A 14-Day Job Ad Nearly Cost Us a Senior Backend Hire — the 7-Step Fair Consideration Framework Checklist I Run Before Every EP Application

I source engineers for Singapore companies, and the Fair Consideration Framework is the part of the process that founders consistently treat as paperwork until the week it becomes the whole project. The rule itself is simple enough to state in a sentence. What catches people is that the advertisement is not a formality you complete — it is evidence you produce, on a clock, about a decision you are supposed to be making honestly. Here is the checklist I run before every Employment Pass application, written from the near-miss that made me build it.

The Rule, in One Paragraph

Under the Fair Consideration Framework, an employer must advertise the job on the MyCareersFuture portal for at least fourteen consecutive days before submitting an Employment Pass or S Pass application, and must consider all candidates fairly. The Ministry of Manpower’s own framing is about giving candidates sufficient time to apply. Some roles are exempt from the advertising step, and MOM still strongly encourages advertising for those. Non-compliance is enforced through work pass debarment, and a false declaration is a criminal matter.

Everything below is the operational detail that sentence hides. If you want the surrounding pass mechanics rather than the advertising step specifically, our guide to navigating the Singapore EP process for tech talent covers the application itself, and Employment Pass, CPF and employer-of-record routes covers the employment structure underneath it.

Step 1 — Test Whether You Are Genuinely Exempt

This is where the near-miss in the headline happened, and it is the single most common failure I see. The client was a Series A company with, they believed, “fewer than ten people”. They had hired two contractors onto employment contracts four months earlier. They were at eleven. Nobody had revisited the assumption, because the exemption had been true when someone checked it in 2024.

The exemptions from the advertising requirement are a short list, and the two that matter for developer hiring are:

• Employers with fewer than ten employees. Tested against your actual headcount at the time of application, not your self-image as a small company.
• Jobs paying a fixed monthly salary of at least S$22,500. A threshold in force since 1 September 2023. Note fixed monthly salary — variable components and bonuses do not carry you over the line.

Shorter-term and intra-corporate-transfer situations have their own treatment. Two cautions apply to all of them. First, an exemption from advertising is not an exemption from considering Singaporeans fairly — the Tripartite Guidelines still apply, and MOM says as much. Second, and this is the trap: the tests are applied at the point of application. A company that crosses ten employees between two hires loses the exemption silently. Nobody writes to tell you.

What I do now: re-verify headcount in writing on the day we decide to advertise or not, and record the number. It takes two minutes and it is the cheapest insurance in this entire process.

Step 2 — Fix the Salary Before You Write the Advertisement

The salary is not a detail you tune after the ad runs. It has to clear the qualifying salary for the candidate’s age and sector, it has to be reflected honestly in the advertisement, and it is scored directly by COMPASS. Getting it wrong means re-advertising, which means another fourteen days.

Two things follow. The thresholds rise with age, benchmarked by MOM to the top third of local professional, manager, executive and technician salaries — so a forty-year-old backend engineer is a materially more expensive pass than a twenty-six-year-old one at the same level of ability, and your budget needs to know that before you shortlist. And the 1 January 2027 increase is close enough now that any role you are advertising this quarter for a Q1 start should be budgeted at the new number, not the current one.

Step 3 — Write an Advertisement That Is Genuinely Open

The obligation is to consider candidates fairly, and the advertisement is the primary evidence of whether you did. An advertisement written around a person you have already chosen is visible from a long way away, and it is the thing that turns a routine application into a difficult one.

Three drafting rules I apply to every developer ad:

1. Requirements describe the job, not the candidate. “Five years with our exact stack including the internal framework we built” is a job description for one person. If a capable senior engineer could do the work after a month of ramp-up, the requirement is ramp-up, not prior exposure.
2. No nationality, age, gender or race preferences, express or coded. These are reportable to TAFEP independently of the pass application, and “native speaker” or “young and dynamic team” are coded versions of them.
3. State the salary range honestly. It has to match what you will apply for. A range advertised low to look competitive and applied for high is a mismatch someone will eventually notice.

The craft of writing the ad itself — the parts that determine whether good local engineers actually apply rather than scroll past — is a separate skill, and our colleagues in Dubai wrote the version we use as a starting point in their guide to writing a developer job description in seven steps, with a longer treatment of what attracts senior applicants in how to write a job description that attracts top talent. Compliance and quality are the same work here: an advertisement that a strong local engineer would genuinely want to answer is also an advertisement that demonstrates fair consideration.

