Have been on the hiring end here and have a strong preference for citizen and LPR hires. Even so, finding the right talent is challenging because we’re not a famous tech company. All the talented kids who are citizens want to work for cool companies, and we’re not one. Also statistically very few citizens go to grad school in STEM fields, and we’re looking for folks with graduate-level education in our field. Our salary rates for citizens and non citizens are identical.

The few citizens who apply to our non prestigious company are competing against a pool of talented H1Bs (not all H1Bs are body shop employees; many are graduates of fine American schools... we’re talking MIT and CMU), yet because of the pool they are in, they often come up short. The most competitive citizens tend not to want to work for non prestigious companies, so we get the less competitive citizen candidates and more competitive non citizens.

I don’t want to say this is the norm out there, because it is not, but to those who have misgivings about H1Bs (the non body shop variety), I’d be interested to hear your stories about your experiences hiring and where/how you found your quality citizen/LPR talent pools (I’d be inclined to hear from employers and hiring managers rather than anecdotal hearsay about a friend of a friend).