Meet the Absa Small Business Friday featured Small Business of the week – Job Crystal.
Job crystal is working towards making a dent in unemployment in South Africa. They aim to help SMEs hire better, faster, and cheaper so they can grow. This proudly South African business is also making waves worldwide as well as they have developed and offer recruitment technology that is revolutionary in finding talent faster than you can read this line.
Sasha Knott’s journey to entrepreneurship has been an interesting and challenging one. She started as a cashier, then worked her way up to waitress, and then became a programmer but decided she preferred people over computers and stepped into a leadership role. She continued to climb the corporate ladder and learnt a great deal from working with start-ups. This knowledge proved highly beneficial when she started Job Crystal.
Her uniqueness as an entrepreneur comes from being excellent at customer service, having a background in IT, and working towards completing a doctorate in strategic management. This combination makes her an entrepreneur who focuses both on customers and brings disruption to their space with IT.
Challenges as an entrepreneur are constant but the one that sticks out for Sasha is keeping Job Crystal afloat and thriving during the COVID-19 pandemic. They stuck to what worked, kept doing the little things each day, and kept communication open. They managed to get through the two years by paying each supplier every employee on time.
Another challenge they face is building their own team on a continuous basis. As recruitment specialists, they need to succeed in their profession internally as well as externally. By turning each success or failure into a learning opportunity, the owners, their team and their recruitment for clients keeps growing stronger. The way they conquered their challenges was by:
- Hiring people that match their values first then looking at their experience.
- Communicating openly with their team weekly which they picked up during COVID-19 times.
- Ensuring they screen a candidate before interviewing, interview them, request the candidate to complete an assessment, and finally always follow through with background checks.
- Working out that having the right people on the bus makes it easier to determine which seat is the right one for them.
While they as a business may be profitable, they believe in paying it forward by supporting two charities on each invoice, ensuring the next generation gets out of poverty.
In the future, Job Crystal would like to continue to help more South-African based businesses to hire better and faster – which means together we can make a dent in unemployment in South Africa.
Sasha Knott from Job Crystal was also crowned the National Woman in Business for 2022 at the South African Small Business Awards.