I refer to the letter Close encounter with MMU graduates by Kecewa. The writer shouldn't blame MMU graduates for the poor turn out at his interviews or the company's employment offer being ignored by the graduates.

Being a former human resources director for a huge multinational corporation here in Malaysia, I wish to point out some of the process errors in Kecewa's recruitment and selection.

Why must Kecewa have so many rounds of interviews? The company should come prepared with all the necessary assessment tools to handle the profiling and job fitting of the potential candidates. As for the poor response after short-listing ie, 10 out of 25, this is actually not too bad as Kecewa should realise that his company is not the only one looking for candidates.

Other companies may be also looking at the same batch of graduates. In fact, it is the graduates who have the final choice actually.

Our prime minister has touched on the issue of those graduates who stay in the 'kampung' and have difficulties coming to Kuala Lumpur to attend interviews. Employers should emphatise with these graduates' situation as many of them come from poor families and one trip to KL costing easily RM100.

Kecewa should instead think of the ways of reaching these graduates in the kampung instead just like what my former company did when they went all out to visit the remotest parts of Malaysia, to look for machine operators.

And why must Kecewa stress too much on grammatically correct English when business communication requirements for jobs normally do not require that high a standard of communication.

Staff at some Malaysian companies that have projects in European countries that are not English- speaking, communicate in the broken local language. I had the experience of watching a Malaysian engineer communicating with a German engineer in broken English but they understood each other very well as shown by the outcome of the project.

I have also seen Malaysian IT engineers who are not able to speak good English but are good in IT software engineering assignments.

One best way of solving Kecewa's problem is for his company to 'recruit' from the campus as the company can identify the potential of candidates while they are still studying and if possible, try to sponsor them as well.

Kecewa should also cut out the multilevel interview process. It only further adds to the apprehension of candidates as to whether they are suited for the jop and whether they will get it. One solution to the problem may be for the company to have a full-day interview session with all the processes of recruitment and selection completed that day itself.

And Kecewa shouldn't be too disappointed if the graduates could not answer well the question 'Can you briefly tell me about yourself'. Possibly, some of the existing employees in his or her organisation too may not be able to form one full sentence in correct English. I have personally seen some general managers who can't write or speak proper English!

My last advice to Kecewa is to not depend too much on interviews as they are based on only 'gut feeling'. If the candidates are engineers, then put them in the real job situation and test their competencies in that related area of job requirements.

But I wonder how Kecewa will deal with a techinically brilliant IT candidate that has speech or hearing impairment?