Heh. Clearly techie common sense is differenct from common common sense.

This seems compeltely unintended, the makers of the site just assumed everyone would enter through the main Macdonalds Singapore site, and then it accidentally turned up high in Google.

Many employers in the United States probably would ask marital status on applications, if they were allowed to do so.

Re JL’s note:
If you hit the BACK button from the linked page, it’s clear that you navigate to this site from a Singapore McDonald’s page.

It’s an interesting question to know how many people hit the Back button on a page rather than in their browsers. It’s not clear, however, how one might have gotten to the page originally. For example, this site is the third result if you do a search on Google (from the US) for the following:
mcdonalds online application

It could just be a boiler-plate personal details form, of course, with the recruiters only looking at some subset of the information collected.

To follow on from Witt’s point in comment 8, I have got the distinct impression from my partner, an IT professional, using online job search websites that most, if not all, of the jobs advertised are just fishing exercises to get people to post their CV, and a way to match people to the kind of jobs in which they are interested.

I have no hard evidence for this, but anecdotally, the posting of the CV is really a way of attracting the interest of the appropriate agent/headhunter.

I can’t say that they’re necessarily adhering to a racial quota though. ‘S true for allocating Housing Board flats, but the serving staff in most fast food centres are predominantly Malay. Which is interesting, considering that Malays are an ethnic minority over here.

Macca’s also doesn’t serve pork products here, period (I have never tasted the fabled McRib), so it’s not a question of food handling in their case at least .

In my experience government forms like to ask for race and religion (I’ve got a form sitting right next to my laptop here that does so): typically in the CMIO structure sarah1rene mentions. Religion is also treated the same way; it’s just that McDonald’s web designer forgot to include the Other box.

The form does directly ask about ethnicity under the ‘Race’ pulldown menu.

@sarah1rene

I agree with you that it’s likely to be a ‘lumping together’ issue. There’s some good scholarship on the CMIO issue by Dr A.E. Lai (http://www.ari.nus.edu.sg/people_details.asp?peopleid=372)

If you look at the 2000 Census figures (via singstat.gov.sg), the largest religious categories in descending order are Buddhism accounted for 42.5% of the population, followed by Islam (14.9%), No Religion (14.8%), Christianity (14.6%), Taoism (8.5%) and Hinduism (4%). It’s probable that Taoists were lumped together with Buddhists (both groups being largely ethnic Chinese) but a sizeable number of Singaporean Buddhists, like Hindus, do not eat or (lesser) handle beef. MacDonald’s had a PR issue a few years ago when it was reported that its french fries were fried in oil containing a beef additive.

@ Peter

Religion is also a compliance issue as MacDonald’s is certified Halal by the Maljis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS) and a certain number of Muslim food handlers per outlet may be a requirement.

I agree it makes a lot more sense to just ask the question. But I suppose there are limits to the customization of the form.