Strange Job Advertisement
Pizza Hut Logo
Just yesterday, I came across an advertisement banner outside the soon-to-be-opened fast food outlet on my island from the world’s pizza giant, Pizza Hut. It reads something like this after some loose translation (and a less than desired memory of mine):
Pizza Hut is coming to your town soon!
We are Hiring!
We are looking for young men and women that fulfil the following criteria:
- A Graduate of senior high school or technical school,
- Men to be at least 165cm in height and women to be at least 160cm in height.
Those criteria left me surprised as I drove past the banner hung on top of the still-renovating building. As you can see, there are only two criteria that they listed, which seems bizarre to me.
It is always common to list the most important qualities that an employer wishes to find in their employees on the advertisement. Since banner does not come cheap, there will be limited number of lines that can be put in a 2 to 3 metres long piece of fabric. Coupled with the need to ensure that the messages are visible, the words, thus, need to be bigger. Hence the advertised words and sentences will be, quintessentially, the main focus of putting up the advertisements.
What is more is that these two qualities seemed to be rather unreasonable.
By normal Indonesian standard, it is only compulsory for children to be educated for 9 years under the national education policy. Assuming that most children are decent in their academic and there were not any retention in the class, by the end of 9 years, they would graduate from junior high school or secondary school.
However, that was just THE DESIRED scenario. In actual fact, many children did not even finish junior high school education, many stopped at just finishing primary school. Of course, in some of the more backward places, 6 years of learning in primary school may be too luxurious to afford. In these places, the children have to unfortunately terminate their learning halfway and looked for earning opportunity to supplement the family income.
Thus, my point is, there are not many who finished senior high school to begin with. Those, whom actually did so, would not want to work in a fast food outlet and would want to pursue higher education in tertiary institutions. To clearly point out, they are just too scarce to begin with.
It is not wise to set such a criterion. What about changing it to age limit? Maybe 17 years old and above? Since being 17 years old is considered to be matured in Indonesia, anyway.
As for the height criterion, it is, frankly, idiotic to require minimum height to do work. The performance of an employee does not depend on their height. Not if Pizza Hut is able to establish and scientifically prove that the height of a person is proportional to the work done of that same person.
Furthermore, being Asians, the built of most Indonesians are considered petite if compared to foreign counterparts. There are not many girls who stand at 160cm, to be honest. If there are, wouldn’t they sign up and get trained to air stewardess? As for men, 165cm seems to be rather reasonable. I would flip out if they dare to put 170 or 175, not because I am applying for the job, but because it is just plain stupid to do so.
In my opinion, it is not just irrational but discriminative to put those two criteria for prospective job-seekers. I wonder what is going on their mind.
Too busy making pizza? I doubt so, seriously.
