President Cyril Ramaphosa has made a direct appeal to the South African business community to fundamentally change their recruitment habits, urging employers to stop treating a lack of work experience as a lack of capability.

Speaking in Johannesburg on Thursday at the SA National Leadership Convening on Youth Employment, the President stressed that the country could no longer exclude young people out of the economy based on “rigid structural demands”.

"Every young person who wants to work but cannot find employment represents potential that is not being realised. We cannot be content with a society in which so many young people stand outside the gates of economic opportunity, looking in. We must open those gates," Ramaphosa said.

Addressing delegates, the President framed youth unemployment as an existential human and social crisis that struck at the core of South Africa's future stability.

Rather than viewing the integration of young workers as an act of corporate charity, Ramaphosa challenged executives to see it as a strategic investment in the longevity of the economy.

He urged companies to look beyond formal qualifications and historical resumes, adopting instead recruitment models that identified talent, aptitude, determination, and a willingness to learn wherever it was found.

"Many young people find themselves caught in a familiar predicament. They cannot get a job because they do not have experience. And they cannot get experience because nobody will give them a job. We must break this cycle," Ramaphosa noted.

The President highlighted the specific advantages that younger generations brought to the modern corporate landscape, arguing that their natural creativity, adaptability, and technological fluency were vital assets for businesses navigating rapid transformation.

As the global and local economies shifted toward AI, digital innovation, and the green energy transition, young people must be positioned as active drivers rather than passive onlookers, he said.

"They must be innovators, entrepreneurs, technicians, researchers, artisans, and business leaders in the industries of the future. We must prepare them not only for the jobs that exist today, but also for the jobs that are yet to be created," Ramaphosa said.

While acknowledging that democratic governments had consistently expanded educational access and rolled out multiple skills development and workplace experience programmes, Ramaphosa conceded that the scale of the current crisis proved traditional methods are falling short.

"This tells us something important. We cannot solve the challenge of youth unemployment simply by doing more of what we have always done. We must be prepared to do things differently," he said, calling for a collective willingness to dismantle institutional barriers and challenge established corporate practices.

To achieve sustainable results, the President called for the same collaborative urgency that had recently driven public-private partnerships in unblocking economic growth and stabilising critical infrastructure.

He made it clear that resolving the unemployment crisis was a “shared national responsibility” requiring synchronised action from all sectors of society, calling on government to focus on building an enabling environment for investment, enterprise growth, and fair employment policies.

He urged business to commit to expanding productive activities, investing capital, and actively opening workplaces to entry-level talent, while educational institutions needed to aggressively realign their curricula to equip graduates with the exact skills employers required.

Ramaphosa called on labour and civil society to work to ensure that newly created opportunities remained inclusive, fair, and accessible to all.

He emphasised that young South Africans themselves must remain active participants in shaping their own economic destiny, provided the broader society was brave enough to give them their crucial first chance.