Recruit Top Engineering Talent through Visa Sponsorship
Detailed Visa Sponsorship Guide for Corporate Employers explaining what is visa sponsorship and how to best sponsor international employees for US visas. Updated in April 2025.
By:
Chelsea Spinos
Reviewer:
Nicole Gunara
8 min read • April 16, 2025
Key takeaways
Hiring top engineers is challenging— the talent pool is competitive, startups often can't match big tech compensation, and HR teams often lack the capacity to navigate complex immigration laws.
Common visa options like H-1B and PERM are viable but have tradeoffs.
Innovative strategies for tech companies: Leverage O-1B visas for exceptional talent to unlock team visas; offering early green card sponsorship can attract AI/ML professionals.
Long-term recommendations to develop a strong talent pipeline:
Recruiting graduate students (CPT/OPT)
Establishing cap-exempt nonprofit entities
Creating foreign affiliates (L-1 visas)
Everyone is chasing the same top candidates, and highly skilled engineering talent is extremely hard to come by, even after you’ve decided to open up your search internationally. Startups and smaller organizations are struggling to compete on compensation - buzzy companies like OpenAI can afford to wow candidates with extremely compelling salaries, bonuses, and stock option packages, making it difficult for small HR and recruiting teams to attract and close their top candidates. Large, established employers like FAANG organizations also rely on foreign talent and have strong brand recognition abroad. So it's important to really consider what practical options your team has to be able to successfully compete with these big players.
U.S. immigration law is and will continue to be complex, and most HR leaders and their teams don't have the bandwidth to become experts on this ever-changing topic in addition to their core job responsibilities. However, a baseline level of understanding of the scope of options and their various pros and cons can really help accelerate an organization’s hiring throughput - even if ultimately you work with a specialized law firm or consultant, achieving a bit of fluency in this space will help control costs and make the whole process much easier on all parties involved.
Visa Type
Who It's For
Key Requirements
Timeline
Duration
Notes
H-1B (Specialty Occupations)
Skilled professionals in tech, finance, engineering, etc.
Job offer + Bachelor’s degree or equivalent++
~6–8 months (March lottery → Oct start)
Max 6 years
$4K–$6K
Annual lottery (85,000 spots)
Visa Type
Who It's For
Key Requirements
Timeline
Duration
Notes
PERM (Employer- sponsored Green Card)
Long-term / permanent hires
Labor market test to prove no qualified U.S. workers
12–18+ months (backlog has recently gotten worse)
Leads to Green Card
~$8K–$10K+
Multi-step: ads → DOL → USCIS
Visa Type
Who It's For
Key Requirements
Timeline
Duration
Notes
L-1 (Intra-Company Transfer)
Multinational execs, managers, specialists
1+ year at affiliated foreign entity
2–4 months (can expedite)
L-1A: 7 yrs; L-1B: 5 yrs
~$8K–$9K
No lottery; requires company relationship abroad
As you can see above, some of the major cons of the standard processes are that they are primarily most effective for much larger organizations that can afford to move more slowly, pay more in legal fees, and/or structurally have more options available to them (such as multiple foreign affiliates).
Recruit from universities and establish internship/trainee programs for graduate students
Students on F-1 visas can be provided CPT (work authorization in school). STEM graduates get 3 years of work authorization after graduation.
Many companies initially feel that this pathway isn’t relevant to them - they don’t want intern or associate level hires and are looking for more senior talent. Don’t forget that this can apply to graduate students as well! Candidates with advanced degrees can be excellent senior hires. By the time a foreign national has decided to enter a master's or PhD program in the United States, they have typically previously amassed several years of work experience, certainly much more than an average undergraduate.
You don’t even necessarily need to wait until they have graduated from their program: A grad student on an F-1 is able to go to their university, tell them that they want to work full time - this can be done while they're doing their courses or wrapping up their thesis.
A note on timing: People who graduate from STEM degrees are provided a 3 year work authorization to work for an organization. If a student is interested in working for you, you now have someone who's at least committed for 3 years, and we can simultaneously start leveraging the other pathways that we mentioned earlier to get them even more time to remain in the United States.
Establish a non-profit organization dedicated to research associated with your company
This is a strategy for skipping the lottery process while also providing an additional layer of stability for your employees and your company, just in case something happens where an individual doesn't win the lottery for an H-1B and doesn't qualify for any of the other alternative visas. Sometimes, we’ve seen multiple companies unite to create one shared nonprofit research organization, which lowers the burden of investment on any one organization.
Essentially, if you have a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to research, employees who were not selected for the H1B lottery can then be sponsored by that nonprofit even for a 5 hr/week part time role, and concurrently have a full time, 40 hr/week job at any private organization, including your own organization without doing the lottery. This is because the nonprofit is cap-exempt and therefore, exempt from the lottery process. Once you’re able to tell a job candidate that through this mechanism, you’re able to offer an immediate H-1B, you’ll become a well-known employer among top foreign talent.
We have seen a lot of organizations use this strategy to build their pipeline, because the unpredictability of the lottery is often the biggest obstacle for a lot of employers when it comes to retaining existing foreign talent as well as recruiting additional foreign talent.
Establish a foreign affiliated company (subsidiary, parent, affiliate, branch)
This would require foreign employees to first be trained for one year abroad before being able to be brought to the United States. The definition of an affiliate is just another organization that has the same common parent, or has common ownership with your organization, or exists as a branch of your company.
This is definitely long term as a solution because it does require a bit of an investment from the company, however, it really can establish a very good long term, consistent pipeline for foreign talent to work and reside in the United States.
If you’re interested in working with Manifest Law on launching any of these short- or long-term strategies for your HR and recruiting teams, you can learn more about our corporate immigration services here.
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