Technology · IT staffing · United States
An HRMS for people who do not work here yet.
The short version
Ventois places IT consultants with US businesses and recruits a large share of them from outside the country, which means it runs a visa operation as well as a staffing one. It needed one system for documentation, visa and LCA management, allocation of people to client contracts, timesheets and invoicing. We mapped how the business actually worked, built the platform around the answer, supported the implementation and handed it over. It is live and Ventois has run it themselves since.
Three different kinds of person
Most HR systems are built on a single assumption: employment starts when someone is hired, and everything before that is recruitment. For a staffing firm sponsoring visas, that assumption breaks immediately.
Somebody can be identified, documented, entered into a case file, tracked through a government process and monitored for months while having no employment relationship with the company at all. They are not a candidate in any ordinary sense — the firm holds their passport scans and their case history. They are also not an employee, and treating them as one is both wrong and, in places, a compliance problem.
| Profile | Basic details and documents held. No portal access. Supplies information through emailed forms rather than a login. |
| Visa applicant | An application in progress, with a workflow that differs by visa type, and a status that resolves to approved or rejected. |
| Employee | Created only once a visa is approved and an employment opportunity is attached. Full access, timesheets, reviews, leave. |
Getting this wrong is the reason firms in this sector end up running their real process in spreadsheets alongside whichever HR system they bought. The software cannot describe the business, so the business goes around the software.
We also built the path around it. Anyone already holding a valid visa, a green card or citizenship skips the visa request module entirely rather than being routed through a process that does not apply to them.
The compliance calendar is the business
The visa team got a dashboard of its own, and its primary content is a list of upcoming expirations.
That sounds administrative and it is not. A consultant working past a visa expiry is a serious exposure for the sponsoring employer, and the work required to prevent it — renewals, filings, Labor Condition Applications — has long lead times. The risk is never that somebody decides to ignore an expiry. It is that in a business tracking dozens of cases across several visa types, one of them stops being visible in time to do anything about it.
So the system surfaces it rather than storing it. That is the whole difference between a record and a control.
What we built
| 01 | A Profile module held separately from Employment, so pre-employment records live somewhere structurally distinct from employee records. |
| 02 | Visa management with workflows that vary by visa type, and emailed form links so a profile can supply what is needed without portal access. |
| 03 | Application tracking through to approved or rejected, with current visa details recorded on approval and an employment opportunity then attachable. |
| 04 | A bypass route for active visa, green card and citizenship holders. |
| 05 | Statements of work between Ventois and its clients, with resource allocation against them and visibility of who is on the bench. |
| 06 | Leave management and annual performance reviews. |
| 07 | Weekly timesheets with an approval flow and reminders. |
| 08 | Invoicing integrated with QuickBooks and driven off approved timesheets, for both clients and vendors. |
| 09 | Three dashboards — revenue and business metrics for management, daily tasks for employees, upcoming expirations for the visa team. |
Items five, seven and eight are one chain. A person is allocated against a statement of work, records hours against it weekly, those hours are approved, and the approved hours become the invoice. Where that chain is broken — and in staffing firms it usually is, somewhere between a timesheet in email and an invoice in accounting — margin leaks quietly and nobody can say exactly where.
What we can and cannot tell you
What we can and cannot tell you
We did not measure the outcome, and there is no number on this page. We built the platform, implemented it, handed it over and stepped back. What we can evidence is what was built, that it went live, and that Ventois has operated it since. What it saved them in time, errors or margin we do not know, because nobody established a baseline before we started and nobody measured afterwards.
That is a gap in how we ran the project, not a gap in the work. Three things here were measurable and cheap to capture: the elapsed time from timesheet approval to invoice raised, how far in advance visa expirations were surfaced, and days on the bench per consultant. Any of them baselined at the start would have given this page a result rather than a description. We would build that in now as a matter of course.
A description is still worth something. If you run a staffing business with visa sponsorship, the specifics above will tell you whether we understood your problem better than an efficiency percentage would. That is the honest case for reading this page.
How it ended
We built it, supported the implementation, and handed it over. Ventois has run it internally since, without us.
That is the intended shape. A platform that still depends on the firm that built it has not been delivered, it has been rented.
Constraints that shaped the work
A custom build was the right call here and it is not our default — on another engagement in the same period we recommended a client not build custom software at all. The difference is that visa lifecycle management genuinely is unusual: the sequence, the states, the compliance obligations and the access rules do not map onto a standard HR product without fighting it. That is a narrow condition and most businesses that believe they meet it do not.
The larger limitation is the one above. We finished, handed over and did not go back to find out what changed. A short review at six months would have cost very little and would have given both sides something firmer than a working system and a good feeling about it.
If your team runs the real process in spreadsheets
That is diagnostic, and it is usually not laziness. It normally means the software you bought cannot represent something your business genuinely does — a state, a sequence, an exception — so people route around it to get the work done.
Find out what that thing is before you buy anything else. It is often one concept, and once it is described properly the choice between configuring something existing and building something new becomes obvious rather than contested.
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Measurement note. Scope, modules and delivery status are from our own project records and confirmed by the client. No performance baseline was established before the engagement and no outcome measurement was carried out afterwards, so this page reports what was built rather than what it produced.
