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Hiring and retaining the best talent is key to a company's success. And an effective employment-based immigration program is the cornerstone to attracting the best talent. As your operations and needs in the immigration area expand, using technology in the space may help you alleviate the following pain points.
Fluctuating exorbitant firm fees
Time spent in processing documents and researching solutions to complicated immigration issues
Following up with stakeholders and keeping everyone informed
Risks of mishandling information and becoming noncompliant
Managing decentralized immigration efforts
Investment in an immigration platform should be about strategic returns. It should help you do your job better, mitigate risks and act as a strategic driver for talent growth.
Let's look at some of the many upsides of using technology to deal with immigration operations at your company -
High touch experience for employees
Employers care most about making sure that their foreign national employees are well informed and not worried about their immigration cases. An immigration platform provides a high touch experience for your employees, giving them transparency on each milestone, explaining what actions are needed and who is responsible. Each milestone is broken down into smaller progress markers that keep your employee informed and focused on growing your business.
Centralized Management
As the immigration program in your company grows, keeping the finance & HR departments, hiring managers and the recruiting team in sync becomes complicated. Hours are spent in back and forth email communication, where important information may sometimes be lost. Having a dedicated centralized system to track progress and communication saves time and reduces chaos.
Better Cost Forecasting & Planning
Reporting capabilities of the platform can help you forecast costs associated with the program. So, you are able to plan and budget your quarters better. Predicting how much you'd be spending in prevailing wages and in capped H-1B, L-1 or Green Card costs would help you and other executives make more informed decisions.
Automated Immigration Agility
Immigration is constantly changing and keeping up can be awfully hard sometimes. Further, submitting outdated or expired documents can result in costly delays. The immigration platform does the job for you by automatically adjusting the processes and associated fees and alerting you to things that need your attention. The platform makes sure that the information submitted is always up-to-date and in compliance with any new or changed regulations.
Real-Time Tracking & Reporting
Tracking important milestones for multiple employees can be frustrating, considering the stakeholders that need to be kept informed and critical of the process for the employee. A centralized dashboard to show what tasks you own and what's pending from the attorney or stakeholder's side gives you the power to act to keep the process moving. Further, gathering the data you need for a company-wide or visa-specific report from spreadsheets can be a painful process and potentially inaccurate. An immigration platform helps you pull and show this information in real time, with decision-oriented visuals, keeping stakeholders in the know and giving you visibility into the state of immigration at your company.
Faster response times
Process automation can not only help the company administration but also the associated case attorney/s. Communicating with law firms can be a full time job with back and forth emails and inquiry calls about the next steps. An immigration platform can send out automated alerts for pending and dependent tasks increasing the efficiency in response times. Further, with all information auto-populated in the forms, the attorney could not only save time in submitting the paperwork but also not worry about any errors. Thus, giving the attorneys time back that they can then spend responding to inquiries.
Automated PAF compliance
Since the Department of Labor (DOL) started allowing digital Public Access File (PAF) in 2017, it has become a preferred way to store these documents electronically using an online repository to avoid risking errors and to ensure better compliance. An immigration platform could easily assemble your public access files regularly, maintain it to send and receive notifications, to provide action items and see all your PAFs in once place.
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 WayLit-affiliated attorney or another qualified professional.