Media
5 items
Description
Reads a job advert and says whether the employer is on the Home Office register of licensed sponsors, and if the pay is enough. Before you spend an evening on an application, find out whether the employer can sponsor you at all, and whether the pay is enough for the visa. Open a job advert on Indeed, Reed, LinkedIn, Totaljobs, NHS Jobs or an employer's own careers page. Click the icon, or press the keyboard shortcut, which is Alt and Shift and S unless another extension already uses it. The extension reads the advert, searches the Home Office register of licensed sponsors, and tells you in one word whether that company holds a licence today. WHAT YOU SEE One word at the top. Licensed. Lapsed. Not found. Not for workers, when the licence is real but covers a route an ordinary job offer does not use. Or a question, when more than one company matches the name equally well. Under it, the company and its town on one line, then the facts as short tags: the rating, the visa route, a licence that is new or was taken off this month, how many live checked jobs we hold for that employer today, and whether the pay is enough. One line says what to do next, and one button opens the company on sponsorjobuk.com. THE PAY CHECK A licence is half the question. Pay below the floor for the job is a refusal however good the employer is. So when the advert publishes its pay and its job title, the extension checks one against the other. It tells you which kind of job it took the title to be, with its occupation code, so you can see whether that is right. It tells you the usual minimum for that job, from the gov.uk going rates. Then it says the pay meets it, is below it, or that only the top of the range meets it. Pay by the hour is turned into the number of paid hours a week it takes to reach the minimum, because an hourly rate alone cannot answer it. Most adverts do not publish their pay in a form a computer can read. When that is so, the panel says it cannot check the pay. It does not guess. It also does not guess the kind of job. When the title does not make it obvious, it says so. The pay check is about pay only. It does not say the job itself can be sponsored. WHAT IT WILL NOT DO It will not tell you that you will get the job. A sponsor licence is permission to sponsor. It is not a promise to sponsor you, for this vacancy, and that sentence is printed under every single answer. It will not guess the company. Searching the register for Tesco also returns Notesco, Atesco and Vitesco. Searching for Greggs returns a business in Newcastle and a pharmacy in Tunbridge Wells, both licensed, neither of them the bakery. So the results are scored against the name on the advert, and when two companies match equally well the panel shows both and asks you which one is your employer rather than picking. There is one exception, and it is narrow. Some franchises hold one licence per shop under exactly the same name. When the advert names its town and exactly one of those identical licences is in that town, the panel picks it and says so on screen, and still shows you the others. It will not leave you with a blank box. No internet, a slow answer, a name that matches nobody, a page it cannot read. Every one of those ends with a sentence on the screen telling you what happened and what to do next. WHEN THE NAME ON THE ADVERT IS NOT THE NAME ON THE REGISTER Adverts carry trading names. The register carries registered names, which are usually longer. An advert writing an ampersand where the register writes the word and will find nobody at all. So when the full name finds nobody, the extension searches for the other spellings of it, and tells you on screen which spelling found the answer. Every one of those is another search of the same register. None of them is a guess. CHECK ANY NAME, ANYWHERE Found a job in a Facebook group, a WhatsApp message or an email? Select the company name, right click it, and choose Check this employer. WHAT IT COSTS 99p, once. You buy an access key on sponsorjobuk.com, paid by card through Stripe. The key is shown on screen and emailed to you. Paste it into the panel the first time you open it and that is the end of it: no subscription, no renewal, nothing to cancel. The extension takes no payment itself and never sees your card. WHAT IT SENDS, AND WHAT IT COLLECTS There is no account, no sign in and no cookie. The one thing it stores is your access key, in Chrome's storage for this extension, on this computer only, so you do not paste it every time. Nothing runs on a page until you ask. It contains no analytics of any kind. When you paste your key, and once a week after that, the key alone goes to our own API, which answers only whether it is valid. When you click the icon, four public facts off the advert go to our own API at sponsorjobuk.com: the employer name, the job title, the pay as the advert states it, and the town. When you right click, only the text you selected goes. The key does not go with either, so a check cannot be tied to you. We keep no copy of what was checked. THE FOUR PERMISSIONS IT ASKS FOR, AND WHY activeTab lets it look at the tab you are on, at the moment you click the icon or press the shortcut, and then that permission expires. scripting is what runs the small read only file that looks for the employer name, the title, the pay and the town. contextMenus adds Check this employer to the menu you get when you right click selected text. Chrome hands the extension that text, and nothing else. storage keeps your access key on this computer, so the panel does not ask for it every time. Nothing else is stored, and it is not synced to your Google account. That is the whole list. It asks for no host permissions, so it has no standing permission to read any website. It asks for no identity, so it cannot know who you are. It asks for no tabs and no webNavigation, so it cannot be told where you go. You do not have to take our word for any of that. Chrome prints the permissions an extension asks for on this page and again when you install it. Read that list on this extension, then read it on any other one you are considering, and install whichever you are happier with. WHERE THE DATA COMES FROM The Home Office register of licensed sponsors, downloaded again every morning. We publish it, we do not write it. If a company is on the register the morning you check, that is what you are told. The pay floors come from the gov.uk tables of thresholds and going rates, and the panel says the date we last checked them. SponsorJobUK is a trading name of Jagat IT UK Ltd, registered in England and Wales, company number 17474995. Registered office: 164 High Street, London Colney, St Albans, Hertfordshire, AL2 1QF.