Glasgow’s Caseblocks helps transform South African youth employment 

The South African youth employment accelerator Harambee has adopted Glasgow-based Caseblocks’ adaptive case management platform to help excluded young people find work.

In South Africa, more than half of all young people are unemployed. To tackle this challenge, Harambee is working with social and tech partners, including Caseblocks, to build a work-seeker support system and technology platform.

Caseblocks’ adaptive case management system will enable the not-for-profit organisation to scale to meet greater demands at a national level, and in doing so will help hundreds of thousands of young workers currently locked out of employment in South Africa.

The platform supports and manages the complex processes involved in candidate recruitment, search, training, selection, and job placement. New candidates are found across South Africa and are welcomed on to the platform by first building a personal profile, the cornerstone for future job matching algorithms.

Candidates matched to job opportunities can be taken through training interventions required for specific roles. Candidates passing the interventions are offered interviews with the employer. Those not selected for employment are brought back into the available pool to be matched against more suitable opportunities.

The data is processed to continually improve and adapt the matching algorithms.. Engagement with ‘harambeans’  is maintained beyond job placements, so if former candidates are looking for work once more, they can make themselves available for future matching.

Underpinning a wider technical solution, the Caseblocks platform integrates with the candidate mobile site, an employer portal, Genesys in the contact centre, machine learning based on Tensor Flow, a central data warehouse, and the EdX learning management platform. The full solution is hosted on the Google Cloud Platform.

Caseblocks was chosen because of its ability to manage granular customer journeys where each case, the work seeker, can find their own route to employment.

Ijonas Kisselbach, co-founder and chief technology officer of Caseblocks, said: “We were delighted Harambee chose the Caseblocks platform to help them scale operations to meet South Africa’s  youth employment challenge.

“Harambee is an incredibly exciting organisation and it’s rewarding to be involved in a project critical to the future of South Africa.

“It’s not just about the technology though, the entire team, from c-suite to contact centre agents to the other consortium partners Genesys, Dotmodus and IQ Business are all highly motivated and driven by the shared goal to see 500,000 young people secure income generating opportunities by 2022.

“This important project demonstrates how machine learning and case management can come together to solve complex, enterprise process challenges.

Evan Jones, chief information officer at Harambee, added: “We’ve developed a tech platform that helps excluded young people join a network, learn and find jobs. From the outset we have worked collaboratively with partners selected to deliver a robust and scalable platform.

“Caseblocks was chosen to deliver the case management platform to 400 users as well as our consortium partners IQ Business and Dotmodus, who deliver systems integration and machine learning algorithms. We’re delighted to have a system that meets the needs of our young people as well as the companies that are employing them.

“As we place more people into employment, the system will scale and adapt to better identify opportunities for placing more young people into work. We’re driven by creating a better outcome for young people here in South Africa, and we’ve chosen our technology partners with care.

“Everyone working on this has focused on inclusivity and context. Caseblocks allows the system to learn from each and every case on the platform and the algorithm is based on ‘rules to include, not exclude’.”