PERM advertising is all about formulating specific ad campaigns to reach the right audience for the available job. While it’s clear the company is interested in bringing a foreign national into the fold, they are obliged to do everything possible to make sure they are not taking said job away from a qualified domestic worker. There are ways of doing both, of course. For example, posting an ad in a rural newspaper for a highly skilled electrical engineering job does fulfill the PERM requirements and will probably go unanswered. This kind of intelligent advertising is something that an advertisement specialist will be able to advise a company on.
The Special Handling Category
While it might not be clear for those who have not gone through with PERM, the reality is that certain jobs have different application requirements. Posting a newspaper ad is not the proper procedure for jobs that fall into the ‘Special Handling’ category of PERM applications. There is a subsection of PERM known as the ‘Special Handling’ section that pertains only to teaching positions at universities. They represent a unique case because they strip away a lot of the restrictive elements present in a normal PERM application. Essentially the government is saying that American students should have the best profs in the world, no matter what.
There are a few particulars about the Special Handling category that deserve attention. In the first place, instead of having to post in newspapers, universities must follow standard university professor hiring procedures, posting the job on department bulletin boards and across internet job boards. While this might seem to make it easier, it also opens the door to a national audience, as the job posting must be included in a national professional journal.
In the second place, the positions are only available to tenure track professors. There will be no assistant professors making the jump from overseas through PERM, because due to their lack of experience they do not represent a higher quality teaching standard than American professors can provide. It’s really for academics who specialize in a certain field that are being offered a position at a school, perhaps to open their own department or institute of specific study. Applicants must be aware that the files need to be submitted within 18 months from when the formal decision has been made to grant them entry. Missing this deadline means re-applying.
In the third place, the same kinds of requirements exist for documenting the recruitment and interview process, as well as the prevailing wage determination. The benefit of the Special Handling case is that the description of the job can be more open-ended, as it is meant to be split between teaching and research. Many universities have used this special category of PERM to bring some of the leading academics to America.
