H-1B Labor Condition Application Filing
Before sponsoring an H-1B worker, an employer must file a Labor Condition Application with the Department of Labor, and the DOL publishes every certified filing with the job title, SOC classification, worksite address, offered wage, prevailing wage, employment start date, and number of positions. It is one of the most detailed public disclosures of corporate hiring intent that exists — filed by name, by role, by location, and by salary. Avina detects new certified filings, which frequently surface a hiring plan before the corresponding job posts appear anywhere.
Why an LCA Filing Is a Buying Signal for Sales Teams
An LCA is filed because a company has decided to sponsor. That decision costs real money in legal fees and filing fees, carries a wage floor the employer is legally bound to, and commits the company to a worksite. Nobody files one for a role they are unsure about. What makes the data unusually valuable is its granularity: not just that a company is hiring, but the exact title, the exact address where the work will be performed, the exact salary, and how many positions are covered by the filing. Read across a quarter, that granularity describes strategy. A cluster of filings for machine learning and data engineering titles is an AI program being staffed. A block of filings at a worksite address the company has never filed from before is a new office, often months ahead of any announcement. Filings at wage levels well above the prevailing rate indicate senior hires and a team being built rather than backfilled. A sudden concentration in one SOC classification is a function being scaled — and the function that is being scaled is nearly always the function about to buy tooling. The filing also identifies a buyer directly. Sponsorship at any volume means immigration counsel, case management, compliance with public access file requirements, and someone in HR spending a meaningful share of their week on it. Companies crossing from occasional sponsorship into regular sponsorship are the ones that stop handling it in email and buy an immigration management platform, and the filing history shows exactly when that crossing happens. For staffing and recruiting firms, the same data identifies which competitors are staffing which roles at which wages — the most concrete competitive intelligence available in that market. The caveats are real and worth knowing. Not every certified LCA results in a petition or a hire, since employers sometimes file more positions than they fill. Filings from staffing firms and consultancies represent placements at client sites rather than internal hiring. And the public disclosure files are published on a quarterly cadence, so this is a strong signal about direction rather than a same-week alert.
How Does Avina Detect LCA Filings?
Avina ingests the Department of Labor's LCA disclosure data, parsing each certified filing for employer, job title, SOC classification, worksite address, offered and prevailing wage, employment period, number of positions, and full-time status. Employer names are normalized and resolved to the operating company, since the same business frequently files under legal entity variants, and staffing and consulting filers are separated from direct employers so placement volume is not mistaken for internal hiring. Filings are aggregated into company-level patterns rather than surfaced individually: volume trend against prior periods, concentration by role family, new worksite locations that do not match any known office, and wage levels relative to the prevailing rate for that occupation and area. PERM filings are tracked alongside, since they indicate permanent residency sponsorship and a longer-term commitment to the employee. Avina then cross-references correlated evidence — public job postings for the same titles, office lease or expansion activity at the filed worksite, and funding or contract wins that would fund the plan — so the signal reflects a hiring program rather than a paperwork artifact.
What Happens When an LCA Signal Fires?
Avina scores the account on filing volume relative to its own history, the concentration of filings within a role family, whether a new worksite location has appeared, wage levels relative to prevailing rates, and correlated public job postings. Relevant contacts — VP of Talent Acquisition, CHRO, Head of Global Mobility, General Counsel, and the engineering or functional leaders hiring into the roles — are enriched with verified emails, phone numbers, and LinkedIn profiles through waterfall enrichment. Reps receive a Slack alert with the company name, the titles and role families being filed for, the worksite locations including any that are new, wage ranges, and total positions covered. CRM records in Salesforce or HubSpot are updated with the full filing pattern. Qualified accounts can be auto-enrolled into Outreach or Salesloft sequences matched to what the filings show — immigration case management and compliance tooling for companies whose sponsorship volume is climbing, recruiting and talent tooling for functions being scaled, and function-specific software aimed at the team the filings say is being built.
Start Tracking LCA Filings With Avina
Job title, worksite, wage, and headcount — disclosed by law, often before the role is ever posted. Activate this signal in Avina's Signals Library and get notified when a target company files. Every plan includes a 7-day free trial with no credit card required.