Developing a Corporate Immigration Policy

[Rahul Sharma]

Corporate immigration policies are important for an efficient recruitment process and help the migrant workers gain a positive perspective towards their organisation.

An effective organisational structure and policy can help reduce the risks involved, give better management, improve immigration policy implementation and assessment and help in achieving the compliance goals.

Understanding the corporate immigration policy?
A corporate immigration policy is a detailed documentation that includes all the processes with the company either recruitment or hiring of foreign nationals. It provides a backbone to building a robust framework for sponsorship compliance, reducing the threats of legal enforcements from the UK visa and immigration and gives consistent management across the organisation.

For organisations looking to hire overseas talent, formalising a structured policy for immigration and visa can help achieve an easy and smooth talent hiring and recruitment process at all levels in the organisations. The employee’s perspective refreshes and adds a better job experience. The policy outlines important sponsorship compliances for the organisations, general ethics and code of conduct and the best practices in the recruitment and hiring of the skilled migrant workers.

How can organisations develop effective corporate immigration policies?

There are a number of ways through which effective policies can be identified and established across the organisation to help achieve all the goals
Sponsorship customs: that the company policy to recruit the most suitable person for each vacancy, irrespective of sex, nationality,sex, religion or cultural and social beliefs, age, disability, sexual orientation stands equal for all. It also includes the guiding principles upon which the workings and structure of organisation is established.
Authorisation of the sponsorship: This caters the sponsorship authorisation within the organisation pertaining to which visa categories of worker the organisation has been approved to sponsor under, such as sponsorship in the Intra-Company Transfer or Skilled Worker routes,the Skilled Worker route allows you to hire overseas workers from outside the UK, subject to them having a genuine job offer at the specific skill and salary threshold. The Intra-Company Transfer route allows international organisations to facilitate temporary transfers to the UK for existing employees.
Cost of sponsorship: An employer is obligated to pay for the cost of its sponsor licence and the immigration skills charge during the time of issuing a certificate of sponsorship(CoS), the employee is asked to pay for the visa application processing fees and any additional costs with the immigration health surcharge to help them access the NHS benefits. The organisational policy should also highlight the cost of work visas extensions if the migrant worker’s contract of employment is renewed.

Data collection and analysis

Every organisation must ensure that the data within the organisation is collected, collated and processed within the set rules and to be used for company’s growth analysis, hiring of the migrant worker, information on visa types and immigration costs. This should be managed for the purposes of fulfilling the employer record keeping duties. The organisation's effective auditing and implementation of changes.

How can legal experts help you?
Before you jump into forming, framing and actualising your company immigration policy you must clearly define the purpose of having it. A well defined and structured immigration policy will help you form an effective organisation for hiring and recruitment planning.
With the help of the visa and immigration experts you can build your policies effectively.
A Y & J Solicitors have been immigration and visa specialists for over 10 years now, helping the organisations to set up based on their bespoke services and advice.