H-1B Visa Ban Impacts Business Continuity for Tech Companies

On June 22, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that freezes new visas for foreign workers through the end of the year. This includes H-1B visas, which are a critical source of foreign labor for tech companies — many of whom already suffer from a lack of available talent to fill open positions.

Visa-holders already in the U.S. and those applicants who have already received a visa are exempt from the ban. The restrictions are intended to last until the end of the year.

What this means for tech companies

It was already notoriously difficult for tech companies to find qualified candidates for open positions. According to KMS Technology, it takes 66 days on average to fill a tech role, which is 50% longer than other positions. It’s logical to expect many open jobs will take longer to fill if organizations can’t accept new H-1B visa candidates.

For tech companies that need to make new hires in the second half of 2020 to fill open positions, the H-1B visa ban will likely make it even more challenging to find qualified candidates. “Software developer” and “software engineer” are the two most commonly used job titles for H-1B visa candidates, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor in 2019.

For tech companies that need to make new hires in the second half of 2020 to fill open positions, the H-1B visa ban will likely make it even more challenging to find qualified candidates.

As an alternative to hiring H-1B visa candidates, companies could look to outsource the work internationally with employees based in other countries. However, doing so presents the challenges of hiring and managing a distributed global team.

This threatens those companies’ business continuity at a time when many organizations are still reeling from financial losses, downsizing and company layoffs in recent months due to the pandemic, and were looking at the second half of 2020 and beyond as an opportunity to rebound.

In addition, this represents another roadblock for Western companies who relied on outsourcing firms for QA testing in faraway countries. Many of those offshore companies lacked the infrastructure to remain fully operational during the pandemic, when workers were required to work from home, and it impacted their customers’ business continuity.

How Applause can plug the hole

As organizations look to ensure business continuity at a time when filling technical roles with qualified personnel is difficult, Applause is uniquely positioned to help. Applause’s fully managed service, global community of vetted QA testers and SaaS platform with complete visibility into real-time testing results enables organizations to expand the size of their testing teams exponentially — and free up their internal resources to focus on other initiatives.

Applause’s community-based approach enables organizations to launch teams of testers, on demand, that meet specific testing needs for that moment in time. The organization chooses which devices to test, what locations to test in and the demographics to test with, all while freeing up internal teams to focus on other initiatives. Applause can get up and running with testing for organizations in a day, and get actionable testing results to companies in a matter of hours.

Applause’s global community includes QA experts, CX researchers, accessibility experts, SDETs, and panelists matching any demographic across virtually any country and language with access to virtually any device or payment instrument. To solve targeted, high-impact challenges, Applause has people who are experts at breaking shopping carts, and other critical use cases.

Organizations can benefit from this exponential growth in the size and expertise of their teams by leveraging Applause, whose business model continues to thrive during a global pandemic and is proven to provide a strong ROI for organizations. And it doesn’t take 66 days to get started with this team.