[Sassmofi]

I have been living in the UK for over 4 years now.

1. After you receive your job offer and the company agrees to sponsor you, the company must first prove they cannot fill the position from within the UK. Usually the company will write a job specification particularly tailored to you. The company is required to to advertise the position for a month (could be 6 weeks as it has been some time since we went through the process).
2. If the only suitable candidate is yourself, the company will need to submit an application to the employment tribunal which only meets once a month and the application has to be received 2 weeks before the tribunal or it will be reviewed in the next month. The tribunal will review the application to make sure the criteria are met.
3. After the tribunal has approved the application for sponsorship, the visa application process begins. Your offered salary must minimum requirements in order for you to support yourself (I believe it is now just under 20,000).
4. You will fill out information online for your biometrics (some of this will include information on your parents). They will also want copies of your bank account balances. Marriage/Divorce Documents, birth certificate, etc
5. After you submit the visa application, you will receive notice to get photographed and fingerprinted. I believe the location was the local social security office which will send the information to Home Office.
6. Once all is complete, the time to complete the visa can very. DH's company paid for an expediter. Our completed information and passports needed to go to the embassy in New York and the expediter personally walked them into the embassy and received our visas in about 3 days. If you don't have an expediter, I believe it can take several weeks to get your passport and visa back.

DH works for a large global company with headquarters in the UK. They do sponsorships all the time. The advertisement was posted in August. The sponsorship application just missed the deadline for the September tribunal and was processed during the October tribunal. We submitted our visa application in October with the biometric appointment at the very end of October. We had the passports and visa in our hands in about a week with the visa start date at the end of November.