Posting on behalf of Owen
Hi all,
This forum has been indispensable in my own Global Talent Visa endorsement application, and I’m glad to say that I’ve come out of the other side with an endorsement for Exceptional Promise. To pay it forward, I’m gonna share some of my insights.
Unlike most posts in this forum, I’m going to do something different and firstly tell you assumptions I debunked myself as I went through the process.
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Take ALL opinions in this forum with a grain of salt, including mine. Every person here has biases, conscious and unconscious, that affects how they see Tech Nation and their process. It was helpful to see people proving each other wrong with a successful endorsement review (appeal) when most of the commenters assume they will fail at them. I even hear people say the forum is not very helpful, and I think it’s because of the reason I mentioned.
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Reasons for rejection is fairer than you think. I can say this because I was rejected the first time. Initially the pro-forma seemed unreasonably harsh, until I gave myself 1-2 weeks away from GTV to come back later with fresh pair of eyes, realising that my application had a lot of gaps in explanation. Suddenly the pro-forma makes sense. It wasn’t obvious initially as I was too focused on the details and didn’t show my application to enough people for feedback, so things like describing what my employer does (even a major company with a popular brand name needs to be explained to TN like they’re from another planet, turns out) wasn’t in my initial application, and was picked up on in the pro-forma.
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Winning awards/conferences/public engagements is NOT a requirement for endorsement. I certainly didn’t win any awards when I applied. Got this impression initially when most TN application in the forum mention some sort of awards in their MC. What matters is third- party recognition, and it can be just one or two persons with undisputed reputation in the field to say your contribution is worthy per evidence. Awards will fulfill this part of the assessment, but only because it’s a third-party voice.
So, if you haven’t noticed by now, mine is a story of rejection → endorsement review (appeal) → endorsement. It was an emotional roller coaster but TN endorsement I feel is rare in the world of visas in that legal assistance is not required to succeed, even when appealing.
So, here’s my application outline: Timeline:
- 17 Sep 2024: Submitted
- 9 Oct 2024: Rejected
- 6 Nov 2024: Appealed
- 19 Nov 2024: Endorsed
Letters of Recommendation (LORs)
1st LOR: Former Head of Growth of an Indonesian payments startup
2nd LOR: Founder of a Cybersecurity startup
3rd LOR: Founder of a US-based space startup (not Elon!)
CV - Software engineer of UK-based challenger bank, means that it has no physical branch and gets revenue purely from customers using the app.
I didn’t do computer science in my degree, and got a software engineer job out of uni. CV was 1.25 pages long.
Personal statement - Covers what inspired me to switch from materials science to software engineering. Brief mention of all the things I did that will be in the evidence, adding personal anecdotes along the way. Stated intention to continue with my side project as a full-time venture.
Evidence (I’m writing this as if I don’t know I’m going to be rejected.) Mandatory Criteria
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MC1: Worked on core functionalities of the bank, showing diagrams, code commits, and showing it impacting £billions on money flows.
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MC2: Developed customer service AI chatbot side project as the sole engineer. Showed screenshots with explanation, GitHub contribution dot matrix, pull request numbers proving I’m the sole engineer, and conversation screenshots with a company that used the product in a pilot programme, alongside screenshots of improved customer service response time, to demonstrate my work progressing the product’s sales effort.
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MC3: My salary. >90th percentile in the UK (PayScale), with graph (PayScale) showing salary progression is equivalent to an engineer with 10 years of experience. Offer letters, all letters of salary increase and post-benchmark adjustments were included.
Optional Criteria 2
- OC2(1): Another side project: APIs for real-time collaboration in the browser. Similar to MC2 but now with two conversations from two prospective enterprise customer suggesting real need of the product in the market.
- OC2(2): Yet another side project: A software platform for remote teams to develop and verify small satellites in the cloud. No coding here, so it was all about showing diagrams and screenshots of mock-ups, with me being shortlisted to pitch in front of investors in a London startup conference. Showed conversations with an expert in this field collaborating with me to write a proposal for one of the senior members of NASA. This expert also wrote my LOR.
- OC2(3): Mentorship for Developer For Good in summer 2024. Firstly, it’s a great charity and you should join as a mentor if you can! Website screenshot of what the charity is, with offer letter showing structured and selective programme and Google calendar event list showing consistent mentoring. Showed impact of the team I’m mentoring (over 2 million people potentially impacted through the chatbot product they built). I was mentoring an individual but she was leading a team, so explicitly mentioned this for full disclosure in the evidence. Showed website screenshot of chatbot products in demand in the UK, showing transferrable skills for the team I mentored.
Optional Criteria 3
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OC3(1): You guessed it, another side project! Now it’s an AI CV builder that caters to the job posting. Again, screenshots of the product with the sample CV generated. PR count showing me as the sole engineer. Screenshot of internal document showing LInkedIn marketing effort, and conversations with two users of the product praising its usefulness. In total there was 61 users, shown by a dashboard screenshot.
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OC3(2): Worked on another core infrastructure of the bank I worked for, with diagrams and code commit showing I did most of the work, effectively leading it. Also showed Slack messages showing messages of praise and thanks from the internal teams that benefited from my improvement. Showed spreadsheet screenshot of the volume of transactions (in the thousands) handled by this infrastructure. Showed glowing public reviews of the consumer-facing product that relied on this infrastructure.
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OC3(3): Worked on yet another core infrastructure of the bank. Showed documentation mainly written by me showing technical leadership, code commits showing 75% of the commits are by me. Shows how my work is one of three major tasks in the product delivery. Also showed a spreadsheet screenshot of the additional time freed up for reconciling trade figures worth £billions.
Pro-forma:
Upon reading the pro-forma, I dissected every sentence within it and try to figure out why each of them is true in their eyes, and what’s the rebuttal (even something as contentious as recommendation letter showing common authorship). For context, I didn’t hire any lawyer for both application and appeal, but I followed the scientific citation technique mentioned in different posts quite religiously to write my endorsement review. What surprised me is how I can re-use what’s already in the evidence to craft a slightly different narrative that fulfills the criteria much better than the original one!
Another angle to take is to poke at TN’s inconsistency in applying the guidance faithfully to your application, which led to your rejection. The review preamble specifically said “that the relevant endorsing body did not apply its criteria correctly resulting in an incorrect decision.”. I did that to rebut some of the claims. I understand why some people want to hire a lawyer for this reason, but in my case I felt I can put up a convincing argument on my own.
I’d like to thank [Ann] for your guidance, as you are very generous with your time and your post was very detailed. Also, thank you everyone in the forum for being generous and helpful!
Now, back to work!
on your endorsement. Excellent read and well explained
I think you are entitled to your opinion about comments in the forum. Most are not actually wrong, the feedback are often about trends in previous proforma. You also need to know that tech nation criteria or requirements evolve. The entire global talent application process is subjective and there are other things assessors look at that are not explicitly stated. How developed the tech ecosystem in your home country and some other backgrounds about the applicants are sometimes taken into account. No two assessors are the same, that someone got endorsed based on some evidence doesn’t mean that it will be acceptable for another applicant from a more developed country. In this forum I have seen some people get endorsed with mostly references letters when it is clearly stated that reference letters alone are not acceptable. Other applicants follow the same pattern and get rejected.