Local businesses struggle to retain young hires

MANY Bruneian entrepreneurs are happy to take on local youths as employees, but find it hard to retain them, instead resorting to hire foreigners.

Hjh Zaidah Hj Mohd Daud and Mohamad Radwan Esbinati, Sugar and Spice Arabic Food proprietors said their experience with hiring local staff has been nothing short of difficult.

"I do try to employ locals. When I asked the Labour department to send unemployed locals for interviews, they told us 20 people would come. But only nine turned up for the interviews. They had to wait for a while and three left," said Hjh Zaidah.

The proprietor said she finally hired one who had the experience, but she left without notice after two days.

"Even after that experience, we kept trying to employ locals, but they stay for a maximum of one month," she said.

Mohamad Radwan said, "We've got no choice but to employ foreigners. Locals are not reliable, they stop without notice."

The restaurant owners found that many of the applicants expect high salaries and regular office hours.

Alister Dousip, 22, said, "You have to understand, restaurants don't operate normal hours. You have to start somewhere, willing to work your way up."

Locals, he said, need to "tough it up a bit".

The manager of a prawn cracker and pita bread factory also highlighted that many unemployed locals do not want to work in factories.

Mazrina Yussof, manager of Zainab Utama Enterprise said, "There are problems with locals working in a factory. They're not too keen on working these jobs because it's hot and dirty," she said.

According to Eileen Nayagam, a business administrator, many unemployed locals expect too much for themselves when they try to find jobs.

"A lot of them expect $2,000 as starting pay, but they don't have any experience, whereas foreigners are happy to get less and work their way to get an increment," she pointed out.

Working in the human resource sector, Nayagam said that many of the applicants she has spoken to "expect a high basic salary even though they have low qualifications".

"A lot of them come in and ask for an office job, but when I ask about their qualifications, some of them said they have Form 3 results. They don't want to work in the hot sun or do dirty jobs. So working in the office is maybe a status thing," she said.

However, Hartini Mahmud, 23, believes there are more locals taking on manual labour because they cannot afford to be choosy. "They're not as picky as before because there are less jobs now. Now, I can see more locals working manual labour especially if they don't have high qualifications compared to five years back," she said.

The Brunei Times