Tuesday, August 4, 2009

What I would avoid as a job seeker

For more than a year, financial consultancy firms have been flooding my inbox with "requests to view your full resume". You must be thinking, wow, this guy is a high-flier and I better start subscribing to his blog! The underachiever in me cant be further away from the truth.

Everyday when I check my email, I get quite irritated with fake job offers on top of lottery/nigerian scams and useless newsletters from websites of which the content are of little interest to me.

Not that they have been particularly intruding on my privacy, but I think that these can be considered as a type of spam. Which is why after taking a really long thought, I decided to expose these financial companies' gimmicks.

1. Many of the insurance companies and MLM companies advertise under "The Advertiser", which I assume is a default name for those who do not want to list their company name on jobscentral/jobsdb. Therefore, I do not bother even clicking on the job description links.

2. Then there are those job listings which boast that you can become a management trainee. While some of these are true positions for banks to recruit fresh graduates, some of them are posted by financial firms/MLMs in disguise. Unless your CV/Resume is really impressive (such as hailing from one of the Ivies) and you are really sure of the source (employer), do yourself a favour by ignoring these posts.

3. Look at the job description carefully, whether if it fits the bill if they are hiring for a certain position. If it either sounds too simple, too common yet they state that you can POSSIBLY earn more than $2,500 (and some even say up to $4,000 per month! Which we all know that no Singaporean employers are willing to pay that much when they can hire Foreign Labour for much less.

Foreign Talents, are a different matter altogether - Singaporean employers seem to be infatuated with these FTs and are willing to shell out top dollars just to attract them. As they say - Ang Mors ideas are always very good (Excerpt from I Not Stupid). Well, God knows.

4. Job titles are worthless if they do not command the industry standard's remuneration. However, I would not be too over-zealous at bashing this. Well give and take a little, since Singaporean employers are more than well-known for their thriftiness, they would certainly want more bangs for bucks. So you are expected to be a jack of all trades and master in 1. Or in the local context (ai pi ai qi ai dua liap ni).

5. Look for jobs with a decent basic pay. In these pretty tough times, most Singaporean employers go all out to undercut salaries, reduce benefits and all forms of compensation. If the job is fully commission based, you better pray hard that the good is like an FMCG (fast moving consumer goods), or that you can take them home for dinner. (This is another reason why I avoid insurance and MLM companies because the agents are not usually paid a basic and therefore they are only concerned with selling their products and in the process, knowingly or unknowingly hoodwink consumers into buying risky/unnecessary/useless products) of which the agents probably have no idea too. Well there would of course be arguments that insurance agents have to take CMFAS exams. But as someone who has taken countless exams I can safely say that most people forget whatever they have studied or mugged over just to get past the exams. Unless the person is really responsible, trustworthy and so enthusiastic about his products..... which is rarely the case.

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