Gauteng premier Panyaza Lesufi has announced more than 1.2-million applications have been received for the 8,000 jobs advertised on the Nasi iSpani recruitment programme.
The number of applications is expected to rise as the system closes later today.
This is as Lesufi gave an update on the June 16 recruitment programme which aims to fill at least 8,000 job vacancies across government departments in the province.
“Unfortunately, which is very sad, for the 8,000 posts we advertised we received 1,230,092 applications. Of that total 1,171,035 were applications received online. Through paper-based and the mass centres we received 359,057 applications. These are the people who went to community halls,” he said.
Lesufi said 44% of the applications are from males and 55% from females, while 1% didn't declare their gender.
“They have the right not to declare their gender. As expected, 98.8% of the applicants are Africans,” he said.
Given the high number of applications received, Lesufi said they would not send unsuccessful applicants regret letters. He said they will use the existing database to fill posts they were supposed to advertise until July next year.
“We are creating a database of unemployed people and are calling for businesses in our province, those who want to recruit people for short-term business, the Electoral Commission if they want to recruit people for running elections, we now have a database and we ask them to use this to kill unemployment in Gauteng,” Lesufi said.
Lesufi said the executive council has also decided to change the provincial government’s tendering system to address unemployment.
“We have also taken a decision as this government that from now on our tendering system will change. Those who are tendering, for you to get tenders you must tell us how many people you will employ and on the basis of that from the database, we will allocate the number of people who need to be employed. We are going to use our tendering system as a new mechanism of recruitment,” he said.
He has assured the jobs are real and available for the people of Gauteng.
Lesufi said the reason for advertising the posts was because they are at the forefront of service delivery.
On the shortlisting criteria, Lesufi said there is no “first come, first served” policy.
“We are going to treat all applications equally. It's going to be difficult. We are looking for merit, skill, experience and qualifications and within there, you can find that we have 5,000 people for one job and that is where we are subjecting the process of interviews and within the interviews, we will be blessed to determine who is ready.”
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