The H1B system is just so terrible for everyone involved. No job posting requirement for H1B but you have to post the job when someone applies for a green card a decade later?

Ah yes, the kind of job you can do 9x5 for decades without pressure to use your own time to make sure you are really staying up to date with the fads for your job next year while trying to deliver something stable enough to make it to your last day..

There is a single job posting on jobs.now for Java. Posted 3 weeks ago.

I don't think this is succeeding even as a jobs site.

No, the ELI5 is that the companies are posting jobs in a way that makes it very inconvenient to find online or apply for them, to ensure it goes to the H1B visa holder and not to an American national. (actually it's less about filling the job itself and more about the PERM greencard process, but that's not super relevant to the explanation.)

By law, these companies must prove the job cannot be filled by an American in order to hire the visa worker. One way to 'ensure' this is to only advertise jobs in newspapers or in radio advertisements, or in unlinked and unindexed webpages. That way, the American never knows the job exists, and the company can prove on paper to the Department of Labor that they tried to hire an American but couldn't find one. The InstaCart job posting for example requires resumes to mailed in through the postal service to their immigration department.

The goal of the project is to aggregate these jobs in a place that Americans can find and apply for them. An additional thing to note is that the company MUST respond to the US applicant within 30 days, or the applicant can file an official complaint with the government.

The only effect of applying to jobs on jobs.now is that someone who is already working in the US on H1-B, and was gonna get green card if you hadn't applied, would instead stay on H1-B.

For the job requiring Russian, that requirement is likely because the owner or hiring manager speaks Russian (the name where to send resumes to is Russian). Should that be a legitimate requirement to allow a visa for someone to work in the US? I cannot speak to that.

It's hard for me to believe that anyone working in a tech industry hasn't seen this kind of thing happening or heard managers/owners talking about gaming the system. When people say they've never heard of it or don't think it happens, I wonder if they're incredibly naive or being evasive.

I witnessed employers doing that to get people greencards too. Claim the exact combination of their stack plus experience in the domain is a requirement. Only way to meet that is to have been working the job.

It's the same with most job adverts in the UK, written to satisfy the 3 week listing requirement before the job can be offered to a foreign national.

The law itself is pretty idiotic. Why would an employer give up a well accustomed well proven candidate for the sake of some random guy, waste money to recruitment and cross fingers that the employee would actually join and perform ?

It is like giving up a lottery ticket you have won for another lottery ticket.

Also, the law mandates certain compliance steps which the employers do. There is no expectation that they should actually hire someone else unless the compliance steps are violated. So everything is working exactly as intended.

This PERM process and law has harmed countless american citizens and employers both. Citizens end up applying for jobs they are not going to get and HR wastes time on resources over candidates they are not going to hire.

A better solution would be to hand a greencard to any immigrant who has worked for 5 years and has earned a certain high salary as proven by the W2.

This whole circus can be gotten rid off if you ask me.

As someone who used to work in contract recruiting, hiring requirements that made absolutely no sense and were fishing for H1-B eligibility were common. I'm still adamant about the idea that an H1 should be paid at least 120% of the average salary for the position at the hiring company. If it's THAT hard to hire an American, then clearly you should need to pay more for such rare expertise.

The companies do that because they already had an applicant from abroad for this role they accepted. And now they must wait out the period for job posting to be live before inviting the applicant.

that’s not true - it’s pretty easy to switch. Your application does not count against new quota - employer just needs to pay a lawyer to file paperwork and done. Been there, done that.