A gorgeous trail of islands in the heart of the Pacific, Singapore has also been named the world’s easiest place to do business and the world’s top ‘meetings city’. Naturally, with all these meetings and business transactions taking place, it also has a huge range of business-class hotels – making hospitality jobs in Singapore one of the most popular immigration work opportunities in Asia.
Because the country has such a small permanent, ‘native’ population – just five million people – it has always been widely accepted that large numbers of hotel jobs in Singapore will be taken by people from abroad. This has many advantages for the Asian job seeker.
To begin with, migrant employees are so common that hotels and other tourism employers are very used to the need to provide visas for their employees. In many countries – for instance, within the EU or US – employers will refuse to apply for visas on behalf of anyone other than the most high level employees, and are quite likely to discard applications immediately if they are from people who will need visas to work.
In addition, Singapore can be a very welcoming place for migrant workers, partly because of its diversity. People filling hotel jobs in Hong Kong, or other less diverse areas, sometimes feel that they ‘stick out’ or that it is hard to assimilate in their new countries, when almost everyone else is, for instance, culturally Chinese. In Singapore, although people with Chinese ethnicity are a majority, there are large Malay, Indian and Eurasian minorities. In addition, almost everybody speaks English, meaning that English speakers working in hotel jobs in Singapore are unlikely to have to learn more than a few words of another language.
All this means that hospitality jobs in Singapore are much in demand and the market can be extremely competitive. If you’re a non-Singaporean looking for work in Singapore – indeed, if you’re looking for hotel jobs in Hong Kong or any other competitive Asian service market – it’s crucial to work with larger recruiters to make sure that you’re put forward for the jobs that are right for you.
Many hotel chains are international, and very few recruit directly on the ground. The more reputable a chain is, the more likely it is to only use recruiters when trying to fill hospitality jobs in Singapore. And the best hotel jobs in Singapore are generally offered by larger chains, who offer more opportunity for promotion, development and training, as well as better management. That’s why large recruiters should be your first step, not your last, when looking for work in this beautiful country.