How We Source Listings

Every listing on SetaJobs starts life as a real advert published somewhere else — a government circular, a SETA's own recruitment page, or an employer's post on a vacancy portal. We do not accept listings by word of mouth and we do not write vacancies of our own. This page explains where our listings come from, what happens to an advert between being found and appearing here, and what we can — and cannot — vouch for. It is the page behind the "How we source listings" link you will see on every listing, next to the key facts.

Where listings come from

Our scraper crawls a small, fixed set of sources on a regular schedule. Three are official — the body issuing the vacancy publishes the advert itself:

• DPSA Public Service Vacancy Circular (dpsa.gov.za) — the circular in which national and provincial government departments advertise their posts
• merSETA recruitment page (merseta.org.za) — vacancies at the manufacturing, engineering and related services SETA
• MICT SETA vacancies page (mict.org.za) — vacancies at the media, ICT and related sectors SETA

Three more are vacancy portals we monitor — Graduates24, SAGraduates and GovPage — which carry learnerships, internships, graduate programmes and government or parastatal vacancies that official sites alone would miss. The trade-off with a portal is an extra step between you and the employer, so for portal-sourced listings we resolve the employer's own application channel — their careers portal, application form or email address — and link you to that wherever the portal exposes it, rather than to the portal's page.

We also deliberately leave sources out. Sites that block automated access, or that never expose the employer's real application link, are not crawled: a listing you cannot actually act on is not worth republishing. Each listing page names its own source in the small provenance strip beside the facts panel, along with the date our scraper last confirmed the advert there.

From raw advert to published page

Between being scraped and being published, every advert goes through four steps:

1. De-duplication. Each advert gets a fingerprint built from the employer, the role and the closing date. The same post found on two sources — or on the same source two days running — becomes one page that is updated in place, not two competing copies.
2. Normalisation. Province, city, sector, SETA, NQF level, minimum education, stipend and closing date are extracted into structured fields. That is what makes filtering, the province and SETA hubs, and the stipend comparisons work.
3. Rewriting. The description you read is an AI-assisted rewrite of the original advert, and we are open about that. Official circulars are dense and hard to read on a phone; the rewrite exists for readability, not embellishment. It works under strict rules: every fact must come from the source advert, nothing may be invented — no stipends, deadlines, requirements or locations the advert did not state — and anything the advert does not say is left out rather than guessed at.
4. Quality gate and review. Before a listing can publish, an automated check confirms it has real substance — at least 200 words of genuine content and a concrete requirements section — and none of the tells of a failed rewrite. A listing that fails stays an unpublished draft until our editor rewrites it against the source or discards it. The editor also audits and corrects published listings; our fact-checking policy covers how corrections work.

Staying fresh: last seen, closed, removed

The scraper does not visit a source once and move on. Each time it re-encounters a listing it stamps it as seen — that is the "last confirmed" date in the provenance strip — and refreshes the details most likely to change: the deadline, the stipend and the apply links.

• The moment a closing date passes, the listing is marked closed. Apply buttons are removed, a clear closed notice appears, and the listing drops out of our browse pages, feeds and sitemap.
• A listing our scraper has not seen at its source for three weeks is closed too — a posting that vanishes from its source has usually been filled or withdrawn.
• Closed pages stay online rather than turning into dead links, because a listing shared in a WhatsApp group last month should still open. But they say plainly that applications will no longer be considered, and point to similar live opportunities instead.

What we verify — and what we cannot

We can vouch for three things: that the advert existed at the named source when we crawled it, that the facts on our page are the advert's facts, and that the apply link points to the destination named in the provenance strip. We cannot see the employer's side: posts are sometimes filled early, extended, reissued or withdrawn without the source being updated, and no listing here is a promise that anyone will be shortlisted. If our page and the official advert ever disagree, the official advert wins — check it before spending money on certified copies or transport.

One rule has no exceptions: applying is free. SetaJobs never charges you to view or apply for anything, and a legitimate learnership, internship or government vacancy does not carry an application fee either. Anyone demanding payment to "process" or "secure" an application you found here is running a scam — stop, keep your money, and report it to us.

Report a bad listing

If a listing looks wrong — a dead apply link, a passed deadline still showing as open, details that do not match the official advert, or anything that smells like a scam — tell us through the contact page with the listing's URL and what you found. Corrections and fraud reports reach the same monitored inbox; we aim to respond within 48 business hours, and verified fraudulent content is removed within 24 hours. The reader who reports a broken listing is doing exactly what this page exists to make possible.