F-1 job search tips that you may not know

This article is for you if you hope to work and stay in the US after graduation, most applicable for juniors, seniors and recent grads in STEM. I’ll breifly touch on the popular routes, but there are lots of great articles out there on these. I’ll share my experience and empahsize the lesser known facts, strategies, and options — things that will help you increase your odds in landing a job and staying in the US for the long run. This is an high-level overview based on my own job search experience and learning from the experiences of other international students, meant to expand options that you may have not known or been exposed before, but won’t fill in the details.

Knowing the game

Do your research, know how immigration through employment works, so you know where to apply force where it matters.

The most popular route is to convert the F1 student visa to H1b work visa, then apply for Permenant Residency (PR), a.k.a green card, but this relies a bit on luck because of the change of being selected in the H1b lottery each year is roughly ~20% and trending downwards.

Some rather rare but great options,

Apply for Permenant Residency (PR) directly while on OPT. If you are not Indian or Chinese, there’s a good > 80% chance that you can get a green card within 3 years of your OPT, so prioritize employers who can sponsor green card directly from F1. These employer are rare but you can find them.
If you are employed at an institution of higher education or its affiliated or related nonprofit entities, a nonprofit research organization, or a government research organization. You don’t have to go through the H1b lottery. You are gauranteed a H1b as long as your employer sponosor.
If you are talented in your field and have established some credentials, consider National Interest Waiver (NIW) or O1 Visa. Timeline to get PR from these are a lot faster. You can self-petition (no employer sponsorship required) for NIW, EB-1 and EB-2.

Lesser known facts,

You can always convince an employer who has not sponsored before to sponosor. See “negotiating”.
While on OPT, you DON’T need sponosorship, so if you’re goal is to gain some work experience and go to grad school, you can simply apply for any job you like.
You can be self-employed, volunteer or start a business, while on the first year of your (post completion) OPT. On STEM opt, you have to be employered for at least 20 hours per job.
There may be country specific rules that applies to you, so talk to other folks from the same place.

Regardless of getting H1b or PR, your employer will have to file a PERM application to show that you as a foreign worker are not negatively impacting the US labour market. The filing data is public, so if you want to find employers that have sponsored internationals in the past, the historical data of PERM application data is published by DOL is the ground truth. Goverment data is not the most accessible, so you can also try https://h1bgrader.com/ and its sponsor searches.

Form your strategy

Negotiating

General thumb is that for any employer to sponsor you, they go through some paper work, pay legal fees and necessary processing fees. For them the cost is roughly 5k for H1b, and 10k for PR, so if you can find a way to convince your employer that you can add that amount of value (which seems like a lot for an individual but is not that much on a corporate scale), it would seem reasonable that they sponsor you. Think that if your compensation is 100k and you can be 5-10% more effective than what’s expected.

Develop a Niche

For CS majors, the market is flooded with general developers, so it’s easier to standout if you have some specialization like cybersecurity, machine learning, etc.

Have Plan A, B and C

Things change, be prepared since you have limited unemployment days, 90 on OPT, and 60 on H1b. For instance, tech companies have mass layoff in response to markets. If they do, because of labour law requirements, they will have to stop there PR sponsorship process. Because certain things are not in your control, have a few backup if plan A didn’t work out. Some options to consider are graduate school, volunteer, or Day 1 CPT.

Start Early. Be consistent. Be good.

This is nothing new, but worth emphasizing. If you are really good at what you do, and have established some results, jobs and sponsorship will come find you, not the other way around.