Step 4 — Run the Full 14 Consecutive Days and Count Them Correctly

The word doing the work is consecutive. The advertisement runs, uninterrupted, for at least fourteen days, and the pass application is submitted after that period, not during it.

The two ways teams break this are both innocent. The first is editing: someone spots a typo or wants to adjust the salary band on day six, takes the listing down and reposts it. The second is impatience: the candidate is holding a competing offer, day thirteen feels close enough, and the application goes in. Neither saves meaningful time, and both convert a clean process into an exposure. If the ad genuinely must change materially, the honest answer is that you are advertising a different job and the clock restarts.

What I do now: screenshot the live listing on day one and day fourteen, with the dates visible, and keep them with the application file. It has never been asked for. It costs nothing, and it is the difference between asserting compliance and evidencing it.

Step 5 — Actually Consider the Local Applicants, and Keep the Evidence

This is the step that is substantive rather than procedural, and the one most likely to be skipped by a team that has already decided who they want. Fair consideration means the local applications are genuinely screened against the same criteria, by someone, with an outcome that could in principle have been different.

In practice, for a developer role, that means: every applicant who meets the stated requirements gets a first-round screen; the screening criteria are written down before the applications arrive rather than after; and the reason a candidate did not progress is recorded in a sentence that would survive being read aloud. “Not a culture fit” does not survive that test. “Could not describe how they would debug a memory leak in production; two other candidates could” does.

There is a commercial argument here too, separate from compliance. Singapore’s local engineering market is deeper than most foreign-headquartered teams assume, and a process built on the assumption that the local pipeline is a formality routinely misses people. I have watched clients run the advertisement grudgingly, screen properly because I insisted, and hire locally — which removed the pass question entirely and started the engineer three months earlier.

Step 6 — Score COMPASS Before You Submit, Not After

For Employment Pass applications, clearing the qualifying salary is necessary but not sufficient. COMPASS is a points system in which applicants need forty points across six criteria, and several of them are consequences of decisions you made before advertising.

The point for a hiring manager is that C3 and C4 are properties of your company, not of your candidate. They move slowly, they are the same for every application you make this year, and they are knowable in advance. Work out your firm-level baseline once, and you will know before you advertise whether a given candidate profile can reach forty — which tells you whether to run this search for a pass candidate at all, or to focus the fourteen days on local hiring where your odds are better.

Step 7 — Submit, and Know What Non-Compliance Actually Costs

Submit after day fourteen, with the screening record and the listing evidence filed. Then understand the downside you have just avoided, because it is larger than most founders assume.

• Debarment from work pass applications: 12 to 24 months. Since January 2020 the scope includes renewals, not only new applications. For a company with foreign engineers already on passes, that is the genuinely dangerous part — being unable to renew an existing senior engineer is far worse than being unable to hire the next one.
• Criminal penalties for a false declaration: imprisonment of up to two years, a fine of up to S$20,000, or both.
• Separate TAFEP exposure for discriminatory advertisements or HR practices, reportable by anyone who reads your job ad.

Set against that, the compliant path costs fourteen days of calendar time you were largely going to spend screening anyway. That is the whole trade. The reason I wrote this checklist is that the client in the headline did not lose the engineer — we caught the lapsed exemption two days before submission, ran the advertisement properly, and the candidate waited. But the two days were luck, and luck is not a hiring process.

The One-Page Version

• Re-verify headcount and salary against the exemption tests today, in writing. Exemptions lapse silently.
• Fix the salary first: age-banded qualifying salary, sector, and the 1 January 2027 increase if the start date is near it.
• Write requirements that describe the job; no coded preferences; advertise the salary you will apply for.
• Fourteen consecutive days on MyCareersFuture. No takedowns, no edits that restart the clock.
• Screen every qualifying local applicant against written criteria, and record why each did not progress.
• Pre-score COMPASS, knowing C3 and C4 are fixed by your firm, and confirm forty points is reachable before you search.
• Submit from day fifteen with screenshots and screening notes filed.

FAQ — MyCareersFuture and the Fair Consideration Framework