Sending a visa sponsorship offer used to be all or nothing. You opened the form, started filling it in, and hit a wall the moment it asked for something only your candidate could tell you, like their date of birth, their current visa type, or the date their visa expires. If you didn’t have it to hand, the form wouldn’t let you move on, and there was no way to save and come back later. So the offer sat half-finished, or someone guessed to get unstuck and picked the wrong visa category.
Borderless Immigration has rebuilt the Send Offer flow to fix exactly that. You still send a complete offer at the end, with every detail in place. What has changed is everything in between: you can start before you have it all, save your progress on any step, fill the gaps in any order, and submit only once nothing is missing.
Here’s what changed and why it matters.
The problem: good offers were getting abandoned halfway
A sponsorship offer asks for two kinds of information. Some of it the employer knows: the role, the salary, the start date, who pays the fees. Some of it only the candidate can give you: their personal details, their current immigration status, and when their existing visa runs out.
The old form treated both the same. If you couldn’t answer a candidate-only field, you couldn’t advance, and you couldn’t save what you’d already done. Open an offer at the end of the day with only half the details to hand, and you were left choosing between abandoning it to start from scratch later, or guessing to get unstuck.
That second option is the dangerous one. Pick the wrong visa category because you didn’t have the candidate’s details in front of you, and you’ve built an offer on a mistake. The fear of getting it wrong is real, and it is why so many people dared not submit when there were gaps.
What Send Offer changes
The new flow is built around a simple idea: you should be able to start an offer, stop, and come back as many times as you need, without losing your progress or guessing to fill a gap. Five changes make that work.
A checklist of what you’ll need, before you start
Before the form even opens, you get a short screen listing the details only your candidate can answer, such as their date of birth, current visa type, and visa expiry date. You can email the list to yourself and forward it on, so the candidate can send everything back in one go before you sit down to fill the form in.
It is also aware of who you’re sponsoring. For someone you already sponsor, the checklist shows only the details we don’t already hold on file, and if we have everything, it skips the screen and takes you straight in. If you’d rather not see it again, you can turn it off for yourself.
Save a draft on every step
Every step of the form now has a Save draft button. Save, close the tab, walk away, and your progress is still there when you come back, because closing after a save no longer discards what you’ve done.
Drafts live in your Drafts tab, ready to pick up whenever you like. They’re visible to everyone on your team, with a column showing who edited each one last, so a colleague can carry on where you left off. Drafts you don’t return to are cleared automatically after 90 days.
Move through the form in any order, and leave the gaps for later
Once you’ve saved a draft, you can jump between steps in any order and leave required fields blank. Anything still outstanding is highlighted amber, with a plain note that we’ll need it before you can submit, but you can come back to it later.
That is the change that ends the guessing, because you no longer have to invent an answer to get past a field. Leave it amber, save, and move on. The old “I don’t know” checkbox on the visa expiry date has gone, since you no longer need it; you simply leave the field blank and save.
A clear list of what’s still missing before you submit
When you reach the review step, a “What’s still needed” panel lists every blank required field, grouped by section, with a link straight to each one. A running count tells you exactly how much is left, for example “3 required fields still need filling before you can submit.”
Submit stays locked until that list is clear. You can build an offer over several sittings, across several people, and still send a complete one at the end, with the platform confirming nothing has been missed.
A sensible default on the payment step
Small friction adds up, so the payment step now starts from your organisation’s default fee allocation rather than a blank slate. If you split who pays what differently for a particular hire, that sits behind a “Customise who pays what” option, there when you need it and out of the way when you don’t.
A few smaller touches round it out. Each section header shows where you are, such as “Step 2 of 5: Visa information”. For an existing employee you’re re-sponsoring, the “candidate based in UK” field is pre-filled to yes. And from your homepage, a Send offer tile in the quick-actions row gets you straight in, while a nudge card surfaces any incomplete drafts waiting for your attention.
Who it’s for
Anyone who sends visa sponsorship offers through Borderless: HR, People, and Operations leads, and the hiring managers who actually sit down to compose an offer. It doesn’t matter what sector you’re in or how many people you sponsor. If you’ve ever started an offer and stalled because you didn’t have a detail to hand, this is the change you’ll feel.
It is especially useful if you sponsor people in batches, or if more than one person on your team touches an offer before it goes out. Shared drafts and the last-edited-by column mean a colleague can carry on from where you stopped, rather than starting over.
What difference it makes
Sending a sponsorship offer now fits around your day, rather than demanding a clear half-hour with every detail in front of you at once. You can start when it suits you, save when you run out of information, chase the candidate for what’s missing, then come back and finish.
The end result is the same complete, correct offer it always had to be. What changes is how you get there: in stages, without guessing, and without the nagging worry that you’ve missed something. For a team that sponsors workers regularly, that means less stop-start admin, fewer abandoned offers, and far less risk of an offer built on a detail someone had to invent.
Send Offer is live on the Borderless platform now. If your team sponsors workers and you’d like to see the new flow against the way you send offers today, you can book a 20-minute walkthrough with us.
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