When I thought this company was only gonna be offering me $500/month, I applied to other companies in the papers for jobs, and I managed to get two interviews. So after 3 weeks in KL, I got the same number of interviews that I managed to get in 9 months in Perth!
The thing that's different here is how much more 'discriminatory' the companies are here! Job ads in the papers openly proclaim that the job is for 'Chinese' only or 'Bumiputra' ('Bumiputra' is the term used to describe Malaysians who are of Malay, indigenous, Portugese, or Dutch descent). It doesn't seem right that rather than asking for someone with Chinese language skills, the simply ask for Chinese applicants. I also had a bit of trouble because the companies that interviewed me assumed I could speak Chinese because it would be helpful for the job. Many ads also stipulate requirements for age and sex, expecially for sales positions.
For resumes and application forms here in KL, it is often compulsory to put down details such as race, religion, marital status, and birthdate; the kind of things I got told not to put down in my resume in Perth. At the interviews, the application forms also asked me to list down my university and high school achievements and activities. The thing is I did a heck of a lot of stuff in high school, so I just told the guys that there was too many things to write down and I couldn't remember them all. I don't know about Australia, but here in Malaysia, the HR department also asks alot of information. My cousin, Bryan, just got a job with a marketing form, and some of the questions he had to answer included all names of his parents, official titles if they had any, their jobs and their date of birth. It seems absurd to me that they would want so much detail about you're family when it's you they're paying to do the job. |