Navigating US Job Market after EB2-NIW

As I already posted before, immigration visa EB2 with NIW (EB2-NIW) is a program which allow you to attain the permanent residency (PR) in the US without employer sponsorship. Basically it is a great advantage that you can get the PR without sponsorship, but this merit turns into a pressure just after your petition is approved by USCIS. The most profound issue is that, differently from citizenship, you cannot maintain your PR unless you are physically present in the US longer than 183 days a year. Therefore, you it becomes pressing that you have to get a job offer and start your new life in the US. You are still able to maintain your PR but you should file the form I-131 or so-called re-entry permit which allows you to stay out of the US less than 183 days but still maintain your PR.

In my case, I interviewed with a consul in the US embassy in Seoul and shortly after that my immigrant visa was approved. Considering I started job hunting when I received P4 letter (the US embassy interview notice) on 15th Mar. 2024, it took more than 6 months for me to get my job offer on 25th Sep. 2024😭.

When to Start Job Hunting?

For EB2-NIW petitioners, I think that your receipt of P4 letter is the best timing to start your job hunting. You can start earlier, but most of the job postings in the US asks you about your eligibility to work in the US. It is not an easy choice to check YES unless you received the P4 letter. Surely you can just answer YES and move on, but it is highly likely that finally your recruiter or hiring manager get to know your eligibility. Knowing your are not eligible to work in the US, most of the companies cannot proceed further with you. To make things worse, some companies operates Cooldown Period policy for hiring, which bans an applicant from applying to the same position during a fixed duration of time. It seems to be a bad deal to risk your potentioal opportunity by blindly checking YES to your work eligibility screening and moving on.

🧑‍🏭Proof of Eligibility to Work in the US
You might not have your green card yet, but it does not directly mean that you cannot check YES to the work eligibility screening. Once you receive the immigrant visa and land at the US territory with it, the immigration officer will stamp a temporary I-551 on your visa. This combination of immigrant visa + I-551 stampe works as your 1-year temporary green card which certifies your legitimacy to work in the US.

Toolings for Job Hunting

Job Posting and Recruiting Sites

I mainly resorted to LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and Indeed. Most of the time I spent was with LinkedIn, subscribing the paid premium plan also. I am not 100% sure that the premium plan worked for my job hunting. But it is a boon to have that with the premium plan you can directly send messages (InMail) for the recruiters and hiring managers. If you are proactive enough to utilize the feature the premium plan would be nice to try.

US Mailing Address and Phone Number

In hindsight, I think it was true that US address and phone number are must-haves for your job hunting🤨. I feel that the chance to get interviews definitely surged since I had added them to my resume.

I used the address of my wife’s aquaintance living in Los Angeles, and created a virtual US phone number using and pre-paid app Dingtone. About the call quality there was some echo and delay, but anyway interviewing with the service was definitely doable. But sometimes I had to use earphones to complement my listening comprehension issue😳.

Resume

There were a several facelifts for my resume. At the very beginning of job hunting I used a version including my portrait, which I removed shortly after observing a poll in Blind where most of the users voted against adding their portrait in resumes. Finalized version of my resume included contact information - short self PR paragraph - work experience - education - papers & patents in total 3 pages.

Job Hunting Process

In general, job hunting process consisted of the cycles of application → recruiter call → hiring manager interview - onsite interview.

Direct Application

In most cases I directly applied to the job openings I found from LinkedIn and Glassdoor (Indeed was less effective, unfortunately). Generally job postings there redirects you to the careers page of the company. More often than not all the job openings in a company’s careers page is uploaded to the recruiting platforms, so it is advisible to bookmark the careers pages of the companies you are interested and regularly explore them.

Referral

If you apply to a position and you get a recommendation from an internal employee, it is called that you received a referral. There are no set norms of getting referral. Sometime there could be someone in your network close to HR or hiring manager, and there are even some random posts on Blind asking and offering referrals for the positions in some companies - definitely, being ‘random’ here would not mean the referrers are willing to refer literally random guy: you would need to communicate with those offering referrals and convince them of your competitiveness -. If your referer knows hiring manager well and could pitch how your strengths are aligned with the manager’s need, you could take unparalleled predominance compared to the other applicants. I had a chance to get referral to a position which I knew is not that fit to my strengths. In my case the referral did not work well.

Recruiter Call

The very first step is to have a call with your recruiter. At this step the call is usually set between 15-30 minutes. Usually the contents of the call is to brief the basic job description of the position, your background, and your potential fit to the position. Recruiter call is usually expected to be the very first step of a hiring cycle, but I also experienced the case where the very first contact was made by C-level person. This could happen if the company you applied is an early-stage startup. But the more likely situation is that you get an email from a recruiter first, asking you to book a slot when you are available to call. You might call with them but sometimes it could be a video conference using Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Amazon Chime or so.

But sometimes I got a direct call without email asking me about the schedule. Mostly this happend when the callers were the professional agents from staffing companies. I used to not answer the phone when my phone rang but I had no prior contact via email. I thought such calls were most likely to be spam calls. But after once I happened to answer one of such calls and it was one from a staffing company agent, I tried to be awake to receive those calls also. During my 6 months of job hunting, I was able to answer 3 of direct calls like this.

Interview with Hiring Manager

If you can move on after recruiter call, the next step is to have another interview with hiring manager (HM). HMs are usually the most important people during job hunting process, as it is mostly the case that you are going to report to them if you finally get through everyting and receive an offer. From this phase technical details start to kick in during interview so preparation is needed.

Final On-Site Interview

Final interviews are usually called on-site interview. Differently from the final interviews I experienced in South Korea, which are done in many-to-one setup in most cases, in the US the final interviewe are mostly done in back-to-back setup. I know the companies used to support the airfare and accomodation to invite international candidates, but not sure how many international candidates are invited in-person nowadays. I got on-site interview opportunities from two companies and both of them were virtual.

• Company A: Five 1-hr lasting back-to-back interviews.
• Company B: 1-hr presentation + 30-min group casual chat - seven 30-min lasting back-to-back interviews.

Final Report Card & Takes on Job Market

It was really stressful and painstaking to navigate the job market 2024 after my acquisition of PR, but I am glad that finally I was able to receive an offer and relocate to the US. Six months is not a short period of time, but it was still a decent amount of time spent considering the rough job market of 2024. I hope the world economy improves and new opportunities open, and would like to close this post with my final report card for my 2024 later half job hunting☺️.

• Job openings applied : 100
• Recruiter call : 11
• Hiring manager interview : 7
• On-site : 2
• Job offer : 1 🙏

An Offshoot - Studying English

For English study I mostly used some applications and video tutoring service. SayVoca (Korean app.), Speak, and Ringle were my best picks. SayVoca helped me to extend the pool of vocabularies and refine pronunciations. Speak’s AI-assisted voice chat was great to exercise English conversation regardless of time and place, and I could set up a virtual interview setting with a few lines of prompts. Ringle was a face-to-face English tutoring app and it worked to do some final exercise before the interviews. But since I started my first interview, I found the real interview itself is the best study material and it became less and less important to take extra time for studying English. I would like to do another post solely dedicated to outline how to study English👋!