H1B Hiring Reality Check

The H1B conversation is loud, political, and often full of half-truths, so we wanted a clean, practical breakdown from someone who has lived it from the staffing side. We sit down with Robert Richard, Chief Digital Officer at Tier 4 Group and the creator behind the H1B Guy, to talk about what is actually happening inside high-skilled immigration and the labor market right now.

We unpack how H1B hiring works in the real world, including the staffing agency supply chain, why sponsorship became a strategy for filling niche technical roles, and how the USCIS lottery and annual H1B cap create winners and losers. Robert explains the recent shift toward wage-based selection, why selection rates changed as application volumes moved, and what the four wage levels mean for employers trying to hire software engineers, data talent, and other hard-to-find specialists. We also dig into the big picture: India and China’s dominance in H1B and international student pipelines, what the US education and training gap looks like, and why the green card backlog signals a system that needs reform.

Then we zoom out to the business response. When access to US work authorization tightens, companies look to nearshore and offshore delivery, and we break down why Latin America nearshoring can be a strong option: time zone overlap, bilingual communication, and deepening tech talent across markets like Brazil, Mexico, and Costa Rica. We close with what recruiters and staffing leaders need to know about AI in recruiting, from sourcing agents to digital recruiting agents, plus the biggest mistake buyers make when they treat AI like set-it-and-forget-it software.

If you care about recruiting strategy, high-skilled immigration, nearshore talent, and the future of recruitment technology, hit subscribe, share this with a hiring leader, and leave a review. Where do you think the balance should land between protecting local jobs and keeping the innovation pipeline open?

🎧 Host | Brian Samson – Founder of 💻 Plugg Technologies
🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/briansamson/

🎙️ Sponsored by Plugg Technologies – Connecting U.S. companies with top-tier software developers across Latin America.
🌐 https://www.plugg.tech

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_00 0:12

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Nearshore Cafe Podcast. I'm your host, Brian Sampson. Today's episode is sponsored by Plug Technologies, PLUGG.tech. Great way to connect talent from Latin America to growing U.S. companies. If you are a fan of the H1B guy, like many of you are, this is going to be a special edition treat for you. We've got the man, the one and only, the H1B guy, Robert Richard. We'll introduce him in a second. But this show is going to get into geopolitics, all sorts of movement happening in the labor markets. I can't wait to get into it. So without further ado, Robert Richard, Chief Digital Officer of Tier 4 Group. We're so happy to have you.

SPEAKER_01 0:57

Brian, excited to be here on the New Shore Cafe with you. Looking forward to this conversation.

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Me too. Well let's let's

From IT Support To Recruiting

SPEAKER_00 1:05

get started. I mean, you've had just a really interesting career journey. You know, obviously chief digital officer today for Tier 4 Group. You've had an H1B guy, but kind of walk us walk us back. You know, what did what did you uh where did your career start and uh give us a little bit of the journey in the history?

SPEAKER_01 1:23

Yeah, I started working for um an outsourced uh IT support for small medium-sized businesses and technology many, many years ago, and uh got my first exposure into network infrastructure, Microsoft server, single server access databases that really take it back here. And then I moved into recruiting for that organization and realized that it was just a skill for me that came naturally. I've always been really curious in people and their backgrounds and what their career objectives are. And so I had an opportunity to went into the agency side and worked for K Force for many years and spent almost eight years at Matrix Resources and um you know kind of through all of that and poured a bunch of different paths within the agency, mainly on the delivery and recruiting side.

