The first rejection I blamed on the candidate, which was wrong. The second one arrived four months later for a stronger engineer with a better degree and a higher offer, and that is when I sat down with the published criteria and a spreadsheet and worked out that neither application had ever been likely to pass. The problem was that I had been treating COMPASS as something that happens to an application after you file it, when it is actually arithmetic you can do before you write the job advert. All figures below are from the official Ministry of Manpower eligibility page, which is the only source worth using because the numbers move.
Step 1: Clear the Qualifying Salary Gate Before Anything Else
There are two stages and they work differently. The first is a salary threshold, and it is a gate: a candidate below it is ineligible regardless of how the points would have landed. The second is COMPASS, which is the points framework. Teams that lose a week to a doomed application almost always did the second stage first.
The threshold is age graduated and sector dependent. For new applications made before 1 January 2027, the published range runs from $5,600 at age 23 or below to $10,700 at age 45 or above for all sectors except financial services, and from $6,200 to $11,800 for financial services. From 1 January 2027 for new applications, and for renewals expiring from 1 January 2028, those ranges step up to $6,000 to $11,500 and $6,600 to $12,700 respectively.
Two things to notice before you move on. The thresholds rise progressively with age from 23 onward, so a senior engineer in their forties needs a materially higher fixed monthly salary than a mid level engineer in their twenties for the same role. And if your hiring timeline crosses the end of the year, the number that applies is the one in force when the application is made, which is a scheduling decision rather than a budgeting one.
Step 2: Check Whether the Application Is Exempt From COMPASS Entirely
Before scoring anything, check three published conditions. An application is exempt from COMPASS if the candidate has a fixed monthly salary of at least $22,500, if they are applying as an overseas intra-corporate transferee, or if the role is being filled for one month or less.
This check costs two minutes and occasionally saves the entire exercise. The intra-corporate transferee route in particular catches teams by surprise: if you are moving an existing engineer from a group company rather than hiring externally, you may be scoring an application that does not need a score. For a senior architect hire at the top of the market, the salary exemption is worth checking against your actual offer before you start negotiating the bonus criteria.
💡 Our Expert Take
Steps one and two take twenty minutes together and they decide whether the next five steps are worth doing. We now run them during the shortlisting conversation, before the second interview, because the one thing worse than a rejection is a rejection after a candidate has resigned from their current job on the strength of your offer. If the arithmetic does not work, the honest move is to say so while the candidate still has options.
Step 3: Score C1 and C2, the Two Criteria That Move With the Candidate
Four foundational criteria each score 0, 10 or 20 points. Two of them are about the person and the offer, which makes them the levers you actually hold at offer stage.
C1, salary. Scored against sector and age benchmarks rather than a flat figure: 20 points at the ninetieth percentile and above, 10 points from the sixty fifth to below the ninetieth, and 0 below the sixty fifth. The step people miss is that this is a percentile comparison, so you have to look up the benchmark for the sector and age rather than reasoning from what your other engineers earn.
C2, qualifications. 20 points for a top tier degree equivalent qualification, 10 points for another degree equivalent qualification, and 0 for none. This one is fixed by the time you meet the candidate, which makes it information for your shortlist rather than a lever. It also means a self taught engineer with an excellent portfolio starts ten or twenty points behind a credentialled one, and the rest of the application has to make that up.
Step 4: Score C3 and C4, the Two Criteria That Are About Your Company
This is the step that explains both of our rejections, and it is the one almost nobody runs before interviewing.
C3, diversity. Scored on the share your candidate nationality represents among your professional, managerial, executive and technical population: 20 points when that share is under five per cent, 10 points from five to below twenty five per cent, and 0 at twenty five per cent or more. A team that has hired well from one country for three years scores zero here, and nothing about the next candidate changes that.
C4, support for local employment. Scored on your local PMET share against your sector: 20 points at the fiftieth percentile and above, 10 points from the twentieth to below the fiftieth, and 0 below the twentieth.
There is one important relief. Organisations with fewer than twenty five PMETs receive 10 points by default on each of these two criteria. The counterintuitive consequence is that a ten person startup often finds COMPASS easier than a two hundred person company, because it is handed twenty points it cannot lose while the larger firm has to earn them from a workforce profile that took years to form. If you are approaching that twenty five PMET line, it is worth knowing that your scoring regime changes when you cross it.
Not sure what your firm scores on C3 and C4 before you open the role? We will work it out with you.
Thirty minutes on your current PMET profile tells you how many points the candidate has to carry, which changes who is worth interviewing. Python engineers | API engineers | SaaS development in Singapore
Start your shortlistStep 5: Find the Bonus Points Before You Submit
Two bonus criteria sit on top of the foundational score, and they are the points most often left on the table.
C5, the skills bonus. Tied to the Shortage Occupation List: 20 points when the job is on the list and the candidate nationality is under one third of your PMET population, and 10 points when the job is on the list and that share is one third or more. The discipline here is to check the current list against the job you are genuinely filling, with the title you will actually file, rather than against the title you put in the advert. The list is revised, so check it per application rather than trusting a note from a previous hire.
