Two South African women, Sasha Knott and Kelly Louw, are driving change in the country’s job market through their business, Job Crystal. This company uses AI-driven technology to revolutionise the hiring process for small and medium-sized enterprises. Their company aims to make the process faster, fairer, and more humane while addressing unemployment across Africa.
For most job applicants, the job hunt is an exhausting cycle of clicking, sending, hoping, and waiting. Conversely, employers, especially small ones, are overwhelmed by an ocean of CVs, searching for that one golden needle in a stack of “maybes.”
This is the frustrating disconnect that Sasha Knott and Kelly Louw set out to fix in 2015 when they acquired Job Crystal, a good recruitment company but not yet great. What they envisioned (and built) was something more powerful, resulting in a recruitment solution that could find the right talent quickly, without breaking a company’s budget.
The Crystal difference
Traditional recruitment can be painfully slow, excessively expensive, and often biased towards companies with deep pockets and elaborate HR teams. Job Crystal was built to level that playing field.
At the centre of Job Crystal’s operations is its AI tool, Crystal. Crystal dives into job descriptions, reads between the lines using natural language processing, and then scours 42 global databases, including Job Crystal’s pool of over 67 million active and passive candidates. Within hours, it delivers a shortlist of the top ten matches, candidates whose résumés reflect the role’s requirements. It also provides the original CV so interested employers can reach out directly to hire.
Job Crystal provides automated shortlisting, background checks, salary benchmarking, an applicant tracking system, and even automated video interviews. Users have reported time savings of up to 85%, a 99% accuracy rate in candidate matching, and up to a 90% reduction in recruitment costs compared to traditional methods.
It isn’t just about efficiency
The female-led company has always pursued a broader mission to combat unemployment and economic inequality, particularly in South Africa. Their team is predominantly composed of women and has achieved remarkable results. Since 2022 alone, they have facilitated over 1,690 job placements, positively impacting over 10,000 individuals. The total salary value of these placements exceeds R6 billion ($323.1 million).
The company plans to expand its reach across Africa, Europe, and the U.S. to build the most intuitive recruitment platform on the planet.
