How to find a company sponsor visa in the United States. Tips and tricks

Article for those who want to move to work in the United States. On Habré there are several good articles about job search in America. Here I will try to add my own experience to them and share several tricks that helped me get a long-awaited job offer.

First I will tell you about work visas, and then how and where to look for an employer.

Visas

There are 4 basic work visas: H-1B, O-1, J-1 and L-1. All these visas are issued by your employer. Briefly describe each of them.

H-1B

Perhaps the most popular work visa. To obtain it you need to have a profile education or 12 years of work experience.
Pros:

• The only work visa you can transfer to another employer without receiving it again.

Minuses

• The biggest disadvantage of this visa is the availability of quotas. In total, 65'000 visas are issued annually + 20'000 visas for those who have graduated from the magistracy in the USA. At the same time, more than 200,000 applications for this visa are submitted each year. You can apply only for 1 week per year - from April 1 to April 7.
• Even if you pass the lottery and get into the quota, you will not be able to enter the United States before October 1.
• Your wife / husband will receive an H-4 visa, under which they cannot legally work in the United States.
• The administration of President Trump has begun to complicate the process of obtaining and extending an H-1B visa.

O-1

“Visa for talented people”. To obtain an O-1 visa you must meet 3 of the 8 criteria , here are some of them:

• Speeches at conferences.
• Publications in specialized editions.
• The presence of professional awards.

Pros:

• The visa does not include quotas and can be obtained throughout the year.

Minuses

• Visa with the highest requirements for the candidate.
• If you want to change your employer, you will have to re-apply for a visa.
• Your wife / husband will receive an O-3 visa that they cannot legally work in the United States.
  You can read the story of Alexander Kirov 's relocation on an O-1 visa.

J-1

Visa for internships and recent university graduates. Often companies transport programmers on this visa and then transfer you to H-1B or O-1.
Pros:

• The easiest to get a visa.
• Your wife / husband will receive a J-2 visa for which they can legally work in the United States.

Minuses

• A visa is issued for a maximum of one year.
• If you want to change your employer, you need to re-apply for a visa.

About moving on a J-1 visa is described in detail in this article .

L-1

Visa is significantly different from the previous three. L-1 visa for internal transfer of an employee from another country to the United States within the same company. That is, you must work for at least a year at a company office in another country, after which the company can transfer you to your office in the USA.
Pros:

• Your wife / husband will receive an L-2 visa for which they can legally work in the United States.

Minuses

• Visa does not imply a change of employer.

There is also a visa for F-1 students. There are many cheap universities in Silicon Valley and in New York, which after 6 months of study will issue you a work permit for about a year. After training, you can work for another year and a half, during which time you will need to transfer to one of the work visas. The path is quite real, but since I personally did not move through an F-1 visa, I can give a link to a company that helps in finding cheap universities in Silicon Valley.

For more information about the visa can be read here or on the website of the US Immigration Service.

Search for an employer.

Based on the visas offered by the US Immigration Service, there are several ways to move, for each employer search will be different.

Briefly about the visa L-1. For her, you need to find an employer in Russia, which has an office in the United States, and he will be ready to transport you. These are large food companies (for example, Microsoft) or large consulting companies (for example, EPAM).

Further, I will consider only finding an employer for H-1B, O-1 and J-1 visas. I consider them together, because the script for the job offer for these visas is the same: you need an employer in the USA who will be ready to transport you and sponsor your visa. In fact, there are many such companies, but it is important to know where and how to look for them.

If you have the opportunity, come to the USA and personally communicate with potential employers, but in the absence of a work permit it is unlikely that such a venture would give you a big advantage. There are companies that disagree completely on the interview via Skype, but they are less and less. Large IT companies, if they need to, bring you to an office in America for an interview. Therefore, you can easily search for your future employer while in Russia.

What to write in the resume?

