Srinivas Padma: Personal Musings on Life, Growth, and Connections

KUALA LUMPUR: Agencies that supply foreign maids in Malaysia on Wednesday welcomed a government plan to allow recruitment from India, Nepal, Laos and Vietnam to fill a shortage caused by low wages and reports of abuse. "We were waiting" for this decision, said Raja Zulkepley Dahalan, president of the Malaysian Association of Foreign Housemaids Agencies . "Of course we support this." He said Malaysia would need to hire at least 1,000 maids every month to alleviate the shortage. "We have a problem now, 94.8 per cent of the maids are from Indonesia. We cannot depend so much on one source," he said. He said fewer Indonesian maids are applying to work in Malaysia because salaries here are lower than in other countries, and also because many are scared away by media reports that maids are physically abused by Malaysian employers. Reports have highlighted several abuse cases in past months. In the most publicized case, a maid escaped her...

Once you have sent your resume to an organization, be warned –– any telephone ring could find you answering questions from your employer-to-be. These days due to time crunches, most organizations have instituted a new recruitment practice that of the telephonic interview. The telephonic interview is now utilized by companies as a preliminary assessment to sift through the large number of applicants. And since it's still quite a novel phenomenon, apprehensions and the occasional falter is only natural. So how do you ace that dreaded telephonic interview? Since the telephonic interview is mainly preliminary in nature, you can expect not to be asked any questions of a technical nature - that will in all probability be saved for the main interview. Right now, the focus is on gauging your communication skills. So do your homework. There are always going to be questions that will be unexpected. You need to be prepared for those. Keep some important documents and a pen ...