Curious

This sounds like a job for John and Belle! (The explaining, not the working at McDonald’s.) But, the ‘sg’ in the url is some indication it’s in Singapore, no? (Putting “McDonald’s Job application” in google doesn’t turn up this page in the first twenty results, and I didn’t see it in the 1st 20 even when I added “Singapore”, though this post did come up.) I’d guess they just give out the address to people in Singapore who ask for it and that very few other people find it.

Eszter, I realize this is probably far beyond the scope of your research, but one of the issues I’m most curious about with regard to online job applications is how HR professionals develop work-arounds for them. There is so much social pressure on job applicants to USE online applications (particularly for low-wage jobs, where often even at job fairs the only thing the recruiter will say to you is “Here’s our kiosk, do the app.”), that it seems to me to be valuable to document the degree to which this widely hailed “even playing field” can be less than even.

For example, I’ve had a fair bit of experience with human resources folks at local affiliates of national corporations developing fairly low-tech ways to circumvent or shape the web-based application software they’re forced by HQ to use.

Often this seems to be just a tech issue — that is, after a week or so of the software swallowing all of the apps and the headquarters being unable to help the local office extract them, the HR person gets fed up and says “Oh, just fax it to me!” — thus privileging anyone who was smart and persistent and connected enough to track down his/her phone number in the first place.

But other times it’s very clearly a work-around to sift out pre-screened candidates — that is, HR is getting flooded with 1,000 or more applications for a hotel housekeeping position, and rather than look at each one, they fall back on their personal network of contacts from employment agencies or elsewhere, who are calling them on the phone to say “I just submitted so-and-so’s application through your website.”

But again, I realize this may be beyond the scope of issues you are able to explore.

Do you suppose “Other” is assumed to be subsumed under “Free Thinker”?

Oh, well, in that case, a few other issues I’ve seen crop up:

1. Online applications with no way for jobseekers to indicate education or diplomas obtained in a foreign country (i.e., dropdown menus with US-only choices). This hurts internationally educated applicants because the software may assume they are lying if they mark “HS diploma” on one page, and then are unable to select a US state on the following page. Many of these online apps have tricky questions, where they ask several times in different ways if you graduated from hs, if you have a GED, etc.

2. Applications that cannot be saved mid-point, thus penalizing applicants who have to use public internet terminals with strict time limits. Many libraries have a 30-minute limit and many applications are too complex to complete easily in that time period.

3. Job postings that may be unreal — e.g., openings that are eternally posted on the company’s website with no “freshness date,” making it difficult for the applicant to determine whether the job truly exists.

That was my thought too, but then they should straightforwardly ask about ethnicity, you’d think.

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.

My first thought was that McDonald’s is trying to identify applicants who cannot handle certain food items, e.g. Hindus = no beef, but why not simply ask that question?

The options are standard for the MoM (Ministry of Manpower). I have to pick one from that menu every time I fill in my work pass papers. I don’t know exactly what it means, but I’m guessing McDonalds has to give this info to the Ministry. The oddly old-fashioned language (freethinker) probably reflects the fact that, somehow, this all dates back a long time. I wouldn’t be surprised (though I have no special information about it) if it turned out the language is pre-independence (1965). It would probably be considered a moderately big deal to officially change the relationship between work and religion, by law. So it probably just sits there. But I suspect there wouldn’t be any practical consequences to leaving it blank if you were, say, Jewish. I’m really not sure. (Do not take me as an authority on Singaporean employment law.)

Hi! I was linked to this entry by a friend. I second jholbo’s idea that it’s part of a census deal.

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 .

3. Job postings that may be unreal—e.g., openings that are eternally posted on the company’s website with no “freshness date,” making it difficult for the applicant to determine whether the job truly exists.

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.

It seems that other Singapore web forms give Other, Sikh, Taoist and/or Catholic as options

No, they’re just wrong to call their button “back”. Common-sense definition of “back” is history.go(-1) in javascript; and what they mean is something like navigating “up” in the website’s structure. That’s different from “back”.

Yes, as John says, it seems that the ministry of manpower requires this. There are racial quotas of a sort in Singapore, with regard to public housing; within a certain estate or group of estates the ratios of the varying races are supposed to mirror that of the country as a whole. This is religion rather than race, though. There are issues about food handling, I suppose, but all the big fast food places are halal–they just don’t serve any pork at all. I agree with John that this is probably a holdover from an earlier time. The British had explicit policies along these lines (though, again, I tend to think of them as race rather than religion based).