Remember, the main goal of a resume is to generate interest in HR. I will list a few points that helped my resume go through the filters of American HR:

• Do not download resumes from hh.ru and LinkedIn. It is necessary to make everything from scratch.
• Do not write all the companies in which you worked. Even if they are all profiled. Enough of the last three. Well, or three of the largest and most interesting. This is necessary in order to fit a resume on two pages, ideally one. You can tell about the rest of the experience at the interviews, and the main task at this stage is to receive an invitation for an interview.
• For each company / project you need to add at least 4-5 points of your personal achievements. Show with what technologies worked. If you write unit tests in all companies, do not write about it three times. Better to remember something else.
• If you know any other technologies (at least you watched a couple of tutorials and can reproduce it) and this did not fit into the description of your projects, write about them separately. The more points coincide with the job description of HR, the more chances to get the coveted call.
• What contact information to add to the resume? I tried various combinations of Skype, email and US phone numbers. The US phone number can be purchased on Skype for $ 20 for 3 months. But I didn’t give me any particular advantages, because in the end it was all about the absence of a work permit. As a result, I removed it from the resume and left only Skype and email. Try different options until you understand which one works exactly in your case.
• No need to add information about gender, age, and especially a photo. HR in the United States will not consider resumes with this information. The fact is that employers do not want their refusal to be in any way connected with discrimination.

To all these tips, I would add my life hack. It is important to show your future employer your international (better American) experience. But how to do this if you have never been to the United States? In fact, almost everyone can do this. Recall the projects you have worked on. Most likely they were used not only in Russia. Then in the summary, you can specify not only Russia, but also the country where your project is popular.

Also, your company may have an office in another country. Let there even one sales manager sit and from him the company gets 1 client in 5 years. Be sure to write this in the summary: MyCompanyName, New York, USA / Moscow, Russia. This technique will allow you to significantly increase the number of responses.

Link to my final resume , which helped me find a job.

Do I need a cover letter?

Everyone says they need, but I personally did without him. At first I wrote a big cover letter, tried to adapt it for each vacancy. But in the end I made the following email, which turned out to be more efficient and more convenient than the cover letter, and used it.

Dear Google Hiring Team,

I am Software Developer with 5 years of iOS experience. I am very interested in the iOS Developer Position, which I found at your company careers website. My qualifications and experience match your specifications almost exactly.

Please take a moment to review my up-to-date resume.
')
Also, you can look at my last projects:
// two or three links to your strongest projects

It would be a pleasure to discuss this exciting opportunity.

Regards,
Eugene Trapeznikov
// your Skype, email, links on LinkedIn and GitHub.

Where to look for jobs.

Get ready to be more flexible and try to get not only in the top 5 companies. Without a work permit, you must be prepared for a longer search for a company that wants to sponsor your work visa. Most likely, at the first stage you will receive only 1-2 telephone interviews with HR for the 50 sent resumes. Try changing your resume and cover letter / email. Look at the conversion of different resume options and send the one to which HR is more responsive. It is also important to determine as many places as possible where your potential employers are. Below is a list of the resources that worked best in my case.

Personal list of companies
The first and most obvious option is to write to all the companies that you like. In the US, there are a lot of IT giants that everyone knows about. They have beautiful offices and many interesting tasks. And all of them are easy to transport you to the United States. Email everyone: Airbnb, Foursquare, Instacart, Lyft, Uber, Google, Facebook, Square, Dropbox, Amazon ...

LinkedIn
The most popular networking site in the United States. Here you can find job openings for companies of any size - LinkedIn Job Search . But there is no separate filter for companies that provide work visas, so finding a potential employer here will be a little more difficult. But to bypass this site can not be. Anyone who is looking for work in the states is required to actively use LinkedIn, because it is used by HR and all of your future colleagues.

A small life hack to fill out a LinkedIn profile. Try to put in a location: San Jose, California or New York, New York. This should increase the number of incoming messages from HR.

Angellist
Perhaps now it is one of the most popular sites for posting jobs in startups - AngelList Startup Jobs . Be sure to create and maximize your account there. How useful the site is for you: in the search, under the Job Type filter, you can specify companies that are willing to sponsor a visa. Even in the Location filter, you can select companies that are willing to work with you deleted. When both those and those companies run out write to everyone else. More resumes sent - more chances to get a job offer and more experience in interviewing.

