Devising a Corporate Immigration Policy
If you are an SME business you may not have a corporate immigration policy. In this blog, our Immigration Solicitors outline why having a corporate immigration policy may help your business.
UK Online and London-Based Immigration Solicitors and Sponsorship Licence Lawyers
For immigration advice call OTS Solicitors on 0203 959 9123 or contact us online.
Why SMEs need a corporate immigration policy
Unless you are a PLC you don’t need a corporate immigration policy. That’s a view held by many SME business owners. If your business is heavily reliant on recruiting from overseas, such as a care home, nursing home or construction business, or in a sector where highly skilled specialist employees need to be recruited for research and development roles from overseas, your company may benefit from putting a corporate immigration policy in place.
A business immigration policy can assist with outlining:
- Whether your company has a sponsor licence and its remit
- The types of roles and levels of seniority where recruiting from overseas or transferring existing overseas-based employees to the UK is financially feasible and within the scope of the sponsor licence
- Who has authority within the company to authorise sponsored overseas recruitment
- The overseas sponsored recruitment process
- Employment of non-sponsored workers from overseas such as job applicants in the UK on a Family Visa, Student Visa or Graduate Visa or those with settled status under the EU Settlement Scheme
- Risk management in the overseas recruitment process
- Legal compliance
- Employment contract considerations for overseas recruits
- Policies on paying overseas job applicants incentives, such as payment of the Skilled Worker Visa application fee, immigration health surcharge, travel costs to the UK, Dependant Visa costs
- Onboarding recruits from overseas
- Managing sponsor licence compliance with the employee’s right to confidentiality
- Extending immigration-related time-limited contracts of employment and Work Visas
- Supporting overseas or sponsored workers with settlement applications
- The interplay between the corporate immigration policy and other policies, such as your policy on conducting right-to-work checks, HR policy on HR file contents and retention, working from home policy or holiday policy. For example, are overseas workers allowed to work from home and does that policy extend to working from their home country if they want to extend the time spent overseas on a family holiday
The benefits of a corporate immigration policy
Spending time devising a corporate immigration policy is an investment that should reap long-term rewards:
- Reduced risk of the company falling foul with sponsor licence compliance
- Strategic approach to overseas recruitment and overseas staff retention should reduce the overall recruitment cost
- Lower risk of grievances being raised by either sponsored or non-sponsored staff
- Streamlined and clear process support your HR staff and key personnel
- Savings on the use of Employment Solicitors and Sponsorship Licence Lawyers to deal with employment and business immigration-related issues
Writing your corporate immigration policy
Your corporate immigration policy needs to be bespoke to your business. It needs to tie in with any existing policies or other policies may need to be tweaked to ensure they are consistent with the corporate immigration policy.
Our Sponsorship Licence Lawyers can help your business by helping you draw up your policy or reviewing its contents. We can do that as a stand-alone service, as part of our provision of Immigration Law Training for your company or in conjunction with our Sponsor Licence Management Service.
We support a range of businesses of varying sizes from start-ups to multi-generational family businesses with all their employment and business immigration law needs. Our corporate immigration law expertise includes a wealth of experience in advising on business immigration in sectors such as healthcare, hospitality and construction.
We are happy to talk to business owners and HR directors about how our assistance with your developing a corporate immigration policy can help you streamline and organise your recruitment from overseas to make the process easier, reduce risk and increase your profit margin.
UK Online and London-Based Immigration Solicitors and Sponsorship Licence Lawyers
For immigration advice call OTS Solicitors on 0203 959 9123 or contact us online.
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