What is “Supervised Recruitment” under PERM?

Not necessarily. Supervised Recruitment can be successfully completed, and a proper showing made that now US worker is available and qualified to perform the job duties leading to approval.

What selection does mean is an additional delay in case processing while the supervised Recruitment processing is completed. This may take an additional six months or more before receiving a final decision.

Supervised Recruitment is something ordered by the US Department of Labor after a PERM audit response that the DOL deems somehow insufficient – either all questions haven’t been answered, or the original recruitment efforts document are determined to be insufficient.

In these situations, if the DOL may not decide to deny the case outright.  Instead they will order the employer to undertake “Supervised Recruitment.” Supervised recruitment is actually very similar to the way ALL Labor Certification recruitment worked before the PERM program went into effect in 2005, and all recruitment was handled by individual State labor offices on “proof” basis rather than the current “promise” basis.

In other words, the employer doesn’t come to the DOL after recruitment to promise that it’s been completed correctly – rather, the Department of Labor overseas the recruitment process and the employer is asked to submit proof of the steps they have taken to comply.

After a determination that the audit response or initial recruitment is insufficient, but that the case may still be approvable if acceptable recruitment is conducted, the DOL will order Supervised Recruitment.

This is done by providing the employer with notice of this determination and instructions. The instructions begin with an order for the employer to submit the text of a proposed advertisement which must meet certain requirements. There are some major differences from the original PERM recruitment is that the employer now needs to include the wage being offered, and the response contact information will not be directly to the employer but rather to the Department of Labor directly (with a code for the specific case involved).

If the ad is approved, the employer will then be directed to place it…often in a newspaper, for three consecutive days to include one Sunday ad.

The DOL will forward resumes received to the employer, who then must conduct interviews and keep detailed notes on any legitimate reasons for rejecting a candidate (including all attempts to contact the candidate to arrange the interview).

After a new 30-day recruitment period has been completed (from the time the first additional ad was first run), the DOL will issue a letter indicating the close of supervised recruitment and instruct the employer to submit a recruitment report. Then, the DOL adjudicates the case based upon that recruitment report.