The global hiring playbook: solving the tech skills gap without slowing down

The UK isn’t producing specialist engineers, product managers, and data professionals fast enough to meet demand. Salaries are climbing, time-to-hire is stretching, and the roles your next growth phase depends on are the hardest to fill locally.

The Skilled Worker visa gives you access to a global pool of hires that most UK competitors aren’t recruiting from. The catch is that the sponsor licence system wasn’t built for fast-scaling employers. One missed reporting deadline or one incomplete right to work check can lead to civil penalties, a downgraded or revoked licence, and a hard stop on the overseas hiring your plan relies on.

In this online session, speakers from the Home Office and Canva join the specialists at Borderless Immigration. Together they’ll take People Ops and Talent Acquisition teams through what international hiring costs, where sponsors routinely slip up, and how to run a sponsorship process that keeps pace with your hiring plan. The session is useful whether you already sponsor overseas hires or are still deciding whether to start.

Join us online on Thursday 19 November at 11am (UK time).

What you’ll leave with

• What international hiring costs and how long it takes, from licence application to an engineer’s first day, including the £1,320-a-year Immigration Skills Charge (ISC) for each sponsored hire at medium and large sponsors
• The compliance failures we see most often in tech sponsors, and how to fix them before a Home Office compliance visit uncovers them
• A practical system for Certificate of Sponsorship (CoS) assignments, right to work checks, and Sponsor Management System (SMS) reporting that keeps your team out of the admin
• What a compliance visit looks like inside a tech business: the records checked first, the reporting duties that catch fast-scaling sponsors out, and what to do if your hiring has outgrown your CoS allocation