Commentary: International student talent is employment game changer
By Chris Hoehn-Saric, Imran Oomer
If you’re a healthcare employer seeking to hire more nurses or a company working to build a stronger team of technology professionals, you’re facing a frustratingly similar challenge: scores of unfilled positions and not nearly enough skilled workers to fill them.
To solve this shortfall forecast for the next decade, and strengthen the human-capital side of these critical and in-demand industries, we have an opportunity to embrace skilled immigration and fully leverage the talents of international candidates completing their degrees at U.S. colleges and universities to fill the gaps. To illustrate the dire needs of the current landscape: There were nearly 316,000 new technology positions open nationwide in March — a sharp rise from the nearly 240,000 available in February, according to data from the trade group Computing Technology Industry Association. In a shift from Silicon Valley to Main Street, much of this job momentum is coming from increasing demand for tech talent in our financial, manufacturing, retail and hospital sectors — signifying a simultaneous geographic and cross-industry digital transformation.
Meanwhile, our nation's healthcare industry is undergoing a workforce transformation of its own. It’s been acutely felt in Massachusetts, home to some of the best hospitals in the world, where a recent survey of nurses found nearly a fifth plan to leave the workforce within the next two years due to staffing shortages. Relatedly, filling the existing gaps exposed by the pandemic have been expensive, with Massachusetts hospitals spending $1.52 billion on traveling nurses to address critical frontline delivery needs.
The seriousness of these mounting challenges cannot be understated, and the solution — particularly in the face of steepening budget shortfalls and deepening U.S. demographic obstacles — points sharply to a growing pipeline of highly qualified, highly mobile and diverse international talent to meet the demands of these sectors.
While skilled immigration as a concept enjoys wide bipartisan support, and with plenty of research touting the economic benefits of a diverse workforce, for many employers, hiring top tier international talent is easier said than done. Tech and nursing employers we speak to and partner with tell us that the biggest barriers to hiring international talent through the optional practice training (OPT) program, which allows visa-holding students to stay in the U.S. and work after they graduate, is twofold: It requires making sure students are ready and prepared for the U.S. workforce so they can stay in these positions for the long term and, it means managing the oftentimes complex immigration process necessary to keep them on the job.
Smoothing those friction points for international talent and employers, sharpening the relevant skills required for success on the job, and placing candidates in long-term vital roles is the key to building these sectors back to their full potential and closing the workforce gaps. For employers, it means hiring a qualified, adaptable candidate who understands the latest threats in cybersecurity to fortify the online infrastructure of a local business, such as a bank or retail store, or who has the skills necessary to handle high-tech machinery and position a company to take advantage of CHIPS Act funding, or build a platform or app to help a business meet customer demands. In healthcare, it means a nurse who not only has the best-in-class U.S. nursing credentials but who can also bring a cultural perspective to caring for an increasingly diverse pool of patients.
If there’s one thing our personal background and experience in the education sector and working with international candidates has taught us, it’s that this cohort of international professionals is too valuable to overlook particularly when it comes to our long-term economic security.
Like our courageous relatives before us who came to this country full of hope, the international students of today are drawn here to achieve a modern “American Dream.” They are also key to achieving and closing the widening gaps we see today that are keeping the U.S. competitive.
Curating and harnessing this highly mobile international talent pipeline, providing them with critical training and skills development to meet critical job demands and then directly connecting them with employers ready to hire is the streamlined system we need to plug our economic vulnerabilities and solve our most daunting employment challenges.
Chris Hoehn-Saric is co-founder and CEO of inSpring. Imran Oomer is co-founder and chief revenue officer of inSpring in Boston.