News and Research

Our News and Research post includes stories on hiring great team members, breaking habits that affect our happiness and the latest issues with H-1B visas. That’s a lot of great stuff to read while sipping on various pumpkin spice beverages!

Ensure you are hiring great team members

Hiring managers looking to build a successful company should consider how winning sports teams are put together. These teams typically include veterans that have leadership qualities and essential skills, as well as up-and-coming young talent.

Furthermore, great teams also tend to be comprised of people with complementary abilities and work habits. So, if your team has exceptional technical abilities, you can hire someone who brings much-needed valuable qualities to the team, but whose technical abilities need development.

When looking to hire a new team member, the first step is to find out the core capabilities and essential characteristics that will allow for the new worker and the team succeed. The most essential skills or abilities might be interpersonal skills, or a particular technical skill. Try to identify four or five critical abilities and then ascertain how you will evaluate each applicant for these qualities.

Read the whole story here.

The habits of happiness

Recent research from University of California Riverside has revealed about 40 percent of personal happiness is based on attitude and habits.

For those of us who spend 40 hours a week or more working, this finding indicates that adopting habits associated with happiness and breaking habits that make you unhappy are essential to shedding work stress and enjoying life as much as possible.

Some bad habits to get rid of include isolating yourself, constant complaining, spending time with negative people, not setting goals, giving into fear and getting overly obsessed with material things.

Read the whole story here.

Trump Administration has been giving H-1B visas extra scrutiny

Some H-1B applicants are having a more difficult time than applicants in the past in trying to get authorized for the desirable visa, based on federal immigration data recently acquired by the media.

H-1B visas permit foreign nationals with specialized abilities to work three to six years at a sponsor business in the United States. There are 85,000 visas assigned to for-profit businesses through a lottery annually; these mandate further validation before the candidate can start working. The visas are restricted to “specialty occupations,” which means the job calls for someone with a bachelor’s degree or higher.

This new public data supports anecdotal statements from immigration attorneys across the country saying the Trump Administration has been challenging H-1B visa applications far more than past administrations.

According to reports, there was a 45 percent rise in requests for evidence on H-1B applications obtained between Jan. 1 to Aug. 31 compared to the same period last year. Concurrently, the amount of applications increased only by 3 percent.

Requests for evidence are conventional in the H-1B application system when the government needs more data before granting a visa. The difference between the Trump Administration and the previous Obama Administration is that entry-level salaries are under particular scrutiny: Officials at United States Citizenship and Immigration Services have been particularly focused on applicants getting a “Level 1” wage, the lowest salary permitted for foreign-born workers in a given profession.

Read the whole story here.