YES streamlines operations with Azure to help more South African youth land their first jobs

It sounds like a maddening riddle: Getting hired for a job can feel impossible without previous work experience, but getting work experience is impossible if you can’t get hired. This is the circular conundrum that contributed to a youth unemployment crisis in South Africa, where more than 60% of youth could not find work as of 2018. And it was this same dilemma that led to the formation of Youth Employment Services (YES), a nonprofit organization that facilitates a 12-month work experience program designed to get youth the training and experience they need to land that critical first job. 

That training, on topics ranging from workplace etiquette to AI skills, is offered via a learning platform built by one of the original YES staff and hosted on Azure Virtual Machines. It’s one of several technological aspects of YES that have helped it become the most efficient employment program of its kind in the world, according to Malcolm MacDonald, the YES CIO. 

Shedding the excess tech 

When MacDonald joined YES, the nonprofit had multiple platforms, accounts, and servers with a lot of duplication – “sprawl all over the place,” as he puts it. He and his team have since significantly streamlined operations, cutting the number of applications in half. 

“YES is the lowest cost, highest impact employment program of its kind anywhere in the world,” he says. “Tech is a key enabler of that; one person can look after hundreds of programs.”

In addition to the learning platform, YES administers monthly surveys of participating youth. Companies receive a government incentive for participation, and YES is responsible for ensuring that all of the 1,800 companies currently participating meet all the criteria. 

To pull off the monumental task of surveying nearly 40,000 youth each month, YES is using a combination of open-source technologies and other programs and services, including many based in Azure. 

“We have MySQL databases across the board,” MacDonald says. “We are using Azure Database for MySQL and that’s quite efficient in terms of performance and scalability.”

YES’s Customer Relationship Management system is open source, and it has custom-written portals to guide each company through its onboarding process. 

The organization’s internally built applications are then hosted through Azure App Service. And developers frequently rely on Copilot in Azure to assist in their work; a complex task that could take a developer a week to figure out can be done in half a day with the help of Copilot.  

MacDonald says he appreciates the built-in security capabilities and features of Azure – his team is able to have confidence that the proper checks are being conducted, and they’ll get notified if they need to make any changes. For added assurance, YES uses Microsoft Defender for Cloud and is transitioning its VPN to Entra Private Access. 

Investing in the future

Streamlining technology has meant that MacDonald and his team can spend less time managing systems and more time innovating. One feature they’re working on is an AI-powered ranking tool that will help companies determine what program youth to hire for specific jobs by filtering applicants to see whose interests and test scores are most relevant. YES hopes that this will help companies and youth find an even better fit.    

The youth job placement program has already seen meaningful success. Although participating companies are required to offer permanent positions to just the top 5% of youth 45% of YES Alumni are employed (fixed-term, permanent and formal entrepreneurs) – a testament to the quality of work that companies are receiving as well as the training being provided to the youth. 

Some of the program’s youth were recognized recently for their success in a Top 35 under 35 awards ceremony. They have excelled in their careers, rising in the ranks quickly to senior management within just a few years or even opening their own businesses and creating more jobs, compounding the program’s impact.

MacDonald, who landed in his role at YES because he was looking to make a difference, has also been able to have his own impact through mentorship: The vast majority of his team comprises those whose first job was through the job placement program, and he loves the challenge of continuing to teach and learn alongside them. His experience as CIO at a number of financial institutions prior to YES has given him a skillset and tools to pass on to his team members, who are now in charge of key parts of the department.

His experience was also vital in determining how to find and eliminate inefficiencies at YES, and he advises other organizations looking to do something similar to rely on the intuition of people with expertise and to use technology wisely. 

Discover more about YES on Facebook, LinkedIn, X/Twitter, and YouTube.