Current pitfalls of hiring employees from third countries
Employers often find it impossible to staff all open positions with domestic job applicants and have no other option than to hire foreigners. While for EU citizens, the formalities needed before they may start work can be arranged within a day, obtaining an employee card, i.e. work and residence permits for third-country nationals, is a long-distance run. While the authorities should approve the application within a maximum of three months, the process is made lengthier by various administrative requirements, depending also on the country from which the foreign worker is to relocate, or, more precisely, the system that the local embassy uses to make appointments for filing applications.
Under the Foreigners’ Residence Act, the decision on the application for an employee card should be issued within 60 days, while in particularly complex cases the deadline may be extended by another 30 days. However, the whole process, from finding a suitable candidate to them starting the job, rarely takes less than four months but instead often drags on for around half a year. The time needed to obtain all necessary residence and work permits in the Czech Republic is one of the longest in the European Union.
Most employers are already aware that to obtain an employee card, they first have to notify the labour office of a job vacancy and pass the job market test, which takes 30 days. They also know that the preparation of all necessary documents, including their super-legalisation and apostilles will take some time. What they often do not realise is that the entire process may be further prolonged by the necessity to get an appointment at the Czech embassy abroad to file the application – the foreign job applicants must make such appointments in advance.
Although all Czech embassies fall under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the system of making appointments to file applications is not unified. Approaches differ: some embassies proceed informally – it is enough to phone or write a simple email and an appointment for filing the application is assigned within days. Other embassies have introduced specific procedures for making appointments – the embassy has to be contacted via a specific email address, the message must contain prescribed information about the applicant, and, in most cases, already a copy of the applicant’s ID and a document proving the purpose of the stay (for employee cards, typically an employment contract or an agreement on a future contract). While this system is more complicated, if all required conditions are met, an appointment is obtained within weeks.
But there is yet another group of embassies where getting an appointment is extremely difficult or just about impossible. These are embassies with a vast number of applicants, such as the Czech embassies in Vietnam, India or Ukraine. Because of limited capacity, they apply an appointment window system that is only opened several times a year. The appointment to file an application for an employee card has to be applied for at a stipulated time, either by email, by phone or in person, depending on the embassy. This results in overloaded phonelines, endless queues, and the capacity being filled-up immediately after a window is opened. The high number of unsuccessful applicants eager to work in the Czech Republic then attracts fraudsters. At the Czech embassy in Vietnam, their flagrant abuse of the appointments system is now the subject of a police investigation.
It is crucial not to delay making the appointment for filing the application, while preparing for the procedure to take some time. Before choosing a foreign job applicant, we recommend checking the situation at the respective embassy. If employees are needed urgently, they should be chosen from countries whose Czech embassies operate a more flexible system. The government’s new programmes for economic migration may also offer a solution – where both the employer and the job applicant meet the stipulated requirements, participation in the programme (within set quotas) guarantees obtaining an appointment for filing the application, and possibly also shorter approval deadlines.