The Situation 

This solutions company in California allocates a considerable budget to global talent acquisition, for about 3000-4000 H-1B visas each year. They had outsourced the whole immigration process to an attorney firm to help them file petitions smoothly.

Initially, when they started out about 7 yrs ago it went well. But with changing immigration policies, rising RFEs and denials, increased attorney fees, they saw their ROI slowly reducing. Also, the number of people working on the petitions was increasing and so were the costs. The company decided to make a shift. 

Factors that impacted ROI

Our team drilled down to find the various factors affecting ROI, this is what we found:

• Increased Attorney Fees: Building petitions has become more technical and needs expertise of attorneys to build it like a case, for it to be successful. Attorneys were investing more time to build, with increased paperwork and therefore billing hours increased.
• Number of people working on petitions: The Attorney firm had to hire extra manpower to handle the same volumes since the window to file petitions were short. To build each petition manually, more manpower was needed and that converted to extra billing.
• Denials & RFEs: RFEs means re-work and extra billing. Denials can eat into margins in a big way. We have estimated the loss you can incur in the following table. Pick the number of denials and the average margin and see the loss to business in a one year and 5-year timeframe!

For example, for 100 denials in a year, a loss from those denials is 3 million dollars if your margin is $30,000 per year, and in 5 years it will be 15 million dollars! The company realized that they need to stay invested in the entire immigration process and need to know the ROI they are making as a business, by not overlooking these costs. They moved to Imagility.

How did Imagility help?

Imagility is a cloud-based end-to-end immigration platform, with powerful and intelligent petition building, petition analysis and RFE response building features. Imagility took care of all essential immigration needs of the company.

• Smooth onboarding process: Onboarding to the platform was an easy 5-step process from contract to training and support after going LIVE. Data migration was seamless.
• Timelines and workflows: Easy navigation, clarity and transparency through timelines and graphic workflows.
• Review and Analysis: Powerful review and analysis feature that shows the key success elements and the factors that need to be addressed, fully automated.   
• RFEs and Green Cards: Takes care of accurate RFE responses in a jiffy and Green card applications at the right time.
• Templates: Helps build customized and automated template for effective cover letters and detailed support letters.
• Complete Immigration Lifecycle: Covers your essential immigration needs comprehensively in one place, helping beneficiaries, petitioners and attorneys navigate and manage end-to-end visa process.
• Comprehensive Compliance: Provisions for storage and viewing of public and private access files, FDNS visits etc.
• Completely digital: Cloud-based platform, enabling digital and fast file exchanges, eliminating any need to meet in person, even for signatures.

But most importantly the company was delighted to use:

• The Petition builder to build robust, complete petitions.
• The Petition analysis tool to help adjudicate the petition thoroughly and fix it.
• The RFE Response builder to respond effectively and fast to RFEs.

Petition Builder

The company realized that Imagility’s H-1B Petition Builder goes beyond the traditional fill-in-the-forms software currently available in the market. It provides users a simple way to build a story and a comprehensive petition for an H-1b visa.  The process of building an H-1b story begins with a detailed in-take process that could take 30 to 45 minutes.  The survey Is not limited to a combination of multiple choices, pull-down, or fill in the blanks’ questions.  It takes in beneficiary, petitioner, client, and project documents and other evidence.  

The Petition Builder helped the team with constructing the list of duties, itinerary beneficiary qualifications, project description and timeline, work product produced, and employer-employee details particularly in a third-party site situation.  

Petition Analysis

The company realised that once these elements are created, the tool steps the user through a process to refine the H-1B story to make it comprehensive and complete.  It provides a detailed analysis of the H-1B story as it is being built and the key success elements and what factors are still left to be addressed.

The power behind the tool is an H-1b rules and policy engine that incorporates the laws, policies, and adjudication practices.  In addition to addressing today’s needs and challenges, it can leverage the dynamics of the market as it is happening through its machine learning capabilities.

Reviewing, Analyzing, and Improving Petitions

Petition Analysis carries out an elaborate process of checks through built petitions and makes intelligent recommendations through reports to improve petition success rates, giving you infinite chances to correct and improve the identified elements in the petition. 

Imagility’s Petition Analysis carries out the following steps when analyzing a petition:

• Identify any missing documents

• Review filing requirements

• Analyze the job description

• Check for the correctness of the LCA

• Review petition-related requirements

• Review the beneficiary qualifications for the position

• Check the employer-employee relationship

• Check the eligibility of the beneficiary’s status

• Review petitioner requirements

The company realized the power of the petition analysis feature, as the success rates of petitions gradually improved.

RFE Response Builder

The company was amazed at the working of the RFE Response Builder wherein, it allows you to select one of the standard RFE clauses and follow a workflow driven by the standard questions or input needed for the clause.  Machine learning tools power the RFE Response Builder to construct accurate RFE responses quickly. 

The RFE Builder supports the following clauses:

• Validation Instrument for Business Enterprises (VIBE) – Data Mismatch

• Specialty Occupation

• Bachelor’s degree in a Specialty Occupation

• Employer-Employee

• Needs of the Petitioner for the Services of the Beneficiary

• Maintenance of Status 

The RFE building process could take about 20 to 40 minutes and longer if an elaborate technical discussion or evidence is required.  Once the information requested is provided, the graphical Response Analyzer will help to identify areas satisfied and the remaining gaps.  It provides a graphical representation of the RFE response.

The strength of the RFE Response builder is the comprehensive coverage in response to the RFE questions, the organization of the documents, and addressing the gaps usually left otherwise that can lead to denials in today’s landscape.

A Satisfied Customer

With Imagility the company was able to realize a better ROI and the management was satisfied with the decision of moving to the platform. 

Imagility’s professional services helped them transition smoothly to the new platform with seamless data migration and quick onboarding. Customer support was there every step of the way and beyond, to take care of all the nitty gritty migration woes. This helped the customer realize their ROI faster due to reduced attorney fees, reduced number of hours spent on building petitions and improved success rates of petitions, with reduced RFEs and denials.

We have a transformed, happy customer who has made the switch to Imagility for other visa types and all their other immigration needs.

Imagility has other powerful features like collaboration, data & insights, compliance, privacy & security and much more.