Would you hire this helper if you were me...

Good Helper, in my experience

Hi Everyone,

I am back on this forum, simply to help my ex helper; I have returned to Sydney, Austraila 6 months ago, but I still keep in touch with my helper.

I inherited her from my cousin who was in HK before me, when they left, I promise to take her on.

I have found she is very honest and hardworking in the 3.5 years that I have had her, she is GREAT with kids - that sometimes I am jealous as any mother would be. She did help me with my 2nd newborn, but I looked after my own newborn till she was 5 months, so she has experience with both my girls from 5 months onwards.

She is very timid and shy at first, but when you encourage and talk to her, you will find that she is quite good to work with. She is obedient in my experience; she just may need assistance with cooking at times; which I gave her a lot of training on already, so she has been cooking all my meals while I had been in HK over the last 2 yrs - her cooking is almost as good as my mothers :) (bc my mother taught her while she was in HK).
She is good at following instructions, provided she understood your instructions because she fears asking you questions when she doesn't understand. What I did with her was gave her a spreadsheet of tasks to do during the week and what to do when she has time. This made it easier for both myself and her, that way she just refers to the schedule that I have given her; she was good in keeping them too! I didn't expect her to...but she did; that's why I think she is wonderful! But any normal person would be considerate and not be too unreasonable. Just put yourself in their shoes and see if it's something that's achievable.....

Anyway, she is youngish, about 27-28. She is not married.
No boyfriend I don't think; her mother was a helper in HK before her. She is not a party animal as such, very simple kind of girl; that's probably what sets her apart.

I am here on this forum to help her find her next employer because she has started with a new employer just after I left, who are local HK Chinese, they seem to have placed unreasonable demands on her with their 5-6 month olds. From what she told me, they have expected her to make their 6 month olds sleep; if she couldn't get the baby to sleep, they would be really angry with her and blame her for not settling him back to sleep. In my experience, I was not able to settle my own baby to sleep, but she was really good, because she sings them lullaby and they just fall asleep almost in a few minutes. They have also locked her out of the house and treated her badly simply because they were unhappy with her; seems to me that these young couple are behaving childishly towards her.

So I am doing my best by helping her find another employer. She is a Christian...but she would do best with a Expat employer who will treat her like a person.

If you are interested, please private message me and I shall get back to you with her details. HK2008, I hope you can take her on?


:thanks for your time.

I will try to log in as often as I can; as you know, we don't have helpers here to help us look after the kids and do the chores and work at the same time! :D
It's back to the harsh reality for me here.
I wish I was back in HK and hope to go back one day and that she can come back and work for me again, of course.

Cheers!
By the way, she is scared of dogs! :(
 
Thank you smu_hk for your reference. I'm surely interested and had sent you a PM with my contact details. We don't have any pets as I'm scared of them myself:) I hope she knows the procedure if she is to transfer to me. Otherwise I can check it out with relevant govement organisations.
 
Hi HK2008,
I also PM you, and I forgot to say, Rani had posted a link on the Consulate Info, which is here:

http://www.philcongen-hk.com/labor/main.htm

I think you don't have to send her back; because it's not her first contract. She just needs to re-enter HK by going to Shenzhen or Macau I think. She didn't leave after I left her there with the next employer that I know.

If she doesn't know, I am sure she will find out quick enough.
 
U must take your time in this process, long and tedious yes, but hopefully u would have been able to go through the motions and come out in the end with 'the one'. I have done the 'ahh she looks so nice and friendly' way (being desparate) before and was very very disapointed.
 
While I agree that finding someone who's able to complete more than one contract with an employer is a good sign, I also wouldn't automatically reject a helper just because she was terminated. In fact my current helper was unlucky in her previous (local Chinese) employer who treated her v poorly and whom she had a terrible working relationship with. There are some local families who demand quite unreasonable things from their helpers and at the same time seem to grudge their presence.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, we were lucky enough to connect with this helper (as she is friends with my sister's helper from the same church) and we took a chance with her (in that we had no references to check altho she did help out my sister part-time when their maid was off) and it has worked out quite well for us. She is very good with our baby and he adores her.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top