Writing accurate, compelling, and immigration-ready job descriptions is challenging for any company growing out of a chaotic immigration program. But it’s worth it.
Inconsistent descriptions lead to all sorts of trouble, including:
- Confusion among internal stakeholders,
- A disconnect between your recruiters, hiring managers, and People team,
- Confusion among international applicants and employees,
- Ineligible applicants making it too far through the interview process,
- Additional time and costs to revise job descriptions for the application process, and
- A higher rate of Requests for Evidence (RFEs).
Your People team and other stakeholders may be working on role standardization and immigration-ready job descriptions already. You may have hopes to build a job bank as part of optimizing your immigration program. Yet are you failing to reach your goals?
It takes time to learn what your business should include in—or leave out of—job descriptions, especially as immigration regulations and enforcement change. It also takes practice. Crafting immigration-ready job ads is a skill your team strengthens over time with your immigration provider’s help.
When Your Immigration-Ready Job Descriptions Miss the Mark
It’s common (and understandable) to find your emerging immigration program struggles with immigration-relevant job descriptions. Most teams don’t fix this problem overnight or without help.
Your team may run into issues, such as:
Stakeholders have to adjust descriptions for the immigration process
You may think your job descriptions are immigration-ready, yet find you have to revise them for the application.
A common misstep is failing to include your immigration counsel in the drafting process. Instead, you connect with your immigration provider to move forward with an application, and then they advise you to change the description to improve your chance of success. That costs your team time and effort.
Updating a description may also force you to re-evaluate your candidate. For example, your team might realize your candidate’s education, training, experience, and other qualifications don’t fit your new description as well as you hoped.
Stakeholders aren’t using the immigration-vetted descriptions
If everyone in the company isn’t on the same page, immigration-vetted job descriptions go to waste. Some stakeholders might change the content, not realizing the language is specific and intentional.
Others may use old descriptions from previous job postings or create new, casual descriptions during the recruiting process.
Your team receives RFEs
Your stakeholders may think they’ve written excellent job descriptions only to run into trouble during the application process. The Trump administration’s policies increased RFEs, and these requests don’t necessarily mean your stakeholders are doing anything wrong. But keeping up with immigration policies, enforcement, and attitudes, and carefully crafting job descriptions helps reduce the risk of RFEs.
For example, H1-B visas require a specialty occupation. It should be clear from the job description that the position is a specialty occupation in line with federal definitions. To do this, your internal stakeholders must understand the three methods of proving specialty occupations and which method they’re relying on.
Improve Predictability with an Immigration-Ready Job Bank
No matter where you are in the process of creating a consistent immigration program, you can improve your job descriptions in a few steps:
- Identify successful job descriptions: Review your job ads and pinpoint those you’re confident are ready for the application process. If you’ve used these descriptions in the past, they may have received few or no RFEs.
- Collaborate with an immigration provider to improve descriptions: Identify your unsuccessful job ads, meaning those that led to RFEs or required adjustments for the application. Also, consider positions that will need immigration-ready descriptions in the future. Then, work with your immigration counsel to draft these job posts with immigration regulations in mind.
- Establish a job bank: Create a central resource that your internal team members will use to find immigration-vetted job descriptions. This resource can also help your team craft ads when new positions open up.
- Formalize job description policies: Create and inform internal stakeholders of the company’s job description policy. Recruiters and hiring managers should use descriptions from the job bank or have a predefined workflow for creating a new post. No one should post a position eligible for sponsorship without knowing you’ve vetted it.
Can Your Immigration Provider Help?
Beyond a few simple steps, strategic immigration partners can help you further optimize your immigration program to serve talent acquisition goals by crafting a standardized approach to complement your immigration policy.
If you haven’t already, now is the time to consider partnering with a comprehensive immigration platform.
The right immigration provider provides functionality, such as automation and customizable workflows. But more importantly, it offers immigration expertise and acts as a strategic partner in building a consistent immigration program.
Content in this publication is not intended as legal advice, nor should it be relied on as such. For additional information on the issues discussed, consult a Bridge-affiliated partner attorney or another qualified legal professional.
