I recently saw a job posting from a company looking to hire software developers. It looked good, but their process smelled a bit off. I did a bit more investigation, and found that anonymous interview reports claimed a high difficulty, with zero offers. Anonymous salary reports claimed below-median pay and benefits. So I looked up the company on a specialized search site and found that it had several H-1B applications, most of which were software-related. One was a very close match to the job posting.

This gave me the seed of an idea. I could use the paperwork for a company's visa sponsorships to either automatically reject job postings as below my pay grade, or as useful information for the interviews and any potential salary negotiations. The law requires that companies keep a "Public Access File" at their primary place of business, to be presented on demand to any interested person. One required element in this file is the amount the company expects to pay for a position with a given set of job requirements.

But this particular company has so far been very evasive about giving the public actual access to their Public Access Files. It may just be them, and that I would have better luck formulating my new screening criterion using some other company's public records. I just want to look over some samples and find something I can easily use.

Does anyone have any experience with or suggestions about obtaining and using a company's H-1B Public Access File? I don't want to discuss the merits of the H-1B program itself. I'm mainly interested in the research potential.