Are background checks quietly locking candidates out of the job market?

Supplied image: Jennifer Barkhuizen, head of marketing at Mettus

We have read these numbers before. We have written about them. We have cited them in presentations and strategy decks. Then, as an industry, we usually return to the question that feels most urgent: how do employers protect themselves?

I want to ask a different question today: What happens to the person on the other side of the screening process?

The asymmetry nobody talks about

South Africa has built, over the past decade, a genuinely sophisticated hiring verification ecosystem. Qualification checks. Criminal record screening. Identity verification. Fraud database cross-referencing. Social media analysis. Our own screening solutions have processed more than three million background checks in 2025 alone, and the tools are getting sharper, faster and more comprehensive every year.

This is good. Credential fraud is real. The consequences of a bad hire, particularly in regulated, client-facing or financially sensitive roles, are significant. I have written about this. I stand by it.

But here is what we have not fully confronted. In a country where nearly half of young people who want to work cannot find it, the same system designed to protect employers from bad actors is also, as a structural side effect, making it harder for legitimate candidates to get a fair hearing.

Not because the tools are wrong. But because the system around them was designed with an imbalance built into it. Employers bear almost all of the risk in a hiring decision. So employers optimise, rationally, for risk reduction.

Under PoPIA, candidates do have the right to request what checks were done and by whom, and they can dispute a result if they believe it contains an error. But those rights are exercised after the fact.

By the time a candidate learns that incorrect data cost them an opportunity, the role has been filled. The system permits correction; it does not prevent harm.

We are very good, as an industry, at measuring fraud. We track the percentage of qualifications misrepresented; it is high, with 7.82% of matric certificates found to be inaccurate in the 2024 Background Screening Index. We monitor the rise of AI-generated CVs. We flag synthetic identity fraud before it reaches the hiring manager’s desk.

What we do not measure with the same urgency is the false positive rate. How many legitimate candidates are declined, delayed, or quietly dropped because of data that is outdated, incorrect, or simply unverifiable due to institutional failure rather than candidate deception?

We do not know. And if we are honest about it, the reason we do not know is that employers are not the ones who feel that particular cost.

HR & Management

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South Africa has 17.3 million people outside the labour force. Some of them have made a choice. But a significant portion are what statisticians now call the ‘potential labour force’: people who want to work, who are available, but who have stopped actively searching. Not because they are fraudsters. Because the process itself has become exhausting.

An individual who attended a college that has since closed down, or whose matric certificate cannot be found at the Department of Education, or who carries a fraud listing attached to a stolen identity they reported and never had resolved; that person will fail a background check. Not because they lied. Because the data infrastructure behind the check wasn’t built with their circumstances in mind.

I want to be precise here, because this is a conversation that can easily be misread.

The answer is not fewer checks. The answer is not a return to gut-feel hiring or the honour system on CVs. Credential fraud is a genuine threat to business integrity, to safe workplaces, and to the candidates who earned their credentials honestly and then compete against people who fabricated theirs. The case for rigorous screening is as strong as it has ever been.

But rigorous screening should also include rigorous remediation.

What does this look like?

It looks like candidate-facing access to their own screening data, not as a courtesy, but as a structural right, so that errors can be caught before they silently disqualify.

It looks like dispute resolution pathways that don’t require a lawyer or a degree in bureaucratic persistence. It looks like institutional investment in the data quality of the sources we all draw from.

And it looks like employers being honest with themselves about the difference between a candidate who defrauded the system and a candidate who fell through the gaps in it.

The trust economy works both ways

There is a phrase we use often in this industry: trust must be earned, not assumed. It is usually applied to candidates. They must prove who they are, prove what they know, prove they are who their CV says they are.

That framing is correct. But in a 32.7% unemployment economy, it is also dangerously one-directional. Because trust in a labour market is not just a compliance issue, it is an economic infrastructure.

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When candidates experience the system as something that wasn’t built for them, they disengage, stop applying, and move into the informal economy.

The 3.9 million discouraged job-seekers reflected in this quarter’s numbers are not simply people who gave up. Many are people who encountered barriers they could neither see nor resolve.

For employers, this is not just an ethical concern, it is a strategic one. South Africa is simultaneously unemployment-saturated and skill-scarce. Organisations that can responsibly extend opportunity to candidates with legitimate but resolvable verification barriers may gain access to talent pools their more risk-averse competitors overlook.

A challenge to our industry

The solutions and services that underpin South Africa’s hiring verification ecosystem, from credit and identity checks to background screening and data intelligence, are not neutral infrastructure. They are actively shaping who gets access to opportunity and who does not.

Those of us who build and operate these solutions are not passive observers of that outcome. We are responsible for it.

Which is why it falls to us, and to every business operating in this space, to ask the harder question: Are we building a verification ecosystem that is as rigorous about data accuracy as it is about fraud detection? Are we investing as much in the candidate’s ability to understand and correct their own data as we are in the employer’s ability to access it?

South Africa cannot afford to screen out a generation. Not because verification is wrong, it isn’t; but because the gap between what the data says and what is true about a person’s life is often wider than our solutions acknowledge.

The number is 32.7%. Behind it are 8.1 million people. Many of them would pass every check we run, if the system could see them accurately.

That is the problem worth solving next.