Giraffe launches salary benchmark showing that 29% of South Africans earn below minimum wage!

Giraffe, the low-cost, automated recruitment platform for medium-skilled staff announces thelaunch of its first ever salary report.

Reducing poverty and inequality- and boosting employment- have long been on the agenda of South Africa’s development policies and programmes.

However, South Africa has the highest level of inequality in the world, as evidenced by its Gini coefficient (standard measure of inequality), and significant effort will be needed to address this. Measuring income is therefore critical if effective policies for wealth creation and distribution are to be effected.

In Giraffe’s first ever salary benchmark, we analysed our database of close to one million mediumskilled candidates to generate an accurate representation of salaries for junior to medium-skilled employees in South Africa across industries, roles, experience level and education level.

This analysis represents the majority of working South Africans since it excludes high skilled individuals and senior management/executives whose salaries often skew average salary estimates.

Some of the major findings in this report reveal that:

• The average salary for the majority of working South Africans is R6,400 per month,

• 29% of working people earn less than the national minimum wage,

• Retail is the biggest industry (employing 18% of the workforce) but is also one of the worst paying (40% earn below minimum wage),

• Banking and IT pay some of the highest salaries but employ only 8% of the working population, and

• Tertiary education is a major driver of salary- with workers with a tertiary qualification earning on average 72% more than people without a tertiary qualification.

“Accurate salary information is generally hard to come by” explains Siobhan Zurnamer, who led the research at Giraffe.

“Employers- especially small businesses- often don’t know how much to pay their staff and job seekers frequently don’t know what their skillset is worth. We find that the large
discrepancies in salaries for equal work to be attributed to the inaccessibility of credible and fair salary reports, so we felt compelled to create one.”

This report is particularly relevant for HR departments & small businesses who hire junior to medium skilled staff and would like to understand market salaries by industry and function.

Economists and policymakers interested in labour force structures and wages will also benefit from the insights
gleaned from this data.

About Giraffe

Giraffe is a fully-automated, digital recruitment solution that enables businesses to recruit mediumskilled staff faster and more affordably than any other recruitment method.

Because Giraffe has automated the administratively intense part of the recruitment process– candidate sourcing,
screening and contacting– employers can focus on more important tasks like interviewing relevant candidates and managing retention.

Find out how Giraffe can streamline your recruitment and get you the best candidates at www.giraffe.co.za