The challenge of finding employment straight out of high school can be daunting. With little real-world job experience, young people can be at a significant disadvantage in getting hired.

To help solve this problem for underprivileged youth in South Africa, the non-profit Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator has built a model based on what it calls “proxies for competence,” identifying the best foot forward for job applicants based on multiple data points. And the group is using Google Cloud to make the employment dream a reality.

“We’re very focused on understanding how to use data to provision a network for our young people to be able to describe themselves,” said Navid Erfani-Ghadimi (pictured, right), executive enterprise architect at Harambee. “We’re taking on a global and Africa-wide strategy which, without cloud, we really wouldn’t be able to do.”

Erfani-Ghadimi spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Google Cloud Next event in San Francisco. He was joined by Carol Carpenter (pictured, left), vice president of product marketing at Google Cloud, and they discussed how a Google LLC-led initiative is assisting non-profits and the results Harambee is already seeing from its data collection work. (* Disclosure below.)

Google provides support and training

The Harambee work is supported by Google through a new program for non-profits called Data Solutions for Change. The program provides cloud credits, training and support for groups to use data analytics in solving global problems.

“Google Cloud is about making the cloud available for everyone,” Carpenter said. “We really believe there are amazing problems we can solve together.”

To solve the problem of giving young people the best opportunity to land a job, Harambee relies on a combination of biographic information and social skill attributes, along with the energy communicated by candidates through phone interviews. All of this data is analyzed using Google tools such as BigQuery and Cloud SQL.

“We try and measure those things and we have as many contact points as we can get,” Erfani-Ghadimi explained. “It’s lot of big data and we’re trying to consume it as best we can.”

Key for participants in the Harambee program is being able to create a complete picture of who they are and present that in a digital package which can easily be reviewed by a potential employer. When a candidate brings their profile stored on a compact disc, results are better.

“That improves their chances of finding a job by up to 30 percent,” Erfani-Ghadimi said. “That’s significant.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Google Cloud Next event. (* Disclosure: Google Cloud sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Google Cloud nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE