Recently I have been engaging with recruiters/ recruiting agencies to fill up some technology positions but I keep getting caught off-guard when recruiters ask me a question I did not expect to hear.
I passed them the Job Description (JD) which also includes the requirements or skills needed for the job.
Then recruiters asked racist questions. 😖
I feel like why do you (recruiter) ask these questions and dig up a hole for yourselves? Initially the company or employer did not think of such thing, they were looking at the skills and qualification. Why did you ask such questions and let company think this is a norm, an accepted practice and then limiting your candidate pool and then blaming the company or the market blaming the company for being racist?
I get confused and think Did anything in my conversation or Job Description hinted I would want a certain race? I think the only thing I'm expecting is candidate should be a Malaysian but Did I state any race preference? or a language preference? for this technical job...
For those still clueless, the questions were 1. Does your company accept non-Chinese? or 2. Does your company have any specific "language" requirement, for example say Mandarin?(Note that they are not referring to coding language nor are they really asking this question but hinting whether we are only accepting a certain race)
Then I get annoyed and I ask them :Did I state any race preference?
I dealt with a few recruiting agencies and each recruiter was of different race, there was Malay, Chinese and Indian recruiters and all of them from different recruiting agencies asked the same thing. So it is a recruiting agency culture? Either way, I believe this is bad practice unless of cause the position is a language based task then it is more logical to ask these kind of questions but why would you ask these ? Dear Recruiters please focus on the skills and experience and budget!
