Traditionally, opening up the job market to immigrants has been fraught with complications, partially because of protectionist policies regarding American workers, and partly because of abuses of foreign workers carried about by American companies. But within the last 20 years, more and more companies are seeking out qualified employees from other countries to fill skilled positions within their company. But the process is fraught with regulations, and is difficult for many employers to manage. While large scale corporations have legal teams on hand that can manage the legal requirements of placing the ads properly, and jumping through all the necessary hoops, many smaller and mid sized businesses end up hiring ad agencies that specialize in immigration ads. Even with more lenience in the process of recruiting from foreign countries, the process must be thoroughly adhered to, requires exacting language, and even one small pitfall can blow up the entire hiring process.
Nonetheless, as of 2011, the DOL has begun to allow employers to recruit prospective employees in special handling cases from overseas through electronic means, which differs greatly from years prior. This probably has much to do with the quantity of jobs that are now posted on the internet, and industry reliance on the internet as medium to network with prospective employees. Nonetheless, the DOL has instituted some restrictions on the process and those include:
- The job must be advertised for no less than 30 days on the journal’s website.
- The company must provide documentation that advertisement was placed in an electronic national journal for at least 30 days by including evidence of the start and end dates of the advertisement’s placement alongside the text of the advertisement.
Initially, the DOL required that the journal that the employer was placing the ad in be freely accessible to public without subscription or membership charge, but later rescinded that condition.
It’s important to recognize that this only applies to the handling college professors and is the result of a key decision where BALCA determined that holding special handling cases to the stricture of only print ads put a “substantive requirement on employers that is not supported by PERM regulations.” In other words, it was too hard.
It is hoped that in the future, some of requirements for overseas recruiting can be relaxed, but it’s difficult to discern the future of that prospect given the current political climate in the US and the current administration. While it’s apparent that many companies choose to recruit overseas because of a lack of prospects domestically, the focus on American jobs, and an America first policy, may make the requirements stiffer, and there appears to be little incentive to relax the regulations
