A Singapore-based banker was surprised to be asked highly personal questions when he applied for a job at the U.K. lender. Standard Chartered’s reasoning is unconventional.
The London-based bank’s procedure for job applicants is pretty standard: an employment portal with listings for hundreds of job vacancies. Standard Chartered, which employs roughly 75,000 people overall, has a strong presence in Asia – and dozens of job openings in Singapore.
This led by a reader to apply for a job in strategic partnerships for digital ventures, the applicant said. The person was surprised to be asked a series of intensely personal questions as part of the online application.
These included their ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation.
Like most developed nations, Singapore bans questions on personal circumstances because it can give rise to discrimination. A spokeswoman for Standard Chartered said the bank complies with international standards of fairness and equal opportunity in its hiring.
The questions, she noted, are designed to foster corporate diversity and to foster an integrative workplace. Hiring managers are not informed on how applicants responded to them, the spokeswoman said. The responses are only used to underpin Standard Chartered’s diversity efforts with data, she said.