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Work visa guides for Recruitment Agencies

As a recruitment agent, you probably want to leave work permit issues to the candidates wherever possible. Unfortunately, this is not normally possible unless the candidates have very close family ties to their destination country. The sad facts are

  1. Most countries require work permits / visas to be applied for by the potential employer and not the individual
  2. Even in countries such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand that allow independent points based immigration, employer sponsorship is the usual route as this is far quicker (independent immigration applications typically take 6 – 18 months to process!)
  3. The UK, and most EU countries do not allow agents to sponsor work permits – they require sponsorship by either the end user, or by a consulting company providing warrantied project-based deliverables (ie not just a 'contract body shop').

If your end user does not want to sponsor, and is prepared to re-jig the work to be suitably project based (this is becoming increasingly possible in the UK as IR35 forces people towards project-based contracts), point (c) need not be a problem if you have a consulting arm within your corporate group. If you do not, please contact us to discuss your situation. We may well be able to help – in particular as we have many agency clients in this situation, in conjunction with LesterSybersolve we have arranged a 3rd party consulting company that is usually able to warehouse such projects. The contracts can be drafted so as to include you and so that payments continue to flow through you. Another advantage for you is that candidate remuneration is handled by Lester Associates who have specialised in this area for many years.

For details on visas and work permits for a particular jurisdiction, please click on the relevant country from the list below (some of the guides are optimised for agencies, where we have not yet drafted an agency-optimised guide for a country, you sill be taken to the relevant general guide. We apologise for having to adopt this interim measure)

If you have a query about a country not listed above, please contact us as we are constantly adding to our portfolio of services



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