Hello Dino,

We are reaching out to share an update regarding your onboarding with Microsoft, and we want to thank you in advance for your continued patience throughout this process. We appreciate you taking the time to thoroughly read this email as it is full of important information.

As you are aware, the United States’ Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) has announced that it has received a sufficient number of H-1B petitions to reach the H-1B cap for this year. Therefore, no additional H-1B petitions are available for your U.S. work authorization until the U.S. Government’s next fiscal year. This is the result of either your H-1B petition not being filed prior to the USCIS’ announcement that the H-1B cap had been met or your H-1B petition not being selected as a part of the USCIS H-1B lottery.

Given that U.S. work options do not exist, we have begun the process of determining alternative placement for you. As we have done for other new hires in previous years, we will be pursuing an alternative placement for you, likely in the Microsoft Canada Excellence Center (MCEC) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The MCEC is host to incredible development work and is centrally located in Vancouver’s downtown near restaurants, shops, and train stations.

Your employment in Vancouver is expected to be for at least 18 months (assuming you perform well) regardless of future H-1B visa applications. We believe 18 months is adequate time for you to onboard effectively, build a strong career foundation, make a substantive impact in Canada, and position you for a smooth transfer to the United States. After 18 months, we will examine your personal situation/immigration status and business needs to determine your exact transfer date to the United States. While working in Canada, we will continue to evaluate work authorization options to enable you to work with Microsoft in the United States.

We can imagine that at this time you may have questions. We are currently in the process of finalizing information related to the following and will follow up with details as soon as they are confirmed:
-          Start date
-          Team placement
-          Offer details
-          Work authorization
-          Relocation details

We anticipate having confirmation of these details in over the next several weeks and will follow up with you in the second half of June.

Thank you again for your patience throughout this process. We are very excited to officially welcome you to the Microsoft global family!

Kind regards,
Mike Martinsen
Microsoft University Recruiting