[filoleg]

Incentive: you already have an employee on a visa working for you. They are a solid proven employee that you already invested money and other resources into (hiring/recruiting costs, onboarding, training, visa paperwork, time of other engineers helping them out during onboarding, etc.). The employee understandably wants to continue working here or, at least, remain in the country. You, as the employer, can either sponsor their green card and go through PERM or risk losing them in the near future (either to a competitor who is willing to sponsor it or due to them leaving the country voluntarily or them getting hit with some visa issues further on). The incentive here is clear.

So you decide to sponsor their green card process (as it makes sense in pretty much every aspect). Part of the application requirements is documentation proving that the employee that you are sponsoring isn’t displacing local workers and is truly high skill (given that H1B visa to green card conversion is intended for high-skill workers). The way that a lot of employers seem to be doing it is posting lowkey ads in newspapers and other places that technically would qualify, but that are unlikely to catch interest of potential candidates and are way more likely to go unnoticed. Then you wait some period of time. I don’t remember how long it is more precisely, but i remember that it is somewhere between 1-6 months. In the end, you got the document required to go forward with the process.

My guess is that for large tech companies like FAANG it wouldn’t work like that, as their job postings are everywhere. But i think the fact that their interviews are notoriously difficult to pass (relative to most jobs outside of tech, where getting an interview itself is usually way more difficult, but once you got it, you are more likely to pass), that might work as a documented proof. Not sure, as I have never observed how those companies handle it, but I have seen some small employers do variations of the dance that I have described in the previous paragraph.