaders, most notably former Capitec CEO Gerrie Fourie, who argue that South Africa’s unemployment rate is far lower than reported by Statistics South Africa (Stats SA). 

Fourie and others have argued that Stats SA’s unemployment calculations disregard the extensive “survivalist” work undertaken by South Africans. 

This refers to efforts by individuals to make ends meet by taking on temporary work, renting out back rooms, or trading goods. 

This is not generally accepted as employment by most definitions and is excluded from Stats SA’s data. 

Fourie said South Africa’s unemployment rate would be closer to 10% if self-employed people and those working in the informal economy were counted.

Worse than it seems

Despite this argument, examples such as Hyundai’s learnership programme and that of the 5,000 police positions indicate that South Africa’s unemployment rate is as bad as the statistics show. 

Political analyst Dr Frans Cronje explained that it is possible for both sides of the argument to be true, with there being evidence of significant survivalist activity in South Africa’s economy. 

“The data is completely accurate and is quite precise. But, it is also correct to say that with such an extreme level of unemployment, there will be a lot of survivalist economic activity,” Cronje said. 

“People will rent a thing or sell a thing. They will hustle or trade something to just survive. But, we must not fall into the trap of calling that employment.” 

While this is economic activity that generates meaningful value for individuals and society, it is not ’employment’ in the common sense of the term.

Cronje pointed to the example of the police receiving over one million applications in response to the advertisement of 5,000 jobs. Around 300,000 of those applications were from university graduates. 

“Look, no one can say our unemployment rate is 5% or 10% because when you advertise police jobs in the United States, you do not get 12 million people applying,” Cronje said.

In a functioning economy with high levels of employment, such a situation would not occur in the normal course of events. However, in South Africa, this is the reality.

The economy is simply not creating enough jobs to absorb a growing labour force, Stanlib chief economist Kevin Lings said. 

Lings has repeatedly outlined the maths behind South Africa’s unemployment crisis, with the number of jobless individuals inexorably rising because they cannot find formal jobs. 

He explained that South Africa’s economic growth rate currently sits between 1% and 1.5%, constrained by deteriorating infrastructure and weak business confidence.

While this is faster than in years past and reflects progress on key reforms, it is simply not fast enough to make a meaningful dent in South Africa’s unemployment crisis.

“I think a 1.3% growth rate is still nowhere near enough. We need to really get that growth rate above 3% and heading toward 4%,” Lings said. 

“Then, I think, we will be in a position to be adding enough jobs to absorb the number of people entering the labour market.”

“At a growth rate of just over 1%, we are not going to create enough jobs to deal with the growth in the population.”

Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, the economy has grown, with it expanding by 3.5% in real terms over the past six years. 

However, over that same period, the population has grown by more than 6%. Therefore, the economy is not growing fast enough to keep pace with population growth. 

“This results in income per capita falling, on average, resulting in the living standards of South Africans stagnating and then falling,” Lings said.