Local recruiters are failing to tap the growing demand for domestic helps in Hong Kong due to the government's 'failure' to update its database with willing job-seekers information, said sector insiders.
They said selection of candidates, to be sent to Hong Kong as domestic helps, by the recruiters has remained suspended for around six months.
During the period nearly 2,000 job-seekers could be selected for training for sending as domestic workers to Hong Kong, said a private recruiter.
He said the recruiters are incurring a significant loss following scarcity of required number of candidates against their training arrangement. There will be no candidate left to send to the job destination after sending the workers, who are undergoing training presently, he added.
Admitting the issue, the Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training (BMET) officials said an enlistment programme will be launched next month to meet the shortfall. The government has planned to enlist skilled female workers, mainly for Hong Kong.
As per the rules, recruitment of domestic helps to Hong Kong has to be done from among the candidates registered with the government database, so that they remain safe from cheating by middleman.
The requirements for domestic helps in the East Asian country are different than those of other countries, like - the Middle-East ones, they added.
At the beginning of 2013, BMET inked memorandums of understanding (MoUs) with Hong Kong-based recruiting associations to send Bangladeshi female workers there. About 700 workers went to Hong Kong after signing the agreements.
In the same year, around 50,000 female job-seekers were enlisted with the government for overseas jobs in various sectors, including as house workers for the Middle-East countries and Hong Kong.
But the recruiters said among the candidates of the existing database only 10 per cent can fulfill the requirements for being sent as domestic helps to Hong Kong.
"I have demand for sending domestic workers to Hong Kong, but I cannot select required workers from the government databank," said a recruiter.
The recruiter said he has not been getting a single eligible job-seeker for interviewing since the last six to seven months.
So the government should introduce a special registration programme immediately, targeting the Hong Kong job market, he added.
Hong Kong will need about 0.5 million domestic workers in the next three to four years, sources said.
Earlier, the employers in Hong Kong announced recruitment of around 0.1 million female workers for its housekeeping sector by a year.
Some four local recruitment agencies got permission from the government for sending domestic helps to Hong Kong.
The aspiring workers have to participate in a two-month-long training on English and Chinese languages, imparted by experts from Hong Kong in the technical training centres in Bangladesh.
The salary of each worker in Hong Kong is around Tk 45,000 with accommodation, insurance coverage and others facilities.
The Philippines and Indonesia are discouraging their citizens to work as domestic helpers abroad, which has created an opportunity for Bangladeshi female job-seekers to be employed there.
Some 343,845 Bangladeshi female workers went abroad with jobs from 1991 to November 2014, mainly to Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, Qatar and the UAE.
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