If your company decides to hire a foreign national to work in the United States then there is a long arduous process that must take place in order to meet the requirements of the PERM labor certification practice. Failing to do so can result in the Department of Labor knocking on your company’s door and they will not be delivering good news. In order to make sure this does not happen you will need to put in some planning when it comes to your PERM advertising. Here is how you can ensure that you have a fairly smooth process.
Recruitment
A good place to start with your planning is in the ads phase since that is quite literally where you have to start during the permanent labor certification process. You will need to be prepared to write a thorough job description, which should not be too hard as this is required for basically any normal job advertisement as well. From there you will need to have a prevailing wage determination ready so that you can ensure that you are offering an accurate and fair job payment.
Then the last chunk of steps in the recruitment process will have you handling the review and tracking of resumes and interviews, and the complement of the recruitment report. All of this requires that you have the manpower of documentation capabilities of sorting through and documenting potentially hundreds of resumes and dozens of interviews.
Know Your Wait Times
An important thing to recognize is that this is not a fast process and can take many months to complete from start to finish. That is why planning ahead is so important because it allows you to reduce the amount of time that you will need to complete all of the necessary steps. Once you have completed the recruitment report and everything that led up to it, you have to send it off to the Department of Labor which can then take anywhere from three to seven months to approve the application.
Associated Costs
As with seemingly anything that deals with the government this process does cost money. How much varies depending on where you are located, what mediums you choose to post your advertisement, and if you hire a professional group to handle it for you or not.
That means in addition to setting aside sufficient time and manpower, you also have to make sure that you are setting aside sufficient money as well. By doing all of this preplanning you can help to eliminate or at least reduce the number of struggles and headaches that might arise from tackling the permanent labor certification process.
