Anyone who has ever been interested in hiring a foreign national to bring on board with their company has likely heard the terms immigration ads and PERM advertising. These refer to the process that is known as Program Electronic Review Management (PERM). This is a extremely detailed process that includes a lot of very intricate steps. One bad move can end up having your entire application rejected, which is why it is so important that you do your research and know exactly what it is that you need to be doing.
One way in which you can make the process so much easier is by hiring an attorney or company who specializes in immigration advertising and the other parts of the PERM labor certification process. But until then, you can simply read through this detailed guide about what to expect from the PERM process.
Job Classification
The very first step of the PERM process begins with the classification of the job itself. There are two different categories that your job opening can fit into. The first being professional, which means that the job generally requires a minimum education of a bachelor’s degree, and the second being nonprofessional, which means that it generally does not require a higher level of formal education.
Depending on which category the job you are offering falls under, it will determine the exact recruiting process that you have to go through. Sometimes, even with a lack of certain higher education requirements, your job will still fall under the category of professional due to the classification system laid out by the Department of Labor (DOL).
Job Orders
After properly figuring out what category your job fits into, it is the time to create your job description and job order. What this requires is a detailed description of the roles and responsibilities for the job and the requirements for the position. Once you have this created, you need to promote it in a public forum.
The job order must be placed with the State Workforce Agency (SWA) for at least 30 days to properly fulfill the government’s requirements. You can sufficiently prove that you have met this time sensitive criteria by tracking and documenting the dates from the SWA’s website, although the job order dates on the official form will likely be more than enough proof.
Advertising
One of the more complicated areas of the PERM application process comes when it is time to start advertising. This might seem surprising, but it is simply because of all the rules that go along with what your advertisements have to include, where they have to be, and how long they have to be there.
An example of these intensive guidelines is that immigration advertising must appear in a general circulation newspaper on at least two Sundays. If the job is one that requires an advanced degree then you have to take these public appearances even further. In addition to having to include the ad in a Sunday paper at least once, you have to include it in a national professional journal so that it has even more opportunities to be seen by qualified candidates.
If the job is for an area that is too small to have a regular Sunday newspaper then you do not have to worry because there are steps to help guide you through this dilemma. One example of this is that you can post in the newspaper in the area that has the widest circulation out of all of the other publications. But an important thing to keep in mind is that this only applies to rural areas and not suburban ones.
Internal Posting
In addition to creating the job ads that you need to post in the newspapers, there are job postings that need to be shared on your own company’s site as part of the internal job posting. Not only does it need to be posted, but it must remain there for a minimum of 10 consecutive business days. In addition to that, the posting is accomplished with the disclaimer that the posting is part of a PERM application.
The internal posting contains basically the same information as the advertisements with the only main difference being that the advertisements have the option of containing the wage of the job whereas this internal posting makes this necessary information. Plus if the job that you are hiring for is part of a union, then the bargaining representative must be properly notified of the posting within a reasonable amount of time.
Extra Steps for Professional Jobs
The advertising steps that have been mentioned up to this point apply to all kinds of jobs, whether they are classified as professional or unprofessional. There are additional advertisement steps that apply only to jobs that are classified as professional. When the role that you are hiring for is one of these positions, then you must promote your job posting in at least three of the following places: job fairs, employer’s website, job search website other than the employer’s, on-campus recruiting, trade or professional organizations, private employment firms, an employee referral program, a notice of the job at a campus placement office, local and ethnic newspapers, and radio and television advertisements.
Commencing Interviews
One of the last major steps of the PERM process involves reviewing the resumes and interviewing qualified candidates. All of the U.S. candidates who applied for the position and have the necessary qualifications must be properly considered before the company moves on to looking at foreign nationals.
If at any point they reject a U.S. candidate from consideration then those reasons must be carefully and officially recorded so that the DOL can better understand your reasoning for the decision. If they do like the reason that you rejected a candidate, then they might reject your entire application, so make sure that you are only rejecting candidates for very important reasons.
