Welcome to The People Insider — a weekly brief for anyone who employs people in South Africa.

Every Wednesday: one headline, one tool, one leadership story, one stat and one question. Under five minutes. No fluff. Let's get into it.

Note: A few weeks ago, we announced Jem as our premium sponsor, but never really wrote anything about them. This week, though, Jem did something that changes the cost of managing a 200+ workforce in South Africa, and you would be annoyed with us if we didn’t show you how it works…

Every SA employer knows that traditional HR platforms charge an implementation fee plus a set monthly fee per employee. The cost is sometimes prohibitive (your SAP, Oracle and Workday are really best suited if you have 500+ employees), and it only really works for office-based staff — the people working across sites, shifts and provinces on the frontline (you know, those who need it most) are often left behind by HR tools.

So employers do what employers do: they improvise.

Nine systems, none of them talking

Jem co-founder and CEO Simon Ellis put the state of play plainly when the company launched its new platform this month:

And it shows up globally: deskless workers are around 80% of the world's labour force, and by Jem's reckoning only about 1% of global HR software spend goes anywhere near them.

The bit that changes the maths

This week, Jem launched a new all-in-one workforce management system on WhatsApp that does everything from payslips and onboarding to leave and time and attendance management (and so much more) at no cost to the employer. They are giving employers one place to connect, manage and reward deskless employees.

We think it’s genius: Jem's model inverts where the money comes from. Rather than charging the employer per head for using the software, the platform comes with valuable embedded financial services like access to earned wages, data, airtime, credit, phone deals at 10x cheaper rates than other FSPs and banks — all things frontline users want and normally source elsewhere (at much higher rates).

The employees are free to use or not use those services. If they do, Jem takes a small fee on that. That is how the platform monetises, and the result is no platform fees for you, the employer.

The receipts

Top investors believe this type of model is the future of fintech in Africa, and Jem is just one of the first-movers; that’s why you will have seen they also announced they closed a R136 million Series A ($8.4m) this week led by global fintech investor Quona Capital, with University Tech Fund, E4E and angels including former Old Mutual CEO Iain Williamson.

The new platform is 100% real, already running across 200 SA companies and 250,000 workers, including Servest, Bidvest, McDonald's, KFC and Seattle Coffee Company. It includes almost every feature you can imagine: From time and attendance running on WhatsApp with geo-fencing, so a guard on a site in Boksburg can clock in without a biometric reader, a card or another app, to an AI agent called Lutho that answers questions against your own workforce data and drafts the action for a human to approve.

There’s even MCP access, so you can approve leave from whatever AI tool your team already uses.

It’s currently built for companies with teams of 200+, with rumours already circulating of a potential upcoming mini version for smaller teams.

Remote hiring solved the talent shortage on paper. Your candidate pool went from your city to the planet. Job van der Voort, who co-founded the Remote platform after spending five years scaling GitLab across dozens of countries, has hired about as widely as anyone alive, and his advice to founders is less romantic than the brochure.

Location, he argues, matters far less early on than people think. What does matter is the clock.

He is blunter still about commercial roles: if you start selling to American companies, you need someone who can work American hours. And it goes for both hiring remote workers and expanding your client base. You need to be sure you have team members and clients in the same time zone to avoid time delays and decisions sitting and waiting overnight.

The question worth sitting with: When you’re hunting or servicing overseas clients and dipping into remote work pools, did you price in time zones alongside salaries?

345,000

is how many more South Africans were counted as unemployed in the second quarter of 2026, pushing the official rate to 33.6% from 32.7%. Actual employment only fell by just 16,000, though. What really happened is the labour force grew by 329,000 in a single quarter.

Also note that jobs are moving rather than simply vanishing: Trade added 70,000 and construction 39,000, while community and social services shed 57,000 and mining 26,000. For an employer, that is a hiring pool getting rapidly bigger and visibly reshuffling, with youth unemployment now at 47.4%.

Source: Statistics South Africa, Quarterly Labour Force Survey Q2 2026 (11 August 2026)

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