Action Plan
Employer’s Tasks
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Dinsmore & Shohl’s Comments
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1.
Decide on
the Job Title
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In some situations,
PERM labor certification-based permanent resident (Green Card) cases can take
one or more years to be finally approved. Therefore, the job title should be
one that your organization and the employee can live with over the next few
years. A subsequent title change could cause the government to view a job
title change to mean a complete job change, possibly requiring your
organization to go through the PERM Labor Certification process again.
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2.
Describe the Job Duties
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Please begin by
harvesting some Organization-Standard job duties for this type of
position. Then, please include in the job duties description more specific
information about the environment in which your employee works/will work.
For example, in the Programmer Analyst example, the employee was expected to
be, “responsible for conversion and interfaces of data from legacy COBOL
applications to Oracle applications; data warehouse design and
implementation; and development of business applications supporting Oracle
application functionality.”
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3.
Describe the Minimum Qualifications Required to Perform
This Job
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This is generally the most important component of any Labor
Certification application because it creates the measuring stick by which
your organization must, in good faith, assess the qualifications of “U.S.
worker” job applicants. Please indicate the type of educational degree
and the academic majors that are required (for example, BSCS or BSEE).
Please indicate the years of required experience and the type of
experience that are required and whether the experience must have been in
a particular setting, using specific tools, or performing certain functions.
Contrary to the job duties which should leave room
for some growth, it is important for the employer to be specific here.
Please be as precise as possible in describing your legitimate requirements
for the position.
Please also keep in
mind three things:
- Your employee typically must have earned all of the
qualifications that your organization requires BEFORE your employee joined
your organization. In other words, to meet your Minimum Requirements, your
employee may not generally rely on qualifications gained while working for
your organization;
- Your employee is permitted to use qualifications
gained while working at your organization to meet your Minimum Requirements
but only if you can prove that the job in which your employee gained the
qualifications is not substantially comparable
to the job for which PERM approval is being sought. A
job that is not substantially comparable means a job requiring performance
of the same job duties less than 50% of the time; and
- the Labor Department requires that an employer filing
a PERM application list the organization's actual minimum requirements,
rather than the preferred requirements. Therefore, if your organization were
to prefer candidates with a Master’s Degree but had sometimes hired
candidates with a Bachelor’s Degree, the latter would be the actual Minimum
Requirement.
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4.
Employee to Complete “Qualifications Worksheet”
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You will find it easier
to craft the skill set (for the position your employee will occupy) by
working in tandem with your employee. For example, if you are inclined to
require two years of experience, but your employee either has, or can prove,
only one and a half years of experience, then requiring two years of experience as part of
your Minimum Requirements will serve no helpful purpose.
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