Background 

L.C. is a senior human resources executive with over 15 years of experience scaling high-growth technology startups across Southeast Asia and China. 

Most recently, she served as the Global Head of People Operations for a leading e-scooter startup operating across Southeast Asia and Europe. Her career has been defined by her ability to lead People Strategy and Talent Acquisition Operations at high-growth tech startups, including stints at Southeast Asia's largest “superapp " and a major regional InsurTech tech startup. L.C. has a proven track record of managing people operations for companies experiencing rapid headcount growth, leading organizational design, and initiating and implementing employee wellness and DEI programs during hyper-growth phases. 

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Initial Problems 

Framing: USCIS adjudicators often view "People Operationsas standard administrative functions, rather than endeavors of National Importance. We faced the challenge of proving that L.C.'s daily tasks, such as optimizing hiring flows, were critical drivers of the U.S. innovation ecosystem rather than just internal business support. This requires extensive framing and a clear articulation of business impact. 

Simplifying and Benchmarking HR Metrics for USCIS adjudication: Unlike engineering patents or citation counts, L.C.'s impact was measured in internal employee NPS, employee turnover, and vacancy fill rates (D30/D60). 

We needed to go the extra mile to help USCIS officers understand what metrics like startup survival rates and operational scalability mean to meet the Dhanasar standard. 

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Our Work 

1. Framing the Endeavor for Economic Resilience 

We pivoted the narrative from generic people management to optimizing workforce scaling practices for high-growth startups in the U.S. Innovation Ecosystem. 

We argued that the U.S. startup economy loses billions annually due to challenges in scaling people operations, where promising companies lose “superstars” and “10x-ers” because of poor culture and people practices. 

The most critical link between internal people function work and national importance requires 3-5 reputable third-party references from the startup industry attesting to the criticality of people ops work to company scaling. 

We were able to source from our network of people leaders at venture capital-backed startups, who independently reviewed L.C.'s work on scaling people operations and attest to its importance and to how similar endeavors have helped their respective scale-ups grow, which is critical to the U.S. innovation ecosystem. 

2. Establishing "Well-Positioned" via Hyper-Growth Leadership 

We documented L.C.'s critical role during the explosive growth phase of a venture-backed startup, during which she directly reported to the Founder for 12 months. 

We highlighted instances where she addressed a 20%+ annual workforce attrition rate at the high-growth startup by implementing employee wellness practices and an employee feedback hotline, reducing churn to <5% during a period of sustained employee growth. 

By showcasing her success in hiring and scaling teams across 5+ countries, we demonstrated that she possesses the "exceptional ability" to manage the complex, multi-regional workforces required by potential U.S. companies that L.C. aspires to work for under the EB2-NIW.

3) Simplifying People Operations expertise into a winning petition narrative

While people-focused engagement metrics like annual employee turnover and eNPS may come naturally to human resources professionals, these metrics make little intuitive sense to USCIS officers who assess whether an HR professional is well positioned to advance the related HR endeavor in the U.S. 

To highlight L.C.'s exceptional professional contributions, our team drew on our understanding of typical eNPS and attrition rate metrics to provide a benchmark for the USCIS officer and further showcased the numbers under L.Cs tenure against industry numbers across mobility/insurance tech companies that are comparable to the stage of companies that L.C worked at while driving these metrics. 

This required our team's deep understanding of the people function in the startup industry, which effectively helped the USCIS officer, who did not come from the HR industry, to understand L.C.'s brilliance as a people leader, leading to the eventual judgment of her ‘well positioned-ness to advance her EB2-NIW endeavor.