Free Uber rides offered for job seekers in South African cities

Uber logo.

• Joburg, Cape Town, Durban, East London and Port Elizabeth job seekers can now receive free Uber rides when travelling to interviews. 
• Uber partnered with jobs platform Trusted Interns to provide R10,000 worth of free rides to job seekers. 
• Job seekers can apply for a voucher through creating a profile on the Trusted Interns’ website, and the trips are limited to uberGO and UberX.
• For more stories go to the Business Insider South Africa homepage. 

Job seekers in Joburg, Cape Town, Durban, East London and Port Elizabeth can now receive free Uber rides when travelling to an interview. 

The #GiveTheYouthAchance campaign, a collaboration between Trusted Interns, which connects first-time employees to job opportunities, and Uber will see R10,000 worth of Uber rides gifted to job seekers.

Uber will also match a further R10,000 to whatever money is raised by the public through a backabuddy.co.za campaign.

Cape Town-based Trusted Interns founder Jaryd Raizon said their engagement with over 40,000 South African job seekers identified travelling as a major hurdle to arriving for interviews. 

“We were arranging interviews with employers but our graduates were not showing up. We knew our community was committed and so something had to be wrong,” Raizon said. 

The free Uber ride initiative started from there. 

Job seekers can apply for a voucher through creating a profile on the Trusted Interns’ website, and the trips are limited to uberGO and UberX.

The #GiveTheYouthAchance campaign is a three-part campaign to inspire first time employees to apply for jobs, thereafter provide access to jobs and then create job opportunities by encouraging companies to hire at least one first time job seeker.

Uber said it believes reducing the barrier travel presents  to job opportunities is a small but simple step in the right direction

“This partnership will not only have a positive impact on the youth, but also on those employers looking for talent, who now have access to undiscovered candidates, who previously may not have even gotten into the interview process," Uber Sub-Saharan Africa general manager Alon Lits said.