Why Employment Pass applications get rejected
The company qualifies. The candidate meets the benchmark. It still comes back rejected. Three reasons that have nothing to do with salary, and why appealing them rarely works.
Most Employment Pass rejections have nothing to do with salary.
The company qualifies on paper. The candidate meets the benchmark. The notification still comes back rejected.
Three things account for most of it, and none of them is a clerical error.
The job was never really advertised
Under the Fair Consideration Framework, the advert has to be real. The posting on MyCareersFuture must describe the actual role, list genuine requirements, and run for the full period before you apply.
A placeholder written to start a clock reads exactly like one. Assessors see a great many job adverts, and they can tell the difference between a role being filled and a box being ticked.
The title does not match the work
“Strategy Manager” or “Regional Director” attached to a scope that reads like administrative coordination is a flag on its own.
MOM assesses the substance of the daily duties against standard occupational classifications. It does not assess the title. An inflated one does not lift the application, it draws attention to it.
The company’s workforce profile looks wrong for the sector
An application is never read in isolation. MOM looks at the hiring company as a whole: the balance of local to foreign professionals, the spread of nationalities across teams, and how the company has applied fair consideration generally.
If the composition looks skewed for the industry, a perfectly good candidate carries the cost of it.
Why appeals rarely work
All three are structural. They are conditions that existed before the application was submitted, and an appeal letter cannot change conditions retrospectively.
That is the part companies find hardest. The instinct after a rejection is to argue the case harder. But the case was decided by the advert, the job description and the company profile, and by then all three are already on file.
What to do about it
Fix it before you submit, not after.
Before the next application, look at three things. Does the job advert describe the role that actually exists? Does the job title match what the person will do all day? Does your workforce profile look ordinary for your industry?
If any of the three would be hard to defend to someone reading it cold, that is the one to deal with first.
Enston HR handles payroll and work passes for small companies in Singapore. We’ll be writing about what we see.