How to read a Nepali job notice before you apply

Most people meet a foreign job for the first time as a small block of newsprint: a company name in capitals, a wage, a date. It is easy to read it the way you would read any advertisement — as a promise someone is making to attract you. It is not that. In Nepal, a foreign-employment advertisement is the public face of a file that the Department of Foreign Employment has already examined and approved, and almost every line on it is a fact the employer is now held to.

That makes the notice the most useful document you will handle in the whole process, and the one most worth learning to read slowly. This is a field-by-field walk through the notices we publish, in the order your eye tends to move across them.

Start at the bottom, with the numbers

The block of reference numbers at the foot of a notice looks like administrative dust. It is the part that proves the rest of the notice exists. Three things sit there.

• The pre-approval date — the day the Department approved the employer's demand. It tells you how fresh the demand is, and it is the earliest date anything else on the notice can be true from.
• The chalani number — the Department's outgoing-registration number for that approval letter. It identifies one specific approval, and it is the number you quote if you ever want to check a notice against the record.
• The lot number — the approved batch the vacancies belong to. One lot, one employer, one approved demand.

Alongside them sits the agency's licence number. Ours is 798/065/066, and it appears on every notice we publish, next to our office address in Kalanki. An advertisement without those numbers is not an advertisement you can check, and a number that nobody will show you is not a number.

The demand figures are the employer's, not ours

Notices state how many workers are wanted, split into male and female. It reads like a preference and it is often mistaken for one. It is a restatement of what the employer requested and the Department approved for that lot — a number in a file, not a rule about who may walk into our office.

It is worth knowing this before you read a notice that says two workers and one that says two hundred. The scale of a demand tells you about the employer's operation and the size of the batch. It does not tell you how good your chances are, and it says nothing about the quality of the job.

The wage, and the two lines that change what it means

The wage is printed in the destination currency, with the rupee equivalent at the rate on the day the notice was drawn up. Take the foreign-currency figure as the real one: it is what your contract will say. The rupee figure will have moved by the time you fly. On our three current Malaysia notices the wage is MYR 1,700 a month, and the rupee equivalent printed beside it differs on each one — 63,988, 64,358 and 64,084 — purely because they were drawn up on different days.

Two lines further down decide what that wage is actually worth. Food and accommodation are stated separately, because they are separate obligations. Of the three notices above, two provide both; one provides accommodation and not food. Same employer country, same wage, materially different money in your hand at the end of the month. If you compare two notices on the wage alone, you have not compared them.

Overtime and annual leave are usually stated as being governed by company rules. That is a real answer, not an evasion — but it means the detail belongs to the employer's policy and the contract you sign, so it is a fair thing to ask about at the interview.

The cost table: the most important part of the page

Every approved notice carries a table that names each cost in the process and says who bears it. This is where a notice stops being a description of a job and becomes a document you can hold someone to.

Read down the right-hand column and the shape of the thing becomes clear. The air ticket, the visa, the visa stamping and the insurance during employment are the employer's. The three fixed charges that are yours come to NPR 4,796 in total, and every one of them is a charge set on the notice itself, not a payment to the agency. The medical examination and the term life insurance are also yours, and their price depends on the clinic and the insurer you use, which is why the notice prints no figure for them and neither do we.

The interview date is an expiry date

Near the end of the notice is the interview date and where it will be held. Dates on Nepali notices are usually in Bikram Sambat, so 2083/05/26 is 11 September 2026, and 2083/05/12 is 28 August 2026. It is worth converting them the moment you read one.

The date matters more than it looks. Once it has passed, that notice is finished. It is a record of what was advertised, not a door that is still open, and an agency that leaves an expired notice up as though it were live is telling you something about how it works. On this site, a vacancy whose interview date has gone says so on its own page, keeps its original notice attached, and offers no application form.

You will also see notices headed पुनः विज्ञापन — a re-advertisement. That is the same approved demand being advertised again, usually because the first round did not fill it. Two of our three current Malaysia notices are re-advertisements. The terms that apply are the ones on the notice in front of you.

What to do with all this

Before you commit a single rupee or a single week to a vacancy, you can now check five things yourself: that the notice carries a pre-approval date, a chalani number, a lot number and a licence number; that the interview date has not passed; that food and accommodation are stated; that the wage is in the destination currency; and that the cost table matches whatever anyone is asking you to pay.

That is not a small amount of protection, and it comes from a document that is free to read. Every vacancy on this site carries its original notice as a PDF for exactly that reason: the transcription is ours, but the record is the Department's, and you should be able to check one against the other.