Why The H1B Guy Took Off

SPEAKER_01 2:21

Like a lot of us, I was impacted during the pandemic. That's when I launched the H1BGuy.com and the H1B Guy YouTube channel. I had no idea what was gonna happen at the time, but it took off really quickly. It's a very political and polarizing subject. And I think what made me unique at that time and place, you know, almost six years ago now, Brian, is that I come from a staffing and recruiting background. And when we look at a lot of individuals on their platforms that talk about workforce solutions, high-skilled immigration, it's a lot of immigrants themselves and a lot of attorneys. And so I think I brought a different perspective that a lot of people resonated with. I tried to really just simplify what I know about the process and provide really sort of thought leadership and opinions on if I were you, here's what I would do. If you were my employee, here's what we would do. And then it became almost a glue where I was connecting people to a lot of different aspects in the immigration world, immigration technology, immigration uh counseling and legal advice, helping organizations to establish really criteria and evaluate and and mitigate their risk. And so through all of that, it it led me to a path to where I got introduced to our CEO here at Tier 4 group, Betsy Robinson, and her and I headed off and we realized very quickly, Brian, that we have these complimentary skills. She is a true hunter, a serial networker, and a connector. And I've always been a deliverer, a tinkerer, very curious, but also a connector. And I think my technical background mixed with her executive presence was really the two of us finding each other at the right time. And so I like to say that I'm a former self-taught recruiter, now technologist in recruitment technology, but I also have this expertise in, to your point, geopolitics, high-skilled immigration, and I still have a lot of opinions on the subject.

SPEAKER_00 4:26

Yeah, well, I can't wait to get into some of those. Um, just so we kind of got some context, recruiters that listen to this, and yeah, you know, um, for those that have maybe have broken into recruiting the last couple years, different landscape, but at least for me, you know, when I was kind of uh getting my career off the ground, uh I would work with a lot of H1B candidates.

SPEAKER_01 4:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:49

When I went in-house in San Francisco, a lot of H1B hires that we made, you know, that were kind of tracking for a

How Agencies Use H1B Pipelines

SPEAKER_00 4:57

green card. Can you just um kind of set the context a little bit on like what the H 1B world looks like in the in the staffing agencies and um you know how how that uh supply chain kind of works?

SPEAKER_01 5:11

Yeah, I think that's a a good question and a great lead-in. I will go back to when I first started really recruiting on the agency side. It was my first exposure to an H1B visa. So this is 2007-2008 time frame. When I started to look at how are my peers filling these very niche technical roles, engineering,.NET, Java, C, there was very few that were being filled on a perm basis with US citizens, green card holders, permanent residents. A lot of them were being filled on contract temporary basis. So decided that I needed to understand this world and build relationships with employers, sub-vendors, if you will, that had access to this talent. And fast forward to a point to where when I was working, you know, in the early 2010s, it became very evident that in order to fill some of these very niche technical roles, uh, the firm I was working for at the time needed to get into the sponsorship business. And we needed to have these individuals where they were permanent full-time employees, and we were using them both internally as well as placing them on external projects. And that gave us a pathway to talent pipelines that we previously didn't have. And so for anyone who's not familiar, we can we can go way, way back to when the H1B visa was created, the current green card policy that's in place for employers, employment-based green card sponsorship.