Stackoverflow
On the most popular site for programmers there is also a section for job search - https://stackoverflow.com/jobs . And similarly with AngelList, you can separately find companies that are ready to transport you to the USA. In the search filters, open the Perks section and select all three options in the Location Options: Offers remote, Visa sponsor, Offers relocation. All vacancies on StackOverflow filtered by these criteria - Remote Developer Jobs Offering Reconstruction in United States - Stack Overflow

Companies that have already applied for H1B.
The immihelp.com site has a section with companies that sponsored earlier H1B visas - H1B Sponsors - Database of Companies that have sponsored H1B or LCAs in the past . All these companies will not have a very important barrier for us - they are ready to hire non-US employees. You need to choose the year of filing a visa and enter the desired vacancy in the Job Title field: iOS, Android, Frontend, Backend ... Here, for example, all the companies that sponsored H1B visas in 2017 for backend developers .

I took each company, found its site and looked, whether there are now open vacancies. But even if there were no vacancies on the site, I still wrote to HR.

Search by recommendation.
In large companies, like Google, your resume is almost impossible to get through without the recommendation of an internal employee. Yes, and in smaller companies a summary of the recommendations will be considered much faster and more thoroughly. In addition, almost every company has bonuses for employees for hiring a new employee on their recommendation. Lift your notebook, open contacts in the phone and look for anyone who has already moved or works / worked in a company with an office in the United States.

And another small comment. Do not search for vacancies that perfectly match your resume. If you can put a tick in front of 50% of the requirements, feel free to send a resume. If you have more than 90%, HR is likely to find that you are already too high for a job, you will be bored and you are unlikely to be invited for an interview.

Where I could not find a job

There are several resources that everyone advises, but I personally have not received a single useful contact for them. I tried to adapt the resume and nothing worked, but maybe you can.

Bulletin Board
In the US, there are several resources that work 1 in 1 as hh.ru. The biggest ones are Dice , Monster , Indeed and CareerBuilder . Now ZipRecruiter is gaining popularity. I created accounts on all these sites and actively searched for vacancies myself.

Craigslist
This is the main bulletin board in the US (like Avito in Russia). There is also a section for job search. Feature of the site - for each city you need to create a separate resume. I created a resume for all major cities: New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Seattle, Dallas, Austin.
Here you need to look for jobs - New York software / qa / dba / etc - craigslist .
And here is your resume - New York resumes - craigslist .

Hacker news
Every month, on the 1st of Hacker News, two entries are posted: Who is hiring? and Who wants to be hired . In the first you need to look for potential employers, in the second - to place your resume.

There are companies in which I would not even advise trying to look for work - Indian body shops. These are companies that resell you to others, while taking on 30% of your salary. There are big companies - Infosys and Wepro, there are hundreds of small companies. Most likely, as soon as you post your resume somewhere, you will begin to write / call hundreds of representatives of such companies. Remember, they are looking for people on short-term contracts and almost never sponsor visas.

What to do now?

• Prepare a resume.
• Fill out accounts on all possible job search sites.
• Mail every day 50 resumes.

I led the table with all the companies where I sent my resume. It also took notes after each stage of the interview. This will help keep your finger on the pulse, track the effectiveness of different sources to find an employer, as well as understand exactly what you need to improve (resume, communication with HR or the technical component).

While waiting for an invitation to be interviewed:

• Get ready for a technical interview. I often met that after telephone screening and before the interview they give a couple of tasks to solve on the Hacker Rank . I advise you to solve at least 2-3 problems in your programming language in order to get acquainted with the interface. Ideally, solve a couple of tasks every day for Hacker Rank.
• Pull up English. It is often recommended to watch TV shows in English. I would also advise you to connect podcasts, they will allow you to better understand the speech without pictures. You will often communicate on Skype in the format of a phone call, and it is much more difficult than with video (at least at the very beginning).
• Start communicating NOT with those companies where you want to go the most. Get first practice from interviewing those who have a lower priority for you personally.

useful links

• Another good article about finding a job in the US - Moving a developer to the USA: finding a job, getting a visa, and the cost of living .
• Be sure to read all the posts from the progblog on Habré .
• Service for finding remote work - weworkremotely .

I am waiting in the comments for more links to services where you could find an employer who sponsored your visa.