Academic questions the basis of recruiter’s claim that foreigners are ‘hungrier’ than Singaporean workers

SINGAPORE: Academic Donald Low has weighed in on the controversy sparked by a legal recruiter’s remarks that foreign workers are “hungrier” than Singaporeans, questioning whether recruiters are actually able to reliably assess traits such as motivation during the hiring process.

The debate began after Shulin Lee, founder of legal recruitment firm Aslant Legal, said on a recent CNA podcast that some employers were increasingly replacing Singaporean workers with foreign hires from countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines because they were perceived to be more driven and willing to “go the extra mile”.

Ms Lee argued that the issue was not necessarily one of skill, but of attitude and hunger, adding that workers should remain “paranoid” about changes in the labour market and continue improving soft skills such as communication and relationship-building.

Her remarks triggered strong reactions online, with some agreeing she was describing market realities while others accused her of unfairly stereotyping local workers and overlooking broader structural issues affecting Singaporeans.

After defending her comments in a series of Facebook posts, Ms Lee drew further criticism when she described offended individuals as being “triggered.” She has since locked her social media accounts from public view, though the debate has continued to gather momentum online.

Among those entering the fray is Professor Donald Low, the former associate dean at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, who now teaches at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In a lengthy Facebook post, Prof Low said the “most interesting thing” about both Ms Lee’s comments and the public response was that few people appeared to question how recruiters determine whether a worker is genuinely motivated in the first place.

“As an economist, the most interesting thing about the legal recruiter’s comment that Singaporean workers aren’t as hungry as workers from other countries — and the overwrought reactions to it — is that nobody (neither she nor her detractors) seemed to highlight what I assumed would be the main point of contention: how does she know?” he wrote.

Prof Low framed the issue as a classic “information asymmetry” problem, arguing that job applicants naturally know more about their own abilities and motivation than prospective employers do.

While academic qualifications may offer some indication of a candidate’s capabilities or discipline, he noted that motivation is far harder to measure reliably during recruitment.

“You may say that higher education achievement is a signal/proxy for motivation as obtaining a degree (with good grades) from a top university requires (high) motivation,” he wrote. “But we all know of people who were ‘good on paper’ but ended up being disappointing or unmotivated on the job.”

He added that employers only gain a clearer understanding of an employee’s actual work ethic after hiring them and observing them over time. At the recruitment stage, however, assessing motivation largely remains “a prediction problem” and “mostly guesswork”.

Prof Low also challenged the notion that technology has substantially improved the hiring process. Referencing a recent study on artificial intelligence in recruitment, he said AI-assisted hiring systems were found to favour CVs generated by large language models and even displayed bias towards CVs written by the same AI systems used by employers.

Drawing on behavioural economics, he cited the late Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who had once expressed doubts about the effectiveness of selection methods he developed for identifying Israeli army officers.

Despite the uncertainty surrounding recruitment assessments, Prof Low said recruiters and admissions officers often remained highly confident in their ability to identify superior candidates.

“I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked people doing hiring or student admissions how they know that the people they’re recommending strongly are better than the average candidate, and their response has essentially been ‘we know’,” he wrote.

He argued that part of the issue stemmed from a lack of accountability and delayed feedback in recruitment. By the time a poorly performing hire is identified, the recruiter may no longer be involved, while underperformance can often be attributed to external factors.

“Recruiters can always cite extenuating factors to ‘explain’ why a promising hire underperformed; this absolves the recruiter of blame,” he said.

Prof Low’s post prompted further discussion in the comments section, including contributions from behavioural scientist Serene Koh. Ms Koh questioned the use of the term “hungry”, arguing that it was never clearly defined.

“Assuming for a second that ‘hungry’ isn’t just code for being pliant and exploitable, but is actually associated with meaningful behaviours, then I’d like to know what those behaviours are,” she wrote.

She suggested that if employers valued qualities such as persistence, initiative and self-directed learning, hiring processes should explicitly test for those behaviours instead of relying on vague concepts such as “hunger” or “fit”.

Citing the work of Daniel Kahneman and legal scholar Cass Sunstein, Ms Koh argued that many hiring systems fail because employers are not evaluating the right traits in the first place.

“Their fix is straightforward: define the actual behaviours the job requires, then build your process to test for those,” she said.

Ms Koh also stressed that employers share responsibility for developing workers after hiring them, noting that qualities often associated with “hunger” are cultivated over time rather than being fixed traits candidates inherently possess.

Another commenter, Facebook user Reimondo Oo, similarly argued that motivation and work performance evolve and are shaped by changing workplace conditions, technological disruptions and organisational dynamics.

He pointed out that job interviews themselves are a form of negotiation where both employers and candidates withhold certain information to strengthen their respective positions.

Rather than focusing narrowly on “hunger” or paper qualifications, Mr Oo said employers often place greater value on cultural fit, integrity and long-term potential.

Still, he acknowledged that even experienced employers cannot perfectly predict future performance.

“But they still wouldn’t be able to fully predict who’s a dud and who’s not,” he wrote, adding that labour laws ultimately allow employers to remove underperforming staff when necessary.