VIQU’s Tier 2 Worker Program Wins the APSCo Awards for Excellence

In October 2017, VIQU won the highly prestigious APSCo Awards for Excellence – ‘Best Client Initiative of the Year 2017’ for our successful Tier 2 Worker Program.

97.6% of employers faced challenges in 2017 when hiring permanent IT Developers (Java/.Net) and with an estimated 2.2 jobs for each candidate, it is clear to understand these ever-growing supply and demand conditions. Clients are either forced to pay high contractor rates, suffer poorer retention, or are simply unable to compete with their competition. Vacancies remain open, which restricts growth of our client’s businesses. Often, we are competing with many other recruitment agencies over the same few candidates in a highly saturated market. VIQU needed an innovative venture to make a difference to those supply and demand challenges.

We began by looking globally to where highly skilled IT Developers could be sourced from and in January 2017 launched our Tier 2 Worker Program. This is an end-to-end service which involves sourcing non-EU nationals for our Mid-Tier clients and bringing them into the UK with complete Home Office compliancy. These candidates are hired as employees for our clients on working visas.

We began by hiring Senior IT Recruiters in these counties who would source and conduct initial interviews. This would be followed by Skype interviews with UK based VIQU recruiters to ensure fluent English skills and a thorough technical assessment using our in-house web based tool Technical Assessment. Both our clients and VIQU then travel overseas for the final stage of face-to-face interviews and make offers. Our immigration partner will then ensure Home Office compliancy and secure Tier 2 Worker visas for those successful candidates. Finally, VIQU support candidates when they arrived into the UK by renting property, completing school applications and setting up bank accounts etc. Peace of mind and full onboarding support for those relocating is essential for this recruitment solution to work.

The objective of the Tier 2 Worker Program is to streamline the process, meaning our client’s involvement is simply to interview and make offers, we manage everything else. We have placed whole Development teams for our clients this year using this Tier 2 Worker Program.