It has been a while since we have done a site review like we did for H1Base, however given this tends to be a busy season for people especially hunting for H1B visa sponsors in advance of the April 1, 2010 opening filing date for FY2011.

There are a lot of sites out there that propose to help potential H1B applicants from everything from their finding a company, writing resumes, interview practices, legal help, transferring to a green card option, etc.

The legal helps site differ dramatically in what type of help they offer but a word of caution immediately is that any time you start paying for a legal service in the US, be fully aware and informed about what you are paying for in advance, and what it does and does NOT cover. The US legal model is very much based on pay for time, so if you are not paying much, more likely not much time is spent on your individual case and nor will you get much or quick turnaround support.

I will be brutally honest, most of these sites are unscrupulous and either SCAMS or on the borderline. These are easy to spot as they charge large amounts of money, charge for and do not mention the green card lottery is completely free, offer scant information prior to payment and otherwise are more style than substance.

Some off a legitimate service but the service they are offering is not entirely accurate in the way it is marketed nor is it mentioned anywhere that all the best bits of information they have like the Top US Visa Employers are freely available to the general public. They do however provide a type of value added service by repackaging this information in a more user friendly way and at least state they will provide ongoing support, although not really sure how accurately when it comes to real hard slog, grind and few ups and many downs of job searching in the US as a foreigner. (I would put H1Base in this category as a Value Added Service).

Now I would put H1Visajobs.com in this category as a Valued Added Service. Their main product seems to be repackaging the US Visa companies (that I provided links for above) into classification lists like IT, Health, etc. and selling these to a prospect. They also of course have offers to cross sell multiple databases and then further special offers for students and institutions like universities who may want multi-user access.

Finally they have a 30 minute consultation, although reading further it is not entirely clear how much that costs or exactly what is on offer during this time. They do have a running tally (annonymized) of the people who were the most recent subscribers according to them.

I will firstly say noone at E3visa.info has had firsthand experience with H1visajobs and nor are we basing this review on either user comments sent to us here or that we have read elsewhere. This is purely observations based on navigating the site and our what we would like to think is growing deep knowledge of the US Immigration and US Visa system.

Their prices are cheaper than a lot of their competitor sites but then again they also are offering you are lot less. Like I said though other sites may state they offer you a lot but it could be different in reality. A classified database would be helpful if it is done very well and provides multiple layers of search and categorization (given the complex nature of companies like Microsoft wanting IT talent but also talent in other areas).

This would certainly take effort to do this compared to just a raw list of companies and would be extremely helpful further down the list where the company itself may not be as obvious to the average person as to what they would do. As mentioned for this to be truly worthwhile it should be regularly updated (i.e. Top 2009 US Visa companies vs. Top 2008 US Visa Companies) so person can make full determination on the information.

Also if the categorization is just basic, in that the IT list has just all companies who are IT related with no further information beyond that, then it may be worth saving your money and just browsing the lists yourselves.

H1Visajobs to their credit provides some links to useful resources for US Immigration and from those sites although no easily first seen you could actually navigate to US Visa Employer Sponsor lists. So it is definitely not trying to isolate a potential customer as to stating they are the only service, and nor are they offering any crazy guarantees just stating they want to help.

The site itself is very basic in nature as if was created using MS Front Page many many years ago and rarely changed since then. Not that this is a minus but I hope like I said that is not a reflection of the currentness of the databases they provide.

All in all I am a little on the fence with them as on the face of it I would NOT recommend or use them but as I mentioned above they are certainly not seemingly an unscrupulous site or marketing themselves to be anything more than what they seemingly are. However if their databases are constantly revised and as deeply classified as I described earlier then it may be a worthwhile investment for you for your particular niche. (maybe this is something you can ask in your 30 minute consultation with them if indeed that is free!)

CJ