C6, the strategic economic priorities bonus. 10 points for participating in or meeting the criteria for an eligible programme. This is a company level attribute and it is worth asking your finance or corporate development colleagues rather than assuming the answer is no, because firms frequently qualify through a programme they joined for an unrelated reason.
Step 6: Do the Arithmetic Against 40 and Close the Gap Where You Can
Add the four foundational scores and any bonus, and compare the total against the pass mark of 40 points. Then look at where the gap is, because the lever depends entirely on which criteria are short.
If you are at 30 and C1 is sitting at 10, the salary percentile is usually the cheapest move: going from the sixty fifth to the ninetieth percentile band is worth ten points and closes it outright. If you are at 30 with C1 already at 20, the realistic levers are C5, which means confirming the occupation and the title, or C6, which means a company level check. If you are at 20 with both firm criteria at zero and no bonus available, raise the uncomfortable question early: this application needs a candidate who scores forty on C1 and C2 alone, which is a top tier degree equivalent qualification and a ninetieth percentile salary, and that is a different shortlist rather than a different offer.
Step 7: Re-Score Your Firm Criteria Every Cycle
C3 and C4 are snapshots of a workforce that moves. Three resignations in a small engineering team can shift a nationality share across a band boundary, and crossing the twenty five PMET line removes the default ten points on each firm criterion. A score you calculated in March is not evidence about an application you file in November.
We now keep a dated scoring sheet per application, with the firm level numbers recalculated at the start of each quarter and the source page checked rather than remembered. It takes an hour a quarter. It replaced a process where the first indication that something had changed was a rejection, and it also gives you the one thing that is genuinely useful in an offer conversation: the ability to tell a candidate honestly where their application stands before they hand in their notice. The same discipline applies at the other end of the relationship, which we cover in our method for offboarding a developer on an Employment Pass.
💡 Our Expert Take
If you adopt one step from this list, adopt step four before you write the job advert. Knowing your own C3 and C4 score changes who is worth interviewing, because it tells you how many points the candidate has to carry. A company sitting on twenty points from its own profile can hire a self taught engineer at the sixty fifth percentile. A company sitting on zero cannot, and no amount of enthusiasm in the interview loop changes that arithmetic. Find out which company you are before you start making promises to people.
FAQ: COMPASS Scoring for Developer Hires in Singapore
How many COMPASS points does a developer Employment Pass application need?
Forty points. The framework awards points across four foundational criteria, each scored at zero, ten or twenty, plus two bonus criteria, and the published pass mark is forty points. In practice that means a candidate can clear COMPASS on the two candidate level criteria alone if both score twenty, which is why the salary you offer and the qualification you can verify carry so much weight at offer stage. It also means a company whose own workforce profile scores zero on both firm criteria is asking the candidate to carry the entire application, and that is a position you want to know about before you start interviewing rather than after you have made an offer.
Can a strong developer fail COMPASS because of the employer rather than themselves?
Yes, and it is the single most common surprise for teams filing their first few applications. Two of the four foundational criteria, diversity and support for local employment, are scored on your company workforce profile rather than on the candidate. A firm where one nationality makes up a quarter or more of the professional, managerial, executive and technical population scores zero on diversity, and a firm in the bottom fifth of its sector for local PMET share scores zero on support for local employment. The same candidate with the same offer can therefore pass at one company and fail at another. Organisations with fewer than twenty five PMETs are given ten points by default on each of those two criteria, which is why very small companies often find the framework easier than mid sized ones.
Does raising the salary offer fix a failing COMPASS score?
Sometimes, and it is worth checking before you assume it, because C1 is scored against sector and age benchmarks rather than against a flat number. Moving a candidate from below the sixty fifth percentile to at or above it is worth ten points, and moving them to the ninetieth percentile or above is worth twenty. If your current score is thirty, one of those moves closes the gap. What it cannot do is rescue an application that fails the qualifying salary stage, because that stage is a gate rather than a scoring criterion. It is also worth being honest about the second order effect: a salary set to win points becomes your internal benchmark for that level, and the next three hires will be measured against it.
How often do the Employment Pass thresholds and the COMPASS benchmarks change?
Often enough that you should look them up for every application rather than reusing a figure from a previous hire. The qualifying salary thresholds step up on announced dates, with the published schedule raising the general sector minimum and the financial services minimum for new applications from the start of 2027 and for renewals from the start of 2028. The percentile benchmarks behind C1 and C4 are drawn from sector data that is refreshed, and the Shortage Occupation List behind the skills bonus is revised. The practical habit that prevents trouble is treating the official eligibility page as the source for every application and keeping your own scoring sheet dated, so that a score you calculated in one quarter is never quietly reused in the next.
Send us the role and the candidate profile, and we will score the application with you before you make the offer.
Twenty minutes of arithmetic, the firm level numbers checked against your current profile, and an honest answer about whether the shortlist needs to change. More sequences in our hiring notes.
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