Methodology
How we use public records and job postings.
How to read sponsorship evidence
Openbound is an independent job-discovery service. It combines public employer filing records with current posting language to report evidence-based estimates, not employer commitments or legal advice.
- Certified H-1B Labor Condition Application (LCA)
A certified LCA is a Department of Labor labor-condition record. It is not a USCIS petition approval, a hire, or confirmation that a current opening offers sponsorship.
Department of Labor disclosure data · Link to this explanation
- H-1B petition history
USCIS employer petition records are a separate source from certified LCAs. Openbound keeps petition evidence and labor-condition filing evidence separate.
- Certified PERM history
Certified PERM records describe historical employer labor-certification activity for permanent residence. They do not establish a green card commitment for a current job or a green card approval.
Department of Labor disclosure data · Link to this explanation
- Current job-posting evidence
The original employer posting is the source for the opening's stated requirements and sponsorship language. Read its current version and confirm the policy for that role with the employer.
- Data-through date versus refresh date
The data-through date says how far the source records cover. The refresh date says when Openbound imported or refreshed them. Neither date is a promise that an employer's current policy is unchanged.
Research an employer's filing history · Browse current jobs · Report incorrect evidence
Where the evidence comes from
Openbound reads two kinds of public record. The first is U.S. government disclosure data: Department of Labor records of certified H-1B Labor Condition Applications, which show that an employer took the formal step of filing for a role; USCIS records of H-1B petitions by employer; and Department of Labor PERM applications, which relate to permanent residence sponsorship. The second is the job posting itself, read from the employer's careers site or the job platform it uses.
These are separate signals and we keep them separate. A filing history describes what an employer has done before. A posting describes what this specific opening says today.
Matching a company to its filings
Employers rarely file under the name you see on a careers page. Filings arrive under legal entities — a company you know as Twitch appears as Twitch Interactive, and GoDaddy as GoDaddy.com, LLC. Openbound resolves a company to its filing entities and records how confident that match is.
Where a company cannot be matched to a verified entity, we say so rather than guessing. A confident match to the wrong employer would produce specific, credible, wrong advice — the single worst outcome for someone planning around a visa.
H-1B, E-3 and H-1B1 are read separately
Openbound reads every job through one visa pathway at a time: H-1B, E-3 (for Australian citizens) or H-1B1 (for citizens of Chile or Singapore). You choose which one in your profile or from the sponsorship filter, and you can change it whenever you like. All three are filed with the Department of Labor as Labor Condition Applications, in the same disclosure files, and Openbound reads each visa class from those files separately. H-1B1 Chile and H-1B1 Singapore are kept apart as well, even though they are shown as one pathway.
Each pathway's answer uses the same scale and the same rules, applied only to that visa class's own filings: the employer's filings, the filings for this kind of role, the filings in this state, and this year's filings. An employer with hundreds of H-1B filings and no E-3 filings has no E-3 record, so for E-3 it reads Unclear, not Likely. USCIS petition records cover H-1B only, so they are never used for E-3 or H-1B1.
What a posting says applies to every pathway (“we cannot sponsor visas” rules out E-3 as well), except when its sponsorship statement mentions H-1B and nothing else. An offer of H-1B sponsorship is not an offer of E-3 sponsorship, and refusing H-1B is not the same as refusing E-3, so in that case the posting is treated as unclear for the other pathways. Green card history comes from PERM records, which are the same whichever pathway you choose.
Whether they sponsor this role
An employer's overall filing count says very little about a particular opening. A company that has sponsored five thousand software engineers may never have sponsored a marketing manager, and treating those as the same fact is how sponsorship advice becomes misleading.
So role evidence is reported at three strengths. An exact match means the employer has filed for this same role. A related match means they have filed for adjacent work in the same discipline — nearby, but not the same claim. Where the filings we hold cover none of this kind of work, that is reported as a finding in its own right, not as missing data.
What the posting says
A posting that states a sponsorship restriction outranks every historical signal. An employer with a long filing record that says it cannot sponsor this role cannot sponsor this role, and the conclusion reflects that regardless of how strong the history is.
The reverse also holds: a posting that explicitly offers sponsorship is treated as decisive. Openbound quotes the phrase it matched so you can check the reading against the posting yourself.
Confidence is a separate question
The conclusion and our confidence in it are reported independently, because they answer different questions. “Likely, low confidence” is a real and useful result: it says the balance of evidence points one way while telling you not to plan around it.
Confidence reflects corroboration rather than volume. Several independent signals agreeing — role, location, recent activity, posting language — supports a conclusion more than one very large number on its own.
Recent, repeated filing counts most
A filing history shows what an employer has done before. It is not a guarantee that it will sponsor you, or anyone, for this opening.
Not all history is equal. An employer that filed for workers every year, including this one, is a very different prospect from one that filed once several years ago and not since, even when the totals look similar. So wherever Openbound shows an employer’s record it shows three things together: the latest fiscal year with a certified filing, the number of filings in the last two and last three fiscal years, and in how many of the years we hold the employer filed at all. These are exact counts of certified records, not estimates. A fiscal year still in progress is labeled as one, because its numbers are incomplete.
A trend (rising, steady or falling) is shown only when it compares completed fiscal years and the difference is too large to be ordinary year-to-year variation. For small employers there is usually not enough volume to call a trend, and we say nothing rather than guess.
A filing is a certified Labor Condition Application (for H-1B) or labor certification (for a green card). One filing can cover more than one position, and a filing is not a hire, so these numbers describe how actively an employer sponsors, not how many people it hired.
What the posting says is a separate signal from filing history and is reported separately. A posting that offers sponsorship or rules it out outranks the history either way.
Cap-exempt status is verified separately
Some employers — universities, their qualifying affiliated nonprofits, and nonprofit or governmental research organizations — can file H-1B petitions outside the annual lottery. For a candidate who was not selected in the lottery, that can matter more than anything else on the page.
Openbound marks an employer “Cap-exempt employer” only when a reviewer has established that the specific legal entity that employs the people on its job board qualifies, and on what basis. We never infer it from a brand name, from the word “university”, or from a hospital’s or institute’s affiliation with a university: an affiliated hospital is often a separate corporation whose exemption is its own question. For a nonprofit research organization, an organization describing itself that way is not enough: the IRS record for that exact entity must show it is tax-exempt for research or educational purposes, and authoritative evidence must show it is primarily engaged in research. Where exemption has not been established, the page says so; that means unknown, not “not exempt”. USCIS decides exemption for each petition.
How complete the job list is
Separately from sponsorship, company pages say how completely Openbound holds the employer’s current openings, and how recently that was confirmed. This is about the list of jobs, not about sponsorship: a “Complete” list does not mean the employer sponsors, and a “Partial” one does not mean it does not.
Complete means Openbound has read every posting on the employer’s careers site in a check that proved it saw them all. Partial means Openbound deliberately lists only part of the employer’s openings — for example, corporate roles but not store or warehouse roles — and the page says which part. Unknown means no complete read is on record. Openbound never stores a read that was cut short, capped or only partly paged through, so an incomplete read cannot make a list look complete.
How recent the list is, is shown next to it rather than folded into it: the date of the last complete read, and a note when the most recent refresh failed. A failed refresh leaves the last complete list in place — Openbound never removes a job on the strength of an incomplete read — so an older list is still complete as of that date, but new openings posted since may not be listed yet and some listed ones may have closed.
What public data cannot tell you
Disclosure data is filed on a delay and covers completed fiscal years, so the most recent months are always thinner than the rest. It records applications and certifications, not offers, and it says nothing about a team's budget, a hiring manager's discretion, or a policy that changed last quarter.
Many employers have no U.S. filing history at all. That is frequently correct rather than a gap in our coverage — plenty of companies genuinely do not sponsor — but it means an honest answer is often “we checked, and there is not enough here to call it”.
Openbound reports evidence. It does not predict decisions, and nothing here is legal advice.
Data sources
Everything Openbound shows comes from one of the sources below. Openbound is independent: it is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of any agency, employer or platform named here.
- H-1B Labor Condition Applications
- U.S. Department of Labor, Office of Foreign Labor Certification disclosure data. Used for an employer's H-1B filing history, by role and by location. An application is a step before a petition; it is not a petition, an approval or a hire.
- H-1B petitions
- USCIS H-1B Employer Data Hub. Used as a second, independent view of an employer's H-1B history.
- Green card (PERM) applications
- U.S. Department of Labor PERM disclosure data. Used for an employer's permanent-residence sponsorship history.
- Cap-exempt employers
- Openbound's own review of public records about specific employers — for example, that an employer is a university or a nonprofit research organization. USCIS decides exemption for each petition.
- Job postings
- Employers' careers sites and the job platforms they use, including Greenhouse, Lever, Ashby, Jobvite, JobBoardHQ, Phenom, October People, HiringThing, iCIMS, Workable, SmartRecruiters, Workday, Eightfold, Oracle Recruiting Cloud, SAP SuccessFactors, Radancy, Avature. Openbound shows a summary of each posting and links to the original, where the full description is and where you apply.
- Company size
- Mostly the People Data Labs free company dataset, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and reduced to a size band; for a few employers, the employer's own website, annual report or job postings, or Wikidata.
- Logos
- Taken from each employer's own website or careers platform, and used only to identify the employer.
Counts and estimates
Figures such as the number of certified H-1B applications or PERM cases are counts of government records for the fiscal years shown beside them, attributed to the legal entities Openbound matched to the employer. Government data is published after a delay, so the latest fiscal year is usually incomplete. Everything else — the sponsorship assessment, how relevant the history is to a role or location, confidence, and the summary of a posting — is Openbound's own reading of those records and the posting, not something an agency or the employer published. Each job page says which fiscal years its evidence covers and when the posting was last confirmed.
Filing history and offered wages
Company pages chart certified H-1B and PERM filings for up to the ten most recent fiscal years the Department of Labor publishes, fewer where fewer are published, with the median offered wage for each year. The offered wage is the one stated on each certified filing, at the low end where the filing gives a range, converted to a yearly figure from an hourly, weekly or monthly rate. The median is taken across every filing in the year that states a wage, for all the legal entities matched to the employer, and is shown to the nearest thousand dollars. It is not shown for a year in which fewer than five filings state a wage. An offered wage is what the employer stated on the application; it is not a record of what anyone was paid.
For report-specific sample definitions and downloadable data, see Openbound Research methodology.
Corrections
If a company is matched to the wrong employer, a filing record or cap-exempt status looks wrong, or a conclusion looks wrong against evidence you have, report it or write to hello@theopenbound.com. Every job and company page has a “Something look wrong?” link beside the evidence it concerns. Employer identity corrections are the most useful thing you can send. A person reviews every report.