10
Loading video...
By Carlos Gonzalez
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
America’s labor shortage is partly a problem of our own making.
Businesses keep searching for workers within the same narrow geographic circles, then wonder why they cannot fill essential jobs.
Meanwhile, the tools for building a broader, more stable workforce already exist. American employers need to stop treating global talent as an exotic last resort and start treating it as a normal part of workforce planning.
Read More on Leadership Insights
The numbers show why this matters. According to the National Federation of Independent Business, 35 percent of small business owners reported unfilled job openings in August.
Among the 56 percent of owners who were hiring or trying to hire, 82 percent reported few or no qualified applicants. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, meanwhile, reported 7.3 million job openings in July.
This is not a handful of companies struggling to recruit. It is a persistent mismatch between the people businesses need and the way they search for them.
Visas Offer a Solution For a Company's Recruitment
I have seen how quickly that mismatch becomes a cycle. A company needs workers, searches locally, comes up short, and turns to a temporary staffing solution.
Six months later, those workers leave, and the company starts over. Managers repeat the process, retrain people, rearrange schedules, and absorb the costs of turnover. The organization remains stuck solving the same problem over and over.
Temporary visa programs can serve a legitimate purpose, but they become a poor strategy when businesses use them as their default answer to a permanent need.
When an employer requires a dependable workforce year after year, constantly rotating temporary workers creates instability for everyone.
Housing, transportation, training, scheduling, and retention become recurring headaches. The business loses institutional knowledge, while workers are left planning their lives around uncertainty.
There is another option that too many companies overlook: structured employment-based pathways to permanent residency, including programs such as EB-3.
These pathways can take longer to establish than a quick temporary hire, but they are designed for a different objective, like building a lasting workforce.
That distinction matters. When an employer invests in a worker who intends to build a future in the United States, retention and continuity can become part of the workforce strategy rather than accidental byproducts.
Talent Is Global, And So Is The Search For It
The biggest obstacle I see is often not the absence of a legal pathway. It is the mindset inside the organization.
Human resources departments are experts at local recruiting, benefits, compliance, and employee relations. Yet many have little experience with international recruitment.
So when the local labor pool comes up short, they return to the same familiar methods and expect different results.
That is a costly form of tunnel vision.
A genuinely modern workforce strategy has to recognize that talent is global. Looking beyond a 30-mile radius does not mean abandoning American workers or local communities. It means giving employers another tool when persistent vacancies threaten operations.
Done properly, international recruitment can bring motivated workers into communities, help businesses maintain continuity, and give families a lawful path toward greater stability.
The alternative is easy to picture. Keep relying on short-term fixes, and businesses will continue bleeding time and money through turnover, repeated training, recruitment bottlenecks, and unfilled positions.
Operations suffer. Customers feel the effects. Growth gets postponed. Eventually, a “labor shortage” becomes an excuse for problems that better planning could have prevented.
The better future is also within reach, where employers build durable talent pipelines, workers gain a realistic path to long-term employment, and communities benefit from people who are putting down roots rather than passing through for another temporary assignment.
So I challenge every CEO and HR leader facing persistent vacancies to do something specific.
Take the jobs you have failed to fill repeatedly and put them through a global workforce review. Determine which positions are truly temporary and which represent permanent business needs.
Then require your HR team to evaluate every lawful recruitment pathway available before defaulting to another six-month solution.
This is the test. If a company keeps advertising the same vacancy, hiring the same way, and losing workers the same way, it cannot honestly call the problem unsolvable. The labor market has changed. Our thinking has to change with it.
Stop searching for the workforce you wish existed. Build the workforce your business actually needs.
Carlos Gonzalez is legal director at Global Express Recruiting, a company that earns revenue by helping employers recruit international workers through employment-based immigration programs.
The views expressed are the author's own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines