Valuetainment - “Flooded With H1-B Visas” - Job Seekers Forced Into Pay to Play Hiring Battle

00:00:00.160 Story comes out, job hunters are so desperate that they're paying people to get hired and recruited.

00:00:07.760 And by the way, this is not a story from Inquirer.

00:00:11.940 This is a story from Wall Street Journal.

00:00:14.340 So, landing a white-collar job is getting so tough that candidates, not companies,

00:00:19.580 are paying recruiters to match them with positions.

00:00:22.700 Through good economic times and bad, recruiters have usually operated the other way around.

00:00:26.840 Companies pay them to find talent for tough-to-fill positions.

00:00:31.140 Now, though, job seekers are hiring a new crop of what are called reverse recruiters to help them crack a competitive market.

00:00:38.980 Daniel Bejarano, 36 years old, signed up for reverse recruiting service, a referral last year after receiving an email pitch from the company.

00:00:47.220 Refers AI agent, connected him with an executive at Golden, a volunteer management company,

00:00:51.860 which was looking for platform engineer and data scientist.

00:00:54.240 Bejarano got the offer after several interviews.

00:00:57.860 He then paid, referred 20% of his first month's pay once it landed in his bank account.

00:01:04.260 Tom, your thoughts on this?

00:01:05.340 So, I think what's going on here is a couple things going on.

00:01:08.180 Is it tougher to find a job?

00:01:10.020 Yes.

00:01:10.540 In many sectors, it is right now.

00:01:12.700 Is the job market tightening?

00:01:14.600 Yes, it appears to be.

00:01:15.740 And it may be worse in certain sectors.

00:01:18.800 It may be worse in certain geographies where you live.

00:01:21.520 So, yes, it's good to have a Sherpa that's going to take you up to Everest and going to help you through it.

00:01:26.760 The other thing is that companies are having a horrible time trying to filter out incoming inquiries for jobs.

00:01:36.500 And it's hard to have yourself show up in that.

00:01:38.900 But we see it for many of the clients at BetDavid Consulting.

00:01:42.300 They talk about that.

00:01:43.580 There are so many bots and so many fake resumes.

00:01:46.780 I'll give you a real-world example.

00:01:48.800 We put up a job opening for a business analyst.

00:01:52.080 And we were inundated by a set of resumes that were coming from offering us people from a certain country.

00:02:00.160 But there were brokers in the middle trying to offer them to us and saying, and we can help you with the H-1B.

00:02:05.980 That spam was on top of good candidates that we wanted to see, that we wanted to review.

00:02:13.380 Good quality people, you know, citizens ready to work.

00:02:17.400 And so that's one of the reasons that, BetDavid Consulting, we built HireMetrics to help filter that.

00:02:23.860 Right now, filter is the headline here.

00:02:27.000 It's not what they're talking about.

00:02:29.240 People are actually paying to get a company to help them filter in to find a job the same way that companies are willing to pay money for software to help them filter.

00:02:40.680 What does that mean?

00:02:41.540 It means it's broken.

00:02:42.740 The system is broken.

00:02:43.620 Let me explain to you what this means.

00:02:44.620 This is like saying the market has changed so much because of female-driven AI that men create that women are paying men to go on a date with them. 0.74

00:02:55.960 That's the best comparison I can make.

00:02:58.220 That's a good comparison.

00:02:59.200 That's a weird thing to happen.

00:03:00.600 Why do you think we're here?

00:03:02.100 Why do you think we're here?

00:03:02.820 Where people are paying for recruiters to place them at a company.

00:03:07.080 Well, look, there's no question that we have a weak labor market in the United States.

00:03:11.740 I mean, first of all, look at the data that came out last week.

00:03:15.280 Challenger reported the largest January announced layoffs since January 2009, where we were in the financial crisis, a great recession.

00:03:26.140 Look at the jolts numbers that just came out.

00:03:28.440 There was a collapse in job openings.

00:03:30.860 So we have a weak labor market.

00:03:34.600 The only thing strong is inflation.

00:03:36.660 And, you know, you had the clip from Fox News with Bessett on there.

00:03:41.880 Well, I was on Fox and Friends not too long ago on a Saturday.

00:03:45.720 And unfortunately, I'll probably never be on again because I went on and I told the truth about consumer prices and inflation. 0.99

00:03:54.240 And Trump went ballistic on Truth Social and just chastised Fox for having me on, said I was a jerk, said I was a loser, that I was just a Trump hater. 0.99

00:04:06.240 And they said, find the booker who put this jerk on. 0.99

00:04:09.980 And ever since then, nobody will return my emails at Fox News. 0.98

00:04:13.560 I think they got me completely banned from the network for speaking honestly.

00:04:19.640 You know, Trump actually said that I was wrong because I claimed that prices were going up when, according to Trump, they're going down.

00:04:27.100 They're going down massively.

00:04:29.240 So the cost of living, according to Donald Trump.

00:04:31.500 By the way, did you vote for him?

00:04:33.000 Well, I live in Puerto Rico, so it doesn't matter.

00:04:35.120 I voted for him.

00:04:36.220 So the only time I voted for him where it counted was the first time he ran in 2016.

00:04:41.960 I lived in Connecticut then, and I was able to vote, although he lost Connecticut.

00:04:46.260 Is this the tweet?

00:04:46.960 Why would Fox and Friends Weekend put on a stockbroker named Peter Schiff, a Trump-hating loser who has already proven to be wrong?

00:04:54.140 Either the show made a mistake or it's heading in a different direction.

00:04:57.640 He thinks prices are going up when, in fact, they're coming down.

00:05:00.360 Gasoline hit $199 yesterday in certain states, and it's big since Biden.

00:05:04.440 Other prices are almost down.

00:05:05.820 Biden caused the affordability crisis.

00:05:07.500 I'm fixing it along with everything else.

00:05:09.520 Much of it, like the border, is already fixed.

00:05:11.200 Check out the booker who put the shirt on.

00:05:14.140 Yeah, but I actually encouraged all of my followers to vote for Trump over Harris.

00:05:20.920 So I probably got the president a lot of votes.

00:05:23.200 It's not like I have a small following.

00:05:25.780 A lot of people do pay attention to what I say, and I encourage people.

00:05:29.380 In fact, that was a big Trump defender when all the lawfare was going out against him for January 6th and a lot of other things.

00:05:36.340 I completely supported Donald Trump when I thought he was in the right.

00:05:40.640 So I'm not just your typical Trump hater who's got Trump derangement syndrome.

00:05:46.340 The people who I think have Trump derangement syndrome are the people that support him no matter what. 0.59

00:05:52.040 No matter what he does, no matter what lies he tells, if you're just going to support him, you're the one that's deranged.

00:05:58.900 Luke.

00:06:02.100 Sorry, what was the original question again?

00:06:03.960 I apologize.

00:06:04.580 Job.

00:06:04.960 Job.

00:06:05.340 People are paying.

00:06:06.040 People get a job.

00:06:08.080 Yeah, I think ultimately, you know, Tom said something interesting about the H-1B, that these get flooded with the H-1B. 0.96

00:06:14.660 And that was a huge political debate around, and it's interesting, any, if you look, something I've observed at least, any time you have an economic policy floated in this country that looks to boost American wages, whether that be H-1B limits, whether that be border restrictions and deportations, et cetera, they don't get framed in economic terms.

00:06:42.280 Never.

00:06:43.140 They never, ever get framed in economic terms.

00:06:45.260 They always get framed in the media in social terms, in social justice terms.

00:06:52.180 And it's not I'm the social justice guy, but if you had a fair and balanced media, they would say, here's the social justice angle and America.

00:07:01.900 If we remove this many workers at H-1B or whatever, your wages as a graduating engineer from Cal or Stanford or, you know, the University of Michigan would go up over time by this much.

00:07:15.700 And if you were a laborer and there were this many deportations over time, your wages would rise this much.

00:07:22.960 There's a reason why the media never frames the economic argument for these policies is people would vote for them, and that's not what they want.

00:07:32.320 They, you know, the powers that be want to cap wages.

00:07:37.780 These are methods they use to cap wages.

00:07:39.060 So, first, I think it's really interesting, Tom, your point on H-1B is that, okay, there are this flood.

00:07:46.320 End of the day, I add that H-1B to the graduating kids.

00:07:49.220 It tells me what the flow of funds, what you were highlighting, which is there's too much supply.

00:07:54.540 There's not enough demand for those kids, for those jobs, ultimately.

00:07:57.920 You know, my point was – I'm sorry about it.

00:07:59.640 Give me one second.

00:08:00.060 My point was think about how hard it is for us to find good candidates in the crowd because we have to get through the spam of these machines that are being run by brokers that are trying to throw H-1Bs when they see certain position titles. 0.95

00:08:14.280 Now think about the good person on the other end trying to find a job and break through that who is now in a tightening job market where it's harder to find the jobs and saying, damn it, I need help to break through, Pat.

00:08:25.500 You know what I'm going to do?

00:08:26.380 I'm going to pay somebody to see if they can get me to the front of the line.

00:08:29.040 How do I get TSA PreCheck to get through the front of this line so these people can see me so I can get a job?

00:08:34.820 I think that the job search in the digital world is a little bit broken right now.

00:08:40.800 We just heard that half the traffic on the Internet was bots, right?

00:08:44.620 And we're seeing the bots in our inbox where we're trying to find great candidates.

00:08:49.740 So I think there's a couple things going on here between economy and the availability of jobs, tightening market, but then how hard it is for us to filter out.

00:08:57.620 Brandon, you're 30 years old.

00:08:58.980 Your friends are looking for jobs, right?

00:09:00.340 You went to school.

00:09:01.180 You got a bachelor's and a master's in national security.

00:09:03.680 When you talk to your friends that are looking for jobs, what are they telling you?

00:09:07.040 Yeah, so a lot of people have really similar skill sets, like kind of cookie-cutter products of college, and I think that's part of the problem, too.

00:09:13.120 I mean, so, like, you know, the range for somebody with an average degree is probably, I don't know, $60,000 to $85,000 for, like, a job they're applying for.

00:09:20.660 And, you know, the skill sets are usually, like, liberal arts to something with math or STEM.

00:09:25.220 STEM, you'll end up doing better.

00:09:26.560 But this is a, like, cross-current of, like, so many weird things.

00:09:29.480 Like, it's such a weird situation, but I think the things that are causing it is things like distorting the economy with, you know, artificially low or high interest rates.

00:09:37.980 You know, somebody else being involved with that.

00:09:39.520 The zombie companies.

00:09:40.820 So, like, companies that shouldn't exist do exist.

00:09:42.980 Companies that would exist if we weren't interfering at it don't exist yet.

00:09:46.140 But the H-1BV is us trying to hire cheap labor, right, so all the illegal immigrants. 1.00

00:09:50.660 So a lot of – it's not one thing in particular, but it's all these things that are creating this, like, bizarre, backwards, dystopian situation.

00:09:57.740 So, I mean, it's just a product of government being involved where it shouldn't be and not being involved where it should be.

00:10:04.140 Peter.

00:10:04.400 Yeah, and certainly because of the massive subsidy that government provides to education.

00:10:09.280 I mean, we graduate a lot more people with liberal arts degrees than would graduate in a free market.

00:10:14.520 So we're putting these students into a job market that doesn't have jobs for what they just wasted taxpayer money studying for four or five years.

00:10:23.020 You know, if we had a free market in college, we wouldn't have all the student debt, and we'd have much lower tuition.

00:10:28.940 And the only people that would go to college would be people who would actually benefit from the degree.

00:10:33.320 A lot of people would just get jobs right out of high school and maybe even not even go to high school.

00:10:38.140 And we might actually have quality jobs for those people to move into if the federal government or if the Fed didn't artificially suppress interest rates,

00:10:46.460 if we didn't have savings that could finance capital investment.

00:10:49.620 So our whole economy has been screwed up by government intervention.

00:10:54.620 But I wanted to point out, you know, Donald Trump makes a big deal about cheap gas.

00:10:58.880 Well, oil prices are now up about 20 percent since they hit the lows.

00:11:03.280 All the oil stocks are hitting 52-week highs.

00:11:06.300 They're indicating that oil prices are going to rise.

00:11:10.140 And I think the one thing the president's been hanging his hat on, cheap gas, is going to go away.

00:11:14.680 I think by the time the midterm elections roll around, we're going to be looking at $80 to $100 barrel oil,

00:11:21.300 and everything else is going to be a lot more expensive.

00:11:23.480 So the story that, you know, inflation is dead and buried is going to be completely gone.

00:11:29.580 And, you know, the box that the Republicans are going to be in, unfortunately, in the midterms,

00:11:35.040 is they're going to be in the position of trying to lie to the public to convince them that a bad economy is good,

00:11:43.660 whereas the Democrats are going to be able to be honest about how bad the economy is,

00:11:47.880 and they're just going to lie that they're going to fix it.

00:11:49.780 So you say that, but, Peter, this is the question.

00:11:52.360 Then why is it that Trump's approval rating with the people that voted for him went up from 74 percent to 79 percent?

00:12:01.680 Well, I think, well, his overall approval ratings are pretty weak, but...

00:12:05.640 No, with his face, with the people that voted for him, not overall,

00:12:08.840 because overall it could be mainstream media bashing him, negativity,

00:12:12.940 anything and everything they can are going to say negative things about him.

00:12:15.400 But why are the people that voted for him happier than when they voted for him?

00:12:20.000 I think, look, I think Trump voters really like Trump.

00:12:23.680 I think Trump is almost like a modern-day folk hero at this point.

00:12:27.800 And I think, you know, the fact that, you know, he almost died, right?

00:12:31.340 You know, he survived that assassination attempt, I think, really, you know,

00:12:37.100 raised his level in the eyes of the public to that kind of folk hero.

00:12:41.860 So I think that people who like the president just really like him.

00:12:46.900 You know, they, you know, and they listen to him and there are things about Trump that I like.

00:12:51.980 Why do they like him?

00:12:52.540 Because he's basically sticking his thumb in the eye of the establishment.

00:12:57.340 He's telling them what they want to hear about shaking things up and about breaking...

00:13:02.000 Why else do you think they like him?

00:13:03.140 All that stuff is gibberish, right?

00:13:04.980 Specific results.

00:13:06.420 What happened to crime from a year ago?

00:13:09.280 Down 20 percent.

00:13:10.760 Murder.

00:13:11.060 What happened to the border?

00:13:13.060 Zero.

00:13:14.120 How important is security to them?

00:13:15.900 Yeah, I think there's a perception.

00:13:18.180 Perception of security.

00:13:18.740 No, no, that's not perception.

00:13:20.560 No, no, no.

00:13:21.180 There's two different things.

00:13:22.840 Perception is, hey, you're 6'9 with a 38-inch vertical leap.

00:13:28.360 My perception is you're going to score 30 points tonight. 1.00

00:13:31.240 And you play basketball, the reality is you suck. 1.00

00:13:33.920 You score zero. 1.00

00:13:34.800 No, this is border went to zero, right?

00:13:38.560 So crime went down.

00:13:39.880 American people feel safer.

00:13:42.300 The world respects America again.

00:13:44.320 Well, I don't know that the world...

00:13:45.560 I would disagree that the world respects America again.

00:13:47.080 Oh, really?

00:13:47.720 No one's coming knocking on the door?

00:13:49.140 No, no.

00:13:49.380 No one's coming to us not.

00:13:50.260 That's all made up.

00:13:50.820 I mean, if the world was respecting America more, they would be...

00:13:54.000 The fact that everybody is begging to make deals.

00:13:56.520 Look, the world is moving on from the United States.

00:13:58.920 Look at China. 0.88

00:14:00.240 I mean, China's trade with the U.S. is down substantially.

00:14:03.920 But their trade with the rest of the world is up substantially to the point where they're exporting more now than they were before our tariffs.

00:14:10.640 So I think the world has less respect for the United States now than it did in the past.

00:14:17.020 But American voters, yeah, it may resonate with them.

00:14:22.000 I think they like the fact that Trump is pushing back against the political correctness movement that was kind of spearheaded by the Democrats with the woke agenda.

00:14:36.520 And I think there has been a cultural backlash against that.

00:14:39.780 And I think, you know, that has been a positive of Trump in pushing back against that.

00:14:46.300 But, yes, I think the U.S. is less respected.

00:14:50.100 In fact, look what Trump just did with Greenland.

00:14:55.060 I mean, basically threatening an ally that, hey, you know, if we can't make a deal on our terms to buy Greenland, we're going to invade.

00:15:05.060 We're going to send the U.S. military in there because nobody can stop us because we have this powerful military and we can do whatever we want.

00:15:12.500 I think that sent a very, very bad message to the rest of the world.

00:15:16.480 Even though Trump ultimately backed down from that, he contemplated it in public.

00:15:21.540 He actually talked about using our military to annex Greenland.

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00:16:47.960 Thank you.

Valuetainment - February 12, 2026

“Flooded With H1-B Visas” - Job Seekers Forced Into Pay to Play Hiring Battle

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