Workplace Fairness Act Readiness: The Hiring Records Singapore SMEs Need Before 2027

The practical requirement of the Workplace Fairness Act is not a new hiring style — it is the ability to show, months later, why you chose the candidate you chose. That means three artefacts per role: the job advertisement as published, the interview notes as taken, and the reason each shortlisted candidate was not selected. If those three things exist in a consistent place with dates attached, a complaint becomes a document retrieval exercise. If they live in a WhatsApp group, a personal inbox and the hiring manager's memory, the same complaint becomes a reconstruction exercise under pressure. The gap between those two outcomes is a filing system, and you can close it in a fortnight.

What does the Workplace Fairness Act actually require you to be able to show?

The Act, passed in January 2025, prohibits adverse employment decisions made on the basis of protected characteristics — including age, nationality, sex, marital status, pregnancy, caregiving responsibilities, race, religion, language, disability and mental health conditions. It covers hiring, as well as decisions about appraisal, promotion and dismissal. Employers above the size threshold will also need a grievance handling process that staff can actually use.

Notice what that does and does not mean for your systems. It does not require you to hire anyone in particular, and it does not forbid you from setting genuine job requirements. What it does is shift the burden of explanation. An unexplained decision now carries risk that it did not carry in 2024. And an explanation given eight months after the fact, with nothing contemporaneous behind it, is worth very little — to MOM, to a mediator, or frankly to you when you are trying to remember what happened.

Commencement dates and the final shape of the subsidiary legislation sit with MOM, and timelines have moved before. Check the current position on the MOM site rather than taking any date from a blog post, including this one. The documentation habits below are worth building regardless of exactly when the obligations bite.

Does the Act apply to my company if we have fewer than 25 staff?

Smaller employers were given a grace period — the Act's obligations are being applied first to employers at or above a headcount threshold, with employers below it exempted for an initial period of several years. So if you run a 12-person firm, you are very likely outside the first wave.

Three reasons to build the records anyway. First, TAFEP's Fair Consideration Framework and the Tripartite Guidelines on Fair Employment Practices already apply to you now, and MOM can already act on a complaint about a discriminatory job advertisement. Second, headcount moves: a company that hires six people in a good year crosses the threshold without anyone noticing, and you do not want to be building a hiring record system in the same quarter you are onboarding. Third, the enterprise and government clients that ask for your Cyber Essentials mark are increasingly asking about employment practices in the same vendor questionnaire.

Which hiring records break first in a small company?

In a sub-20-person company, hiring is usually run by the owner or an operations lead between other duties. The failure pattern is consistent:

• The advertisement is edited in place. The listing on the job portal is updated three times during the campaign and no copy of the original wording survives.
• Applications arrive in a personal inbox. When that person leaves, the applicant pool leaves with them — which is also a PDPA retention problem, not just a fairness one.
• Interview notes are verbal. Two people interview, discuss it over lunch, and decide. Nothing is written except the offer.
• Rejections are silence. Unsuccessful candidates are simply never contacted, so no reason was ever recorded — not even for internal use.
• Shortlisting criteria are implicit. Nobody can say what separated candidate four from candidate five, because the separation happened in someone's head.

What should a job advertisement look like from 2027?

Write requirements as capabilities and keep a dated copy. Years of experience, specific certifications, language needed to perform the actual job, and physical requirements that are genuinely inherent to the role are all defensible. Age ranges, preferred nationalities, requests for a photograph, marital status, and language requirements that are really a proxy for ethnicity are not.

The system change is small: before publishing, save the final advertisement text as a PDF into the role's folder with the date in the filename. Three seconds of work that preserves exactly what you asked for.

How do you take interview notes that will stand up later?

Use the same four to six criteria for every candidate in a role, score each one, and write one sentence of evidence per score. Evidence means what the candidate said or did — not an impression. Write it during or immediately after the interview, not at the end of the week.

Two rules matter more than the format. Keep notes on the job, not the person: a note about commitment given someone has young children is now a documented reason not to hire, written in your own hand. And stop keeping two sets of notes — the sanitised form and the real conversation in a side chat. If a decision cannot be written down, it should not be the decision.

What do you do with rejections?

You are not obliged to give every applicant detailed feedback, and most SMEs should not try. What you do need is an internal reason code for every candidate you interviewed: stronger candidate on technical assessment, salary expectation above band, withdrew, no response after two attempts. One field in a spreadsheet, filled in the same day.

Also decide retention. Set a policy — commonly six to twelve months for unsuccessful applicants — note it in your PDPA data inventory, and then actually delete on schedule. Holding every CV you have ever received forever is its own exposure.

What should you change in your system in the next 90 days?

1. Create one hiring folder per role in Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, owned by the company account and not by an individual.
2. Route applications to a shared mailbox such as careers@, never a personal address.
3. Build a one-page interview scorecard with fixed criteria and store the completed copies in the role folder.
4. Add a reason-code column to your candidate tracker and make filling it part of closing a role.
5. Write a half-page retention rule for applicant data and diarise the deletions.
6. Have a second person read every advertisement before it is published.
7. Put the grievance route in writing, even informally — who a complaint goes to, and who handles it if the complaint concerns that person.

None of this needs an HR platform. A structured shared drive, a scorecard template and a tracker with one extra column will carry a 20-person company comfortably. The point of the exercise is not the tooling — it is that the reasons for your decisions exist somewhere other than one person's memory. That is the same shift as moving your invoicing off a single laptop or your approvals out of a WhatsApp chat: you are replacing a person-shaped record with a process-shaped one.

Frequently asked questions

Can we still specify years of experience or a required language?

Yes, where they are genuine job requirements. A role that serves Mandarin-speaking customers can require Mandarin. The risk appears when the requirement does not match the actual work — when language, nationality or age is standing in for a preference about who the person is rather than what the job needs. Write the requirement next to the task it exists for, and you will usually see which one you have.

Do we need an HR system, or will a spreadsheet do?

A spreadsheet plus a structured shared drive is sufficient for most companies under about 30 staff, provided both are owned by company accounts and backed up. Buy an applicant tracking system when hiring volume — not compliance anxiety — makes manual tracking the bottleneck. A tool will not fix an undocumented decision; it will only store it faster.

How long should we keep interview notes and CVs?

Long enough to answer a complaint, and no longer than you can justify under the PDPA. Six to twelve months after a role closes is the common range for unsuccessful applicants, with records for the person hired folding into their employee file. Whatever you choose, write it down and follow it — an inconsistent retention practice is harder to defend than a short one.