Sonia Mirbaha, Principal Partner and Josh Schachnow, Partner In an interview with Sonia Mirbaha and Josh Schachnow, partners at the firm, talked about how they help clients deal with the current talent shortage in Canada.
Could you provide our readers with insights into Mirbaha Schachnow?
Our primary objective is to help businesses bring foreign workers or foreign talent to Canada in the most efficient and cost-effective way. We then help the work permit holders to convert that temporary residency status to permanent residency while working in Canada.
Also, we never like to limit ourselves to a specific type of immigration program. At Mirbaha Schachnow LLP, we believe that the sky is the limit, in a sense that there are so many immigration programs available to creatively choose from when helping clients with the work permit or PR options. We can offer a wide array of services according to the needs of our clients, whether it’s for working in Canada, visiting family and friends, conducting certain limited business activities, starting a new business in Canada, or getting an acceptance letter for a program from an eligible Canadian university or college.
Our lean and nimble approach enables us to provide clients with personalized experiences. Our legal admin staff strive to be attentive to the needs of our clients and address them within their expected timelines, which is normally 48-72 hours.
What are the challenges your clients typically face?
The majority of our clients are businesses from the tech sector. While they benefit from the specialized programs designed by the Government of Canada to recruit international tech workers, some are experiencing more than expected delays in processing their employees’ applications due to the unforeseen circumstances such as the pandemic or Ukraine/Russia war.
We also help clients understand the immigration landscape so they can make better business decisions. This often saves a lot of time and energy for the company and help them streamline their immigration process in an efficient manner, which ultimately helps the company scale up seamlessly in Canada.
We provide reliable immigration services to all businesses in relocating global talent to Canada
Please shed some light on the process that you follow while engaging with clients.
From the very beginning, we engage in meaningful conversations with clients to understand all the critical requirements, such as the business need to hire certain number of foreign workers, details about each foreign worker, and the expected timeline to start the employment in Canada. Based on this information and looking into each particular situation, we provide clients with all the crucial details and start the application filing process for them. We follow up through the online and internal channels to make sure the application is moving successfully and is getting a positive outcome. We also hand hold the clients all throughout the process and are always available to answer their questions and address their concerns. Our client-centric approach has given our firm a lot of credit in the past and has become one of the main sources of referrals for our new clients.
Could you cite one or two case studies where you used your solutions to enable clients to attain desired outcomes?
Over the years we have been able to establish meaningful relationships and professional partnerships around the world. We have encountered situations in the past where our clients’ applications required urgent attention or expedited processing where we have been able to rely on these relationships to move the applications forward to help our clients.
What are some of the factors that set Mirbaha Schachnow LLP above the rest?
We have started to leverage a platform in conjunction with the services we offer to simplify and fast track the immigration filing process for hiring tech talent by automating the backend operations. We are also very proud of our fast turnaround time of 48 to 72 hours to respond to our clients’ inquiries, being a simple response to their email communication or filing their full set of documents and applications to IRCC. The speed of work is our biggest differentiator in the market. We are also continuously striving to make the platform more efficient to seamlessly manage complex files.
