We are so new to this that I'm not sure how big a deal it is going to be. We'll definitely find out soon, as a lot of great candidates are not US citizens.
I'll let you see how it stacks up at Kaggle: http://www.kaggle.com/users
Jobs threads on HN seem to have the same callous approach, but… I have never met an American, even expatriated for a decade, that didn't grossly underestimated how US-centrism was hurting them.
You're almost certainly right that I'm underestimating the detriment of US-centrism, since I don't quite understand what you're suggesting–maybe you can explain some more?
Seems the only three things we can do with skilled non-US candidates are 1) try to find them work in the US, 2) try to find them work outside the US, and 3) not try to find them work. We are of course focusing on 1), since we currently only have manpower to do matching in person and we live in SF, which happens to be in the US. 2) would be nice if we grew big enough, and we have one employer in Australia so far. 3) would be an unfortunate necessity if we couldn't get an international employer network and it proved way too hard to convince US companies to sponsor visas. But it's going to be up to our employers, not us, to decide whether that's worthwhile.
The most urgent thing to do is to ask companies if they’d consider an H1B visa applicants, or international contracts and post that information for applicants to see. Taking the time to write applications to dozens of companies to receive a handful of “Sorry, when we meant skilled people, we obviously didn’t mean you.” is… well, not great.
There is a special level of WTF when you read for now several years in every business magazine that what you do is the most looked for skill-set, that they'll be millions like you needed, and having that conversation “It is so difficult to hire the right kind of people! I’ve tried that for months! — Couldn’t you argue that to get me a H1B? — Nah, it's too difficult: you have to put out an ad and wait three months.”
My point is: your brand can be associated to that kind of experience for 60% of your user-base, or try to avoid it.
Your response seems to come exclusively from your perspective, both as US-based and as an intermediary. Great products are made by walking in the shoes of every party involved.
One thing you could do too, as you have a list of candidates, is some instant feedback to employers on whether or not lobbying for a visa would make sense: just say how many candidates are available for each options, how expensive they are or, better, how the best candidates for each option rank in your game; when they might be available. That would require coding, and I appreciate you have limited ressources — but being open-source should let you hope for an interested party to do it for you. So I guess: congratulation on your strategy.
We'll definitely be up front on how necessary an H1B turns out to be once we have that info from our employers. Preliminary results suggest that around 2/3 of companies are fine with sponsoring H1B transfers, but we don't have data yet on sponsoring new H1Bs, which I guess is the big question.
Now we know we can definitely have enough skilled candidates, and though it's only been a week, it is looking really good on the employer end as well.