Terrible if you cannot speak Chinese - Anonymous employee Shopee Employee Review

If you are in a tech role, it can be more or less guaranteed that your meetings will be conducted in Chinese due to the high number of PRCs in similar roles in Shopee. I think this is a major concern as Chinese is the main language of communication and if Shopee still hires non-Chinese speaking people to fill roles that require close working relationships with these PRCs, how can it be expected that they can perform well if they cannot even communicate well? This is extremely demoralising for non-Chinese speakers. Some PRCs do not even have sufficient English speaking skills to be able to carry out a conversation. I think it should be made clear during interviews that proficiency in Chinese is mandatory (at least be upfront about it!) and Shopee should not offer someone a job if they know that they cannot speak Chinese well. Requesting the PRCs to speak English during meetings just blatantly widens the cultural gap and as mentioned, some cannot even conduct meetings in English. This has been raised in previous reviews but I don't think anything has been done to improve the situation. However, it definitely needs to be looked into and I hope that Shopee HR and management take this seriously.