Most job adverts in South Africa are written in two registers at once. One part tells you what the job involves. The other part is a filter list, and it is the section that decides whether a recruiter ever reads your CV. Learning which line is which takes about ten minutes per advert and changes where you spend your effort.
Separate the description from the filter
Scroll to the requirements block before you do anything else. That block is usually titled “Minimum requirements”, “Requirements”, “Essential criteria” or “Qualifications and experience”. Everything above it, under “About the role” or “Duties”, is description: useful for tailoring your CV, but not what gets screened against.
Write the requirement lines out on a separate sheet as you read them. Reading the list in your head is how people remember the four they match, glide past the two they do not, and then send fifty applications without understanding why nothing comes back.
“Minimum” and “preferred” are not the same test
Where an advert splits into “essential” and “desired”, or “minimum” and “added advantage”, treat them as two different gates. Essential lines are usually pass/fail: a screening recruiter or an applicant tracking system will often drop candidates who miss them. Desired lines are scored, not failed — matching them makes you a stronger candidate but does not disqualify the person without them.
Plenty of well-written adverts do not make this split. When the list is one undifferentiated block, look at the wording. Lines with “must”, “required”, “necessary” or “will not be considered without” behave like filters. Lines with “experience in”, “familiarity with”, “an understanding of”, “ability to learn” or “advantageous” behave like scoring. When you cannot tell, ask the employer rather than guessing — a short enquiry to the contact listed on the advert is legitimate and many recruiters will answer plainly.
Lines that usually mean something narrower than they look
“Own transport” or “valid driver’s licence”. On some roles this is genuine — a sales rep covering a territory, an installer moving between sites. On others it is copied from a template for a job that is in one building. If the advert describes a fixed location, a shift in a call centre or a desk job, this line is worth questioning, because for many applicants a car is the single biggest cost of taking a job.
“Two to three years’ experience.” Employers count this differently than applicants expect. What they are usually testing is whether you have done the specific tasks in the duties list before, at roughly the pace they need. Contract work, an internship, a learnership placement, a casual seasonal job, freelance work for a family business, or running a school society’s budget can all be relevant experience if you can describe the task and the result. What does not count is holding a title with no duties behind it.
“Degree in X or equivalent experience.” The word doing the work here is “or”. A qualification that line presents as one option is not the only door. This is one of the most common places where someone without a degree self-excludes from a job they could have got.
“Grade 12 or an equivalent NQF Level 4 qualification.” If you came through the Nated or TVET route rather than a school matric certificate, do not assume you are out. What you need is confirmation of where your certificate sits, and the institution that issued it can tell you. If an advert names a specific level you are unsure about, say what you hold in your application and let them judge it.
“Computer literate” or “good MS Office skills”. In practice this means you can work in spreadsheets, write a document, and learn the employer’s own system without hand-holding. It is one of the easier requirements to genuinely close, and free to build.
“Immediate availability.” Read this as a hiring-urgency signal: the employer needs the vacancy filled and has little patience for a long notice period. If you are serving notice somewhere, say so in your first line rather than letting them discover it in an interview.
Red flags dressed up as requirements
Some requirement blocks are not filtering for skill. Watch for adverts that ask for your ID number, banking details or a copy of your ID document at the application stage; that is normally work done after an offer, not before it. Watch for “earn R30 000 in your first month”, for a pay range that is far above the market for the duties described, for a job with no physical address or no company you can find anywhere outside the advert itself, and for anything where the “interview” is an information session about a business opportunity. If the money is promised and the work is unexplained, it is not a job advert.
What to do in the next ten minutes
For each advert you plan to answer: list the essential lines, mark each one matched, partial or missing. If a must-have line is genuinely missing, drop the application and spend that time on a role you match. If you match, rewrite your CV’s skills and experience section so it uses the advert’s own words for the things you have actually done — a screen looking for “quotation processing” will not find it under “handled customer enquiries”. Then check you can evidence every claim you have made, because that is what an interview tests.