The “Supportive Past Employer” Initiative on Support Letter Policies

I had hard time collecting support letters from my past employers and open-source projects for the EB-1A green card program (not done yet). Some were flexible and gave me full support and involvement. Others limited what they write to strict policies, which rendered their letters useless from that program’s perspective. Some were negotiating the content for 4 months. Some denied supporting letters entirely despite the good feedback they gave me privately.

This is the characteristic of an employer you never know until you quit and are useless to them. This was never advertised by HRs. Until now.

Hereby I declare “Supportive Past Employer” Initiative. This is the draft of the declaration. Any employer or maintainer of a project that uses volunteers can join it.

I need your help reviewing it. Please share your thoughts as an employee or employer.

The Declaration

We understand that your work for us is temporary and at some point you will be seeking other opportunities, and we want to support you in those.

We understand the basic human need to leave a legacy that is recognized properly.

Our support covers all forms of current and past collaboration: employment, approved volunteering, subcontracting, ambassadorship, teaming for events, etc.

We will recognize even the smallest contribution. There is no threshold of minimal impact to earn our support.

We are willing to include the following in your support letter unless our contracts with third parties forbid us from doing some of these, of which we aim to let you know in advance:

— Nature of work.

— Projects.

— Roles.

— Dates.

— Our customer name if you worked on a project for a 3rd party.

— The impact your work had on us.

— Appraisal of your skills and character, if an officer with signing capacity can confirm that.

We can issue a letter for a specific program and recipient you request or “To whom it may concern”.

The letter will contain the corporate letterhead and be on behalf of the organization.

The letter will be signed by the highest officer that knows the details of you work. If that officer does not have a signing capacity on behalf of the organization, then it will be an officer in capacity.

We recognize that programs have different requirements to the content of the letters. We aim to address the requirements of the program you need the letter for and not merely fill the blanks in our template.

We recognize that programs have different requirements to the medium of a letter, and we can issue a letter on the medium you request:

— Electronic.

— Electronic with digital signature.

— Printed, signed, scanned.

— Printed, signed, sent to you physically.

A letter will contain the following about the signing person:

— Full name.

— Position.

— Email.

— Phone. We may put a secretary’s phone who can connect to the signing person.

We aim to have a dedicated pipeline for supporting letters, so you should not be kicked around and spending a lot of time explaining what you need and why.

We can give you multiple letters if:

— You need to address multiple programs and recipients individually.

— You need different subsets of your work and impact covered.

— You did more work for us after we issued a letter.

— Time has passed, and the impact of your work on our company has developed.

You should not abuse the policy of multiple letters. If you will approach the common sense limits, we will let you know.

You can publish our letters on any of your resources if you remove the contact details respecting the privacy of our officers. Name and position can be published.

We can charge you for expenses related to your letters: physical delivery, electronic signature services, etc. This is limited to the costs we have, but the letters themselves are always free.

This policy is a declaration of a good will and not a binding agreement. This policy or its parts will stop applying to you if:

— You publish a letter we gave you without removing the contact details of the signing person.

— You defame us, do material damage, or negatively impact us in other way.

I personally can additionally offer the following to everyone who worked with me and would like other employers to offer that as well, but I understand that this will prevent some to join the declaration. Maybe this should go in a separate optional tier:

If you want, we can put your letter without contact details to our website so anyone can verify its authenticity without calling us. You can choose if it should be available publicly or via a direct link only. You can request us to delete it at any time.

Once the text is stable, I aim to publish it on a dedicated web page so any employer can adopt it and be listed in the footer.

This should become an immutable text for employers to start joining. This is why I need every piece of feedback. Please drop me a few words even if you think they are insignificant.

You can do it:

— Here on Medium.

— In a comment to the Telegram post.

— In a response to the tweet.

If you are an employer, please share any concerns that prevent you from joining the declaration. Do you have even better points in your policy? Please share them. Let’s make people more recognized in this world together.