Almost every company starts mobility the same way: a single foreign national hire, a friendly immigration lawyer recommended by an investor, and a shared inbox that someone in HR vaguely owns. That setup works at twenty international employees. It quietly stops working somewhere around fifty, and by a hundred it's actively losing the company money — usually without anyone noticing the line was crossed. Here are the five signs your company needs a real global mobility program.
1. Nobody owns the function. If I ask 'who runs mobility here?' and three people get named, the answer is no one. The work is happening, but accountability is split across HR, Legal, and Finance — which means nothing is ever quite anyone's job.
2. Your immigration counsel sets the agenda. They decide which visas to file, when to file them, and what to charge. That's fine when you have one case a year. It's a problem when you have forty.
3. You can't produce a clean spend number. Ask your CFO what mobility cost last year. If the number requires a week of digging and still arrives as a range, you don't have a program — you have invoices.
4. H-1B cap day is a surprise. If March feels like an ambush every year, you don't have a contingency plan. You have a hope.
5. Senior people are doing junior work. When a Director of Talent is personally chasing an RFE response from your law firm, your operating model is broken. That work belongs to a program, not a person.
None of these problems are fatal individually. Together, they cost you money, retention, and senior attention. The fix is rarely a hire — it's a function. Build it once, hand it off when you're ready.