First time TN and concern

M

mt2006

Registered Users (C)
Hi everyone,

I have gone through all the pages and read a number of posts. I so far have a very good idea of how to prepare proper documents. Thanks to all experts here :)

I am a Canadian living in Toronto and have obtained a bachelor and masters degrees in electrical and computer engineering from uoft. I've recently received a job offer from a small company in the US as a computer hardware engineer. The employer is willing to provide me an employment letter and asks me to obtain information about how and what to be done.

My concern is that there were a number of rejections. What are other common mistakes besides bad employment letters ? Do I need to provide the INS officer with my reference and work experience ?

Thank you.

~mt
 
mt2006 said:
Do I need to provide the INS officer with my reference and work experience?
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You qualify with your degree alone without any experience. The experience is not required in your case, but if yuo have the reference letters, then bring them just in case. A resume would be handy in case he asks for it.

mt2006 said:
What are other common mistakes besides bad employment letters?
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It seems the most common mistakes are the job description (check the ONET site and find your job to get the right "wording"). Personally I was denied for a whole shopping list: no signature, letter not dated, salary was supposedly too low, and my resume and reference letters did not use similar wording as that in the ONET site.

Simply put these officers are not HR folks, they don't know what people realy do in thier jobs, they can only go by what it says in the handbook, which is scribed from the job descriptions on the ONET site, so the closer your job description is to the one found on ONET the easier it is for the officer to determine if you qualify.

http://online.onetcenter.org/
 
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I was rejected the first time for me because they felt the job description wasn't right in their eyes (and this is the same letter the company used many times before, so go figure). Technically it was the right description, but like Curious said, they only have their books to go by.

The company got me a new letter that had a job description matching closer to what was in the Customs books, not exact, but used certain keywords. The next time I went I got my TN quickly. The letter was otherwise solid (I was impressed when I first saw it) but it was just a couple of words in the job description that caused them to reject it because they questioned it.

If they do reject it they usually tell you why, in my case they even told me how to fix it ("Have them word it differently"), then you just go get it fixed and try again.
 
mt2006 said:
What about inteview ? Do they ask many questions ? Tricky ??
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Very few questions. BTW Keep your answers short, and on the topic, don't offer any extraneous or superfluous information that they didn't specifically ask for. Most of the questions are either what is already in the letter, or about your CDN citizenship. They are basically just doing a cursory verbal check to make sure you actually know the job duties you're going to be performing, per the TN letter of course, and they want to hear the "key words and phrases" that the have in thier manual (that happens to match the ONET description).
 
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