So you finally found the ideal candidate. The only wrinkle? That ideal candidate doesn’t live in the U.S.
All is not lost. If you want to hire talented international candidates, you can sponsor them through something called an H-1B visa. Here’s a quick rundown of how it works and the top things to think about as you go through the process.
What’s an H-1B visa?
An H-1B visa is a non-immigrant work visa available to highly skilled employees. The “non-immigrant” part means that if the job ends, the person has to go home. Basically, their visa is tied directly to the job.
Generally, employees who qualify for an H1B visa:
- Hold a bachelor’s degree.
- Work in a “specialty occupation.” Or in other words, the role has to be unique enough that it requires someone with specialized training.
To keep reading, click here: H-1B Visas: A Practical Guide for Startups and Small Business Owners
I am very surprised to see no comments on this article (Great coverage of why we have these visas). What was not covered in this article were the loopholes used by employers to not hire similar talented Americans for same positions which are the reason there is such a negative reaction to their use. Let’s take how Silicon Valley deliberately has a high use of H-13B visa use, while totally ignoring the pool talent of Americans. In fact, they created a ghetto setting all around that area by ” raising property values and housing costs to the extreme that ordinary people making wages under Silicon Valley “normal” tech wages have no affordable housing. I am using the standard of cost of housing to be 30% of total monthly wages. Housing is one area that is extremely overpriced and ignored. I just hope we haven’t gone back to the pre-French revolution era of the rich being so rich, they totally ignored anyone who wasn’t rich as so beneath them that they closed them off from access to bettering themselves,
Back to the loopholes used by companies who hired via H-13B visa, they will place an employment ad listing job for the required period of time while also applying for a set number of H-13B so they can get candidates for the job from overseas. Because of the use of computers to vet candidates, the company can “claim” they can’t find adequately qualified employees, never letting anyone know they deliberately put disqualifiers for the computer program to eliminate any potential employees ( age, race, gender, etc all hidden under specially worded questions).
These H-13B visas are also used by the agricultural community for those seasonal jobs for planting, tending and harvesting crops even though they usually hire the same people every year because raising them to a year-round employee status means added labor cost. This is also why the high-ended tech companies like to hired via H-13B visa paying that cost upfront because they work it into the salary of this contractual employee. You have to see the actual take-home paycheck to see how much less their actual pay is compared to what the companies would have to pay an American worker. Think of how an employee pays a headhunter form salary.
There’s no help for the employee who comes here for the job on an H-13B visa to achieve full citizenship, as that’s all on the employee for the cost of this and doing so, means they have to be paid differently at a higher cost to employers. Sorry to say this but HR is complicit in this ruse.