There is a sticker on Kristin Faison's laptop that she no longer needs to read. She has it memorized. Even on the days she walks into her office without glancing at it, she knows exactly what it says: human resources is the unofficial lawyer, the psychiatrist, the event planner, the teacher, the peacemaker, the career planner, and the detective.

"And I would add that we're also problem solvers," she says. "That is what we do. Every single day there is a problem that comes up and we are working to solve it. And us working to solve it is nine times out of ten for the betterment of our employees that we're supporting."

It is a fitting creed for someone who never planned on any of this. Faison, a global mobility leader based just outside Washington, D.C., is candid about how she arrived in a field she now considers her life's work: she fell into it.

From Sociology Major to Global Mobility Leader: An Unplanned Path

"I definitely fell into the space," Faison says. "It's certainly a space that I never necessarily dreamed of entering into."

The story begins, as many careers do, with a friend and a referral. Fresh out of college with an undergraduate degree in sociology and nothing lined up, Faison got a call from one of her best friends, who had spent more than a year working as a government contractor supporting the Student and Exchange Visitor Program. The work was interesting, the friend told her, and she was happy to put a referral forward.

"I said, sure. I mean, I had nothing lined up," Faison recalls. "I was definitely open to all, everything and anything that was an opportunity."

That first role made her an initial reviewer of applications from schools seeking certification to enroll international students in the United States. It was, in her words, her true entry point into immigration, viewed from the government side of the table.

A few years later, Faison and her now-husband relocated to North Carolina. Once again, she moved "without anything lined up whatsoever." And once again, an opportunity surfaced: a role at a large financial services company as an Immigration Specialist. That position became her introduction to the