Last Updated on February 23, 2023
To understand if you have a healthy immigration program, start by taking a step back and comparing your practices to others’.
It’s important to look at what’s working for other employers in order to assess the success of your own immigration strategy. When you’re wondering how to know if your immigration program is healthy, a few key factors come into play.
How to know if you have a healthy immigration program
Are you in compliance?
It’s important to consider compliance as one of the main pillars of your immigration program. A strict adherence to compliance helps you avoid crippling fines and other penalties from immigration authorities in the U.S. and in countries around the world. Sound immigration compliance practices can lend insight into your financial health and vision for growth. A few compliance questions to start with could be:
- Do we know the most recent changes in U.S. immigration policy and their impact?
- What about in countries around the world where we send employees?
- What process do we have in case of a site audit?
- How are we managing employee status changes?
- How are we storing our immigration documentation?
- Do we have a plan in place in case of corporate changes?
- What process do we have for managing green card recruitment activities?
These are just starting questions. Dive deeper with our comprehensive Compliance Guide to determine how your immigration strategy measures up to best practices.
Do you have sufficient security?
In our 2018 Immigration Trends Report, we discovered that 62 percent of employers are making investments to prepare for increased security standards in the U.S. and beyond. Not to mention, 45 percent are requesting their immigration partners increase their data security. Include a thorough status check on the state of your data security when determining the health of your immigration program.
How are you managing cases?
Immigration case management is becoming more difficult every year, in the U.S. and when assigning employees abroad. In fact, we recently discovered that immigration-related cases have become more difficult over the last year. In fact, 85 percent of employers say that the current U.S. immigration system has had an impact on their efforts to hire and retain global talent, according to our 2018 Immigration Trends Report.
Managing multiple complex visa application processes can overwhelm HR teams, so your process matters for more efficiency. More than that, though, better case management can decrease time to hire, which means you’re not missing out on talent.
What are your reporting and forecasting practices?
Forecasting casework and costs associated with casework can help you determine where your organization will grow and where you may have a need for certain employees or skills in the future. These are the building blocks of a sustainable immigration plan.
If you’re not asking about, reporting on or forecasting areas of growth in your organization, you’re missing an opportunity to optimize future success by strategically hiring. (Not to mention, reports that document your needs can be quite handy to have in a needs-based immigration system like the United States has.)
Have you implemented an immigration policy?
It’s impossible to have a healthy immigration program if you don’t have an immigration policy to begin with.
Help guide your policy creation by watching our Creating an Immigration Policy for Your Organization webinar. In it, you’ll learn that three main facets to any immigration policy include determining which visas and green cards your company will sponsor, setting payment and reimbursement guidelines and developing a perk package.
To provide some additional context, our 2018 Immigration Trends Report found that 70 percent of employers are sponsoring green cards and 98 percent have changed their green card policy over the past year. Further, 88 percent of employers invest in immigration-related perks, with relocation expenses, housing and sponsoring dependent visas/green cards topping the list. You should also consult with your legal counsel to discuss the policy options that work best for your organization.
Download our complete Immigration Trends Report to see how you measure up to companies around the U.S.
Interested in how technology can help? Download our Immigration Management: Technology's Role During Times of Regulation Change eBook and contact us for a demo of the Envoy platform.