Caps, Fees, And Lottery Math

SPEAKER_01 6:52

We're talking about legislation that Brian is over 30 years old at this point, 1990, so 36 plus years old nearly. While there's been modifications to the system over time, it still is very similar to what it looked like even back then, where we really saw the influx that if we look at the timeline, it was around the the uh Y2K era and the increase of H1B visas that were allotted. There wasn't really a true lottery or HCAP like there is now. The the cap was was significantly increased. Whereas we see now there are 85,000 visas annually that are up for grabs, and 65,000 of those are specifically for uh international individuals with uh a high skilled background. The other 20,000 um is for advanced degree exemption, and really what that means is those are international students that have come to the US and obtained a master's degree, and they're eligible to go into a different allotment, so that additional 20,000. And when we look at kind of the trend that happened over the the last four or five years, we started to see some some really explosive application numbers. And when we look at the percentages of H1Bs that were actually being awarded, we saw percentages drop down into the the acceptance or the selection rate around 16 to 18 percent. And we went from 250,000 applications being the norm to over 750,000 as recent as a couple of years ago. And so you know the demand for H1B visas never was higher than it was literally coming out of the post-pandemic era. And when we look at the the previous administration that was in place, we had really high approval rates. It was a little bit of Wild West when we looked at how the actual HCAP lottery was was working. And I think at the end of the Trump administration, they wanted to go to more of a wage-based, level-based selection process. And so I think when we saw the re-election and and the the Trump administration coming back into office, I think it became very evident to a lot of us in this space that clearly they were gonna focus on undocumented immigration first. But as soon as they were able to get their hands around that, that there was gonna be a target put on high-skilled legal immigration. And we've seen that through the ending of several different types of employment authorization documents, specifically individuals from Ukraine and Nepal that are no longer valid. We have also seen them come in and re-implement this wage-based HCAP selection. And that really comes back to that is rewarding organizations who are willing to pay top dollar, which I, you know, no debate around that. Like we want individuals to be fairly compensated. But Brian, when we look at how the H1B is constructed, there's there's labor condition applications that are part of that that basically takes the wage and says, this is what you're legally obligated to pay this individual based on their level of experience. And so with that, we saw an increased application fee that was implemented. All of this to really try to curb and reduce the number of applications that USCIS was receiving on an annual basis. But the math mass, when you look at USCIS, its revenue is built on fees. And the H1B lottery and premium processing around H1B applications, extensions, amendments, change of employers are the primary revenue sources for USCIS. So I don't see there ever being a time where an HCAP lottery doesn't exist, Brian, because it being a fee-based revenue-based organization. But if we get into the numbers for this past lottery, which opened in March and closed before April, selections have gone out. The estimates that I've seen are somewhere around 250,000 plus applications for this year. And we're seeing selection percentages over 30% is what's being estimated. Why you had a significant reduction in the amount of applications.

Wage Levels Start Driving Outcomes

SPEAKER_01 11:32

But I think the number that's really interesting, Brian, when you start to look at the statistics, there's four different wage levels. So level one, two, three, and four, level four being the highest. The percentage of selection for level four at the highest level is being estimated at over 60%. So you can see this impact immediately hit where the level of the resource and the wage that they're being paid was being rewarded through the random selection process. And so I think when we take a peek into what the administration is trying to do, they're trying to kill this narrative that H1B visas are low-skilled, low-paid, um, you know, in in indentured labor, if you will, um, and and moving that narrative more to the high-skilled, level four type resources. I think, Brian, there's a balance to be had there because if we are starting to diminish the number of level one and level two international resources that US-based organizations can obtain uh H1B visas for, we'll see that impact in three to four years, not necessarily this year, because you're not grooming and growing that talent here domestically that is international based.

SPEAKER_00 12:57

Yeah. A lot, a lot there to uh to dive into. So I appreciate all that. Could we start with with just some of the basics of you know the Y2K era really kind of drove this? You know, from my personal experience, India's really got like the like is like the dominant player here. Yeah, and then I I tend to, just from my own personal experience, like SAP, functional consultants, Java developers, dot net. Do you see that too? And could you, you know, just give some sense on like you know, as you know, when I started technical recruiting, you know, there were COBOL developers and now it's you know data engineers and AI. So maybe you could give a little bit of history on the types of roles and the major countries, the major players as that's progressed.

