US IT recruitment is one of the few careers in India where a fresher with good English, sharp attention to detail and night-shift stamina can be productive inside three months. It is also a career where most candidates fail their first interview for one reason: they can define terms but cannot use them.
Hiring managers do not ask "what is C2C?" for the definition. They ask because the answer reveals whether you have ever worked a live requirement.
Start with the tax terms, because everything else hangs off them
Every US requirement is filled under a commercial arrangement, and the arrangement decides your rate maths, your paperwork and your candidate pool.
- W2 — the consultant is an employee of a staffing company. Taxes are withheld by the employer, benefits may apply, and the employer carries the overhead. Your bill rate must absorb employer taxes, so the pay rate you can offer is meaningfully lower than the bill rate.
- 1099 — the consultant is an independent contractor. No withholding, no benefits, higher pay rate, more risk on the consultant.
- C2C (Corp-to-Corp) — your client contracts with the consultant's own company or with a vendor company that employs them. Most H1B consultants come through C2C.
- Full-time / permanent — a direct salaried hire, usually with a percentage-of-salary fee.
A working recruiter knows that on a $70/hr bill rate, W2 and C2C produce very different take-home numbers, and can say so out loud without a calculator.
Then learn visa statuses as availability, not trivia
Visa status tells you how quickly someone can start, whether transfer paperwork is involved, and whether the client will even consider the profile.
- US Citizen / Green Card — no restrictions; required on many government and BFSI roles.
- H1B — employer-sponsored. A transfer takes time and legal work, so "H1B transfer" candidates need a longer runway.
- H4 EAD, L2 EAD, OPT/CPT (F1) — work authorisation with validity windows. Always note the expiry date.
- TN — Canadian/Mexican professionals under USMCA.
Never guess a status. Ask, note the expiry, and record who holds the sponsorship. A submission with a wrong status is worse than no submission — it costs your account manager credibility with the client.
Understand the requirement before you touch a job board
Read the requirement twice and mark four things: must-have skills with years, location and onsite expectation, bill rate ceiling, and interview process. If any of those four is missing, ask before sourcing. Sourcing against an incomplete requirement is the single largest waste of a recruiter's night.
Translate the skill list into a search string. A Java requirement is rarely about Java alone:
("Java" OR "J2EE") AND ("Spring Boot") AND ("Microservices") AND ("AWS" OR "Azure") AND ("USC" OR "GC" OR "H1B")
Run it across your ATS first, then Dice, Monster, LinkedIn and your internal referral list. Your ATS is your cheapest source and the one your competitors cannot see.
The screening call has a shape
Ten minutes, in this order: confirm the consultant is real and available, confirm visa and location, confirm rate expectation on the stated tax term, then probe two must-have skills with a specific question ("walk me through the last time you tuned a slow query"). Close by telling them exactly what happens next and when.
Log everything in the ATS while it is fresh. Notes written the next morning are fiction.
Submission etiquette is what account managers remember
A clean submission has a formatted resume, a summary line matching the must-haves, rate on the correct tax term, availability to start, current location with relocation position, and the consultant's confirmation that they have not already been submitted to that client through another vendor. Double submissions burn accounts.
Metrics you should be able to quote about yourself
By month three, you should know your submissions per week, submission-to-interview ratio, interview-to-offer ratio and average time to first submission. If you cannot quote these numbers, you cannot improve them — and in interviews, quoting them is what separates a recruiter from someone who has watched recruitment videos.
What to practise this week
Pick one live requirement format, write your own Boolean string, screen three profiles on a call, and write the submission summary as if you were sending it to a client. Do that ten times and the vocabulary stops being vocabulary. It becomes work.