Good Characteristics of H1B visa Sponsoring Employer

There are good employers and bad employers. For anyone who has worked for a few years or changed jobs more than once knows that one has the potential to work for a great company and still have a miserable boss. For each of us the traits of a good employer might be slightly different to fit our personal needs at specific times in our lives. But here our focus is on those employers who specially import the employees from overseas h1b_employer_characteristics_small (such as India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines and Sri Lanka) to work in the IT fields, and such imported employees usually work as a consultants/contractors at a client side on the behalf of this employer.

Please note that this article only applies to the small-to-medium scale IT consulting companies. If you are working for a Fortune 500 Company or for a very big company then such a company does not get involved into finding ways to save money by offering reduced benefits only to H1B employees. To know types of IT employers that exist in the labor market, read this article Types of H1B Visa Employers.

Are you planning to process your H1B Work Visa with a new company or transfer your existing H1B visa to another company ? You need to know what would define a good employer when it comes to offering benefits. Here is the list.

You are not asked to pay any cost occurred for the H1B visa processing fee, lawyer fee, labor certification fee, etc. and any other visa processing fee for your dependents.
You are paid one-way air-fare to join the H1B employer. And you are also paid one way air-fare back to your home country in case you decide to terminate the employment and wish to go back to your home country on a permanent basis.
You are not asked to deposit any money or your original documents to begin your H1B visa processing.
Upon joining the company you are not asked to confiscate your passport to the employer.
The salary that has been offered to you is competitive, meaning that the similar salary would have been offered if your company would have hired someone equally qualified like you from the local labor market.
Your salary and health benefits start immediately as soon as you report to work for this H1B visa-sponsoring employer.
Your salary and benefits do not get reduced during the bench period. Also, your employer does not start threatening you if there is no immediate next project assignment available for you. The most eminent and worst threat is NOT used by employer, and the threat is that your salary will be terminated /reduced etc.
If your project at the client side ends prematurely or because of budget cuts at the client side, your position in the project terminates, your employer would be willing to understand it rather than making baseless claims like “it’s your sin or your work performance was poor” without any satisfactory evidence to prove such a claim.
You are offered at least 10 paid vacation days a year by your H1B visa sponsoring employer.
Your salary does not get reduced in the months of November or December as there are many holidays in this month.

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If you are working on an IT project as a consultant at the client side, and when client is observing a holiday , you are not asked to come to work/report to your employer’s office on a holiday.
You are paid the certification cost or training cost toward the technical area of your expertise at least once a year.
Your salary is reviewed annually without any begging exercise of salary raise at your end. You have been a cash cow for them, so employer is supposed to review it annually.
You are never taunted or ridiculed with a discouraging proud behavior from H1B visa sponsoring employer that we are the one who brought you in to this country; you should be thankful to us.
Any paid certification cost or your family trip to your home country should not be used by your employer as a rebuttal argument of not giving any salary raise.
You are not asked to sign an employment agreement in which you will be digging your own grave. For example, you cannot join any company within the 20-50 mile radius of your client/employer. Read the sample but real employment agreement to know how big this trap could be.
Because of your better work ethics and performance at the client side, you helped your H1B visa employer to place another consultant, in this case you should be paid the referral fees.
Employer offers a 401K plan with the matching contribution.
If your H1B visa is about to expire, and needs to be renewed again, such a renewal is done at free of cost.
Relocation costs are paid in full.
If your employer is sponsoring a Green Card, all the cost should be borne by the employer. Also, you are not asked to sign some nasty agreement that as long as you do not receive your Green Card, you MUST stay with the employer.
Your employer does not use your expertise to train some new consultants/contractors at free of cost.
If client is paying the overtime , make sure that you (the employee) do get paid the overtime.

Please note that it would be extremely hard to find all the above mentioned characteristics in almost any consulting company (aka Desi Company/Desi Employer). So one must be willing enough to settle for a little less. May be if you can find at least 60% to 70% of the characteristics, it’s worth it.

Also, those who said that they do follow all above or at least 60 to 70 percent, NEVER take any words orally; get it in to writing. If they tell you “we do it” then ask the prospective employer politely that “Could you please give me in writing ?”.

If the employer offers you a reference that you can talk with our consultant Senthil, he has been with us for 8 years or you may want to talk with Ali who has been with us for 6 years. Don’t talk with those references, these employees are nothing but loyal dogs of the employer and they would have always a good thing to say about the employer. Instead, ask the H1B employer to provide the email address, name, and contact number of employees who are no longer with them, meaning that those employees who were on H1B with this company and left to work for another company. These former employees can tell you real thing about this prospective H1B employer.

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