Also post on your social media accounts that you're looking for remote work and make sure you have as attractive as an online presence as possible to show off your past work and skills.
> Also, will I need a work visa if I’m to be employed by a US company, even if I work from Canada?
No.
> Do US companies typically hire you as a contractor or can you be employed as an employee? I’m asking because contractors usually have no benefits here, including holidays/vacation/sick days, insurance, company-paid parental leave and all other perks so it has a huge impact on effective salary.
Most US-based remote tech companies work this way:
For people working outside of the US, they will be technically employed as contractors, but often treated like full-time team members in other ways, including vacation/PTO/sick days/parental leave. (This is how we do it at Close.io: http://jobs.close.io/). Medical benefits/insurance and retirement plans (401k) are very country-specific so that is far less commonly offered for non-US team members.
> For people working outside of the US, they will be technically employed as contractors, but often treated like full-time team members in other ways, including vacation/PTO/sick days/parental leave.
Yes, it is legal to give contractors more benefits than industry standard (that is, no benefits). On the contractor end, they may end up losing some favourable tax status, as while they are a contractor on paper, they are working full-time for a single client and should report income as a normal salaried full-time employee (which is the case in the UK). That's not the employer's problem.
There's a list of signs that someone hired as a contractor is being treated too much like an employee (i.e. the business thinks of them as an employee but pays them like a contractor to avoid taxes etc.), but any one of those signs isn't necessarily proof.
That's why a lot of companies will pay outside consulting companies when they hire contractors. The contractor is an employee of the consulting agency.
I once wanted to hire a friend of mine at a company as a contractor (he had all of the required skills and my manager was impressed with him). The company wouldn't hire him directly but were more than willing to give him his asking rate net after he went through the consulting agency - ie if he wanted $85/hour as a W2[1] contractor they were willing to pay the consulting company $110/hour so he would still get his $85 an hour.
[1] W2 Contractor means that the consulting company paid the employees half of social security and Medicare and he would be eligible for unemployment. He was getting health benefits from his wife.
Why wouldn’t it be? The law specifies a minimum standard for permanent employee relationships but even if the relationship is structured otherwise there’s nothing to stop a company being extra nice to contractors.
Most people are interpreting it in the positive sense WRT vacation pay or similar, my experience is its more negative in the sense of if X is on vacation then Y can't be on vacation because we need someone on call 24x7 or release week is the last week of June therefore its assumed all hands on deck the last week of June no vacation.
Setting contact expectations is kinda important, as most employee relationships are considered very feudal serf in nature whereas a contractor could be working somewhere else on someone elses job at any time... its easy to write a contract with a product and a due date, but harder to specify a service of general short term availability for whatever reason.
That was my reaction, as well. If "vacation time" solely means offering a certain number of hours with no work expected—in effect, a bonus—then that's likely fine. But if it's part of a larger expectation around working hours and other employee-ish expectations, then there might be legal issues (though I have no idea how the contractor being outside of the US might change things).
- http://weworkremotely.com/
- https://remotive.io/
- https://remoteok.io/
Also post on your social media accounts that you're looking for remote work and make sure you have as attractive as an online presence as possible to show off your past work and skills.
> Also, will I need a work visa if I’m to be employed by a US company, even if I work from Canada?
No.
> Do US companies typically hire you as a contractor or can you be employed as an employee? I’m asking because contractors usually have no benefits here, including holidays/vacation/sick days, insurance, company-paid parental leave and all other perks so it has a huge impact on effective salary.
Most US-based remote tech companies work this way:
For people working outside of the US, they will be technically employed as contractors, but often treated like full-time team members in other ways, including vacation/PTO/sick days/parental leave. (This is how we do it at Close.io: http://jobs.close.io/). Medical benefits/insurance and retirement plans (401k) are very country-specific so that is far less commonly offered for non-US team members.