The Signal · Column 041

A jobs portal cannot close a skills gap

Andrei van Noordt · 29 August 2026 · 2 min read

The South African ICT association has launched a portal aimed at closing the country's ICT jobs gap, putting the people who want technical work and the companies that need it in the same place. I read it with sympathy, because the intent is right and the shortage is real. I also read it with the memory of every matching platform launched in this market over the past decade, each one built on the same quiet assumption: that the bottleneck was visibility.

Here is what that framing misses. A jobs gap is almost never a discovery problem. Companies with open technical roles are rarely unaware that candidates exist. They are unable to say yes to the ones already in front of them. The requirement list gets written as a wish rather than a job, nobody in the process has the authority or the confidence to judge whether a near miss is teachable, and the role stays open while the market is told there are no people. More supply arriving through a new front door does not fix that. It increases the number of people being declined for reasons nobody in the room can articulate.

Every market with a skills shortage also has a judgment shortage, and only one of them can be fixed with software.

This is where the repricing happens. When access to candidates becomes cheap, the scarce asset moves inside the company. It becomes the hiring manager who can look at an adjacent background and correctly estimate the ramp, and the recruiter who can defend that estimate to a panel that wants the safe hire. That skill was always valuable and always invisible, because while access was the constraint, nobody measured who was good at conversion. Now that portals and outbound tooling have flattened access for everyone, conversion is the whole game. It varies enormously between two companies hiring for identical roles in the same city, and the difference has nothing to do with which platforms they use.

For hiring leaders, the practical read is simple. Before you buy another channel, measure what happens to the candidates you already see: how many reach an actual decision, how long that takes, and how often a rejection is written down in words a colleague could argue with. If your conversion is weak, a new portal will only bring you more people to lose.