KUALA LUMPUR, Sept 24 — The stir over a coffee chain franchisee’s recruitment advertisement prioritising Malay and Chinese applicants exposes a larger problem with bigoted hiring practices in both the public and private sectors, PKR Youth said today.

While thanking the Old Town White Coffee chain and its franchisee for their apologies over the discriminatory advertisement, PKR Youth chief Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad said the incident was indicative of a worrying intent to employ based on ethnicity that would have continued had the wanted ad not been expose.

“Discrimination still exists against the non-Malays in the civil service and towards the non-Chinese in the private sector.

“Therefore, we need to examine and review racial discrimination in the country as a whole,” the Seri Setia assemblyman said in a statement today.

Prejudicial recruitment practices disregard Malaysians’ constitutional rights to employment that is free from biases based on race, religion, origins or gender, he added.

The PKR Youth chief added that all communities must be open and honest about the issue in order to discover policies that promote equality among all Malaysians.

On Saturday, news began to spread on the Internet of a hiring notice by the franchisee of an Old Town White Coffee outlet in Johor Baru that proclaimed Malay and Chinese applicants would be given priority.

The offending advertisement was the subject of a complaint lodged with the Johor Human Resource Department.

The news also triggered uproar among the Indian community, which savaged the coffee chain for the ad.

The chain has disavowed any knowledge of the advertisement, while the franchisees — Vijayamogan Nadarajan and Kannapan Rajendran —  have also apologised and claimed that the hiring notice was not meant to discriminate against any community.

Discriminatory hiring practices are a long-standing and insidious issue in multicultural Malaysia due to the country’s institutionalised racial quotas.

Bumiputeras receive preferential quotas in education and the civil service, the latter of which is overwhelmingly dominated by the Malay community.

In return, Malays allege that private sector firms discriminate against workers from the former community.

In 2012, two researchers from Universiti Malaya and Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia attempted to study the phenomenon by sending resumes of fictional Malay and Chinese graduates to actual job advertisements.

The results suggested that Chinese applicants were more likely to be called for interviews, although the researchers insisted their exercise could not be taken to indicate prevalent prejudices in employment patterns.