India, China, And The Skills Gap

SPEAKER_01 13:47

I think that's a a great question, and and I would tell you the statistics tell us that 90% of H1Bs in the last decade have been issued to individuals from two countries, India and China. So that leaves 10% of the rest of the additional H1B visas to go to the rest of the world. That's a pretty staggering number when you think about it. But when you also look at the number of international students, there's estimated at any given time somewhere between 250 to 300,000 international students here in the US. Guess which two countries have dominated that percentage as well. It's also India and China and South Korea, you know, is another one that that comes up a good bit when you start to look at the number of international students uh here uh studying abroad in the in the US. So I think those numbers are are absolutely uh related and they're corollary. There's there's no doubt about that. But if we were to go back to your question on why are these niche skills, ERP, SaaS-based, legacy-based technologies, why are they primarily that those resources, the ones that are coming from abroad, coming from India, coming from China? Brian, I would point right to our US educational system. And at a much earlier age, international students are learning technology and going down technology tracks much earlier than we are here in the US. And so we're behind in our educational system and how we teach and train and develop technology talent. And when we look at the number of degrees for American US citizens, the computer science degree is is still relatively small compared to other degrees that um that that US-born individuals obtain here in our higher education systems. And so all of that is related, Brian, because what's happening is we we don't have a people problem necessarily, it's a skills-based talent problem. So it's a training and education problem that exists, and that's where the international education system, specifically in India and China, that's that's where they're years ahead of us. And it doesn't mean that we can't train the people that we have when we look at you know AI-based technology and our ability to pick up and learn things a lot faster now. It doesn't mean we can't close that gap, but for us to uh continue to innovate and attract top talent from around the world, there's only a uh a very select number of pathways that these individuals can pursue. And those generally are US-based education, which leads to work authorization for a temporary period of time, and the H1B visa. There are a few others, but those are the two primary that lead to opportunities to have work authorization here in the U.S.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Yeah.

The Case For And Against H1B

SPEAKER_00 16:53

Would you mind arguing both sides of it? What what are the the real like the primary reasons why H1B is sorely needed? And what are some of the reasons that maybe the other side is arguing that hey, you know, we don't we don't need this, there's alternatives to this.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

Yeah, I I think the argument is displacement of American workers. There's documentation on that, low, low pay, but when we look at what is the average H1B salary right now that's in the US, it's over $100,000. So I wouldn't consider that like low pay. I think you look at where a lot of the integrators have come in and and sold bulk contracts at the the large enterprise level, and when you have US workers feeling like they're training their replacement and somebody that literally just came to the US, that vocal minority becomes very loud. And when you look at the politics of it, which is the current administration is definitely pro-American. And I'm not saying that I'm not, but they're pro-American worker. I absolutely am as well. We we have a skill gap, we have a training problem. We can look at declining birth rates as well, Brian, which says that we're averaging 1.9 children for every family. We need to be above two in order for that to continue. And so, where are we going to have access to that talent? Well, it has to be from high-skilled immigration. There has to be pathways and pipelines for us to access it. From a perspective of a pro-opponent, we look at the niche technologies and the ability to step into a role and make an impact. We can also look at a lot of the data out there that says for every H1B employee that an organization has on staff, it creates two and a half jobs for that organization. It's a really interesting statistic. It still holds true that for every H1B employee that you employ on your staff, they are creating 2.1 additional jobs for American workers. So who's telling the truth here when you look at both sides of the data? Because the argument is yes, H1B workers have displaced American workers. But then the other side of the argument is H1B workers are creating two and a half jobs for every one that their employer has on staff. So it's it's this interesting, messy middle that I think when we try to look at what does this all really mean, it's an ebb and flow. And I think for us, when we look at the system as it is, is currently broken. When we look at the green card backlog that exists for individuals that have been living and working in the U.S. on H 1B visas for 10 to 12 years, that's not what the H 1B visa was really intended to be. We have to go back to what is the reform that we can do to help create a better immigration system. And I think for me, when I've I've really given this a lot of thought, it almost is the creation of a new type of VAD. Whether the H1B employment authorization document is the terminology we want to use or something else because just the connotation of an H1B right now has so much negativity and is so politically polarizing. But we have to give a pathway to those international students who are coming into the US, being US educated, and then ultimately are self-deporting because they run out of status. Even if they're in a full-time job, if they're not able to obtain an H1B visa in the lottery, they have to deport. And we are losing that talent. And that talent is going back to India, going to the United Arab Emirates, going to Germany, going to the UK, going to Australia, going to Latin America and Costa Rica and Brazil and Argentina and Chile, where the quality of life and the nomad visa has become a thing for these types of resources. And so the more that we isolate ourselves and try to restrict high-skilled immigration, the impact isn't immediately felt today. But when we start to look down the future and our ability to innovate, that's where the impact's going to be felt.

SPEAKER_00 21:13

Yeah.

Entrepreneurs And The Innovation Multiplier

SPEAKER_00 21:14

You know, the other element that I'd love for you to expand on is it's not just the um uh you know, like these great engineers and the loss of talent, but it's the entrepreneurs that originally came on H1Vs. Um I had it right, I think the CEO of Google was an H1B originally, same with Microsoft. Yep. Yeah, can you kind of talk more about that and like the jobs that they're creating as entrepreneurs and CEOs?

SPEAKER_01 21:42

Yeah, I mean, you know, maybe Taboo to say, but even Elon Musk, right? So I think we've tried to make it more friendly in the last few years for H1B Visa entrepreneurs, which I'm really excited about because there was a ton. Where if you didn't have a million dollars, you couldn't get an investor visa. Whereas now, even if you're on H 1B, they're allowing H 1B visa holders to have a majority ownership in firms and organizations and corporations. There was a time, Brian, where they could only have 49% ownership. And so I bring that up because when I think about what I love about this country, one, we we get to choose what we want to do with our lives. And when we look at high-skilled immigrants who come in, they come here to pursue a better opportunity for themselves and for their families. And the ones who really innovate, really take that and and and go with it. We can look at um the founder creator of perplexity is a is another one on the list. I think we have to ask ourselves if we start to restrict and tighten the talent pipelines for international resources like the ones that we've mentioned, that impact on our innovation and technological advancement, again, won't be felt today, but for future generations and those multipliers that that we're gonna miss out on.

SPEAKER_00 23:16

That's a great

Nearshore Talent And LATAM Advantages

SPEAKER_00 23:17

point. Let's talk a little more about the climate today and uh with the increase in the fee for the H1B. Companies still need talent. So, like what's happening? Are they offshoring? Are they near shoring? Are they going to Eastern Europe? You know, what what's happening?

SPEAKER_01 23:35

Yeah, I think it's a little bit of everything. Of course, we've seen a lot of investments in artificial intelligence.

SPEAKER_00 23:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 23:43

Trying to, I'll say, do more with less. I think to your point as well, when we've looked at it and we've had conversations with our clients, near shore becomes really the avenue that seems to be the most preferred. However, when we look at the cost associated with it, there are times where Southeast Asia may become more attractive. But for us, and the reason why we take that stance and why I believe that the this the Latin America pipeline is critical. Communication, so bilingual, primarily Spanish and English, uh, most of the Western Hemisphere speaks in one of those two, right? Time zones is another one that I think really matters when you look at eastern, central mountain, Pacific time zones. Latin America has an ability to support that very seamlessly. They're not working overnight like Southeast Asia or even parts of Europe, maybe. But I also think that if I go back to their educational institutions, there's been a heavy emphasis in Central and South America from a technology perspective. I I think you're seeing some very high-skilled talent come out of Brazil. I think it's probably the South American country that may be leading that technology revolution the most. But then we look at the capabilities that exist in Mexico. I alluded to Costa Rica. I know Plug has um, you know, a lot of great technical resources in Nicaragua. You start to think about that. And I mean, literally, it's littered up and down the Western hemisphere with high-quality resources, very loyal, but also very skilled and capable of stepping in seamlessly. And so that becomes very attractive to US-based organizations. But the question becomes, and I think we talked about this a little bit, is you know, for the first year of uh the second term of the Trump administration, tariffs were a buzzword and they were something that we heard a lot about. Well, how are we gonna handle that from a relocation of jobs when we start to look at if we can't get access to talent here in the US, we've gotta seek international talent. So near shore becomes a part of that conversation, offshore becomes part of that conversation. But at the end of the day, are we really having access to the best talent possible? Is the first question. And then is there truly some sort of cost savings or benefit or innovation that happens? And those are the questions for me as an employer, we're trying to answer when we get very tight on what are our use cases and what are our requirements, and when we meet with our clients to understand what their needs are, and then partner with uh an organization like Plug that can help us, that's really tapped into that Latin American environment and that can be a true partner and act on our behalf. Uh, so I I think you're starting to see a lot of this movement, and let's be honest, the the world as a whole has become a global society. The fact that you and I can get on an airplane and you know travel around the world, or the fact that you and I can get on a um a video conference call, and no matter what time zone or hemisphere we're in, we can still get work done. The organizations that get this right are gonna blend three things they're gonna blend technology, domestic hiring, and international hiring.

SPEAKER_00 27:16

Yeah, yeah. And that's great.

AI Agents And Smarter Tech Buying

SPEAKER_00 27:18

I want to um give you a chance to talk about the last kind of leverage and especially how it applies to the staffing world, and that's AI. What do you see? What are you predicting? How is this changing the world of recruiting?

SPEAKER_01 27:31

And yeah, it's a great question. And I I think for me, it's it's one of those things that can be really, really tough to answer. And when I think about here at Tier 4 group, we we made a conscious decision that we want to delete. But when I think about our people, and as we've gone through our own really set of of transformation, technology fatigue, people you know aren't necessarily resistant to change, they're resistant or trying to survive complexity. And when I think about December of 2022 with the launch of Chat GPT, and then we fast forward two years, December of 2024, there was a period of time where anything that we talked about AI was really just generative AI. Yeah, right. But now we're talking about cognitive, adaptive AI and voice agents and digital recruiting agents and sourcing agents and administrative agents that have the ability to reduce manual and administrative tasks. But I think the biggest mistake to answer your question that organizations are making right now is they're buying blindly based on a very small number of demos. And when they buy blindly, they're buying a product versus a solution, and that product is not a set it and forget it, and it always works. And I think that is where a lot of organizations are getting it wrong right now, is the the concept of it requires constant administration and tuning and inspection and iteration to make sure that it's functioning, working, and doing what it's supposed to be doing, whatever type of cognitive or adaptive agent you're you're utilizing. It is not set it and forget it technology. And then the last point I'll make, and this is something I tell our team all the time, as we've struggled through our change management and utilization and adoption, is at this moment in time, as we're recording this podcast, this is the worst our technology will ever be. Tomorrow it will be better. A week from now it will be even better. So the pace of which technology is advancing is really tough to fathom. And I think as an organization, as a buyer, you have to be very careful with the partners that you select, whether you build or buy. So there's so much noise out there that exists for recruiters and for staffing executives. And so being able to navigate through that is really key.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

Yeah. Well said. Words of wisdom from a staffing veteran, AI veteran, H1V veteran.

Where To Find Robert And Close

SPEAKER_00 30:59

You gotta great things in your for those that are interested in uh reaching out to you directly. What's the best way to do that, Robert?

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. It's uh uh forward slash R Bouchard on LinkedIn. Of course, I've got the H1B guy YouTube channel and the H1BGuy.com. You can find me there. I've not been posting as much over the last year, but I definitely have intentions to get back out there and get some content because people like you, Brian, are asking me for it. So I know there's still demand for it. But my role here at Tier 4 Group is very demanding. It's very exciting work that I love doing. And so trying to keep the main thing the main thing. But yeah, uh, you can also check me out on Twitter. Um, I'm easy to find.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

Awesome. Well, we'll we'll drop all the links in the show notes for everybody for easy access as well. Uh, thanks again, Robert. What a great show! Thanks to our sponsor, Plug Technologies, P L U G G dot tech. Great way to connect talent from Latin America to growing US companies. This is the Nearshore Cafe Podcast. We'll see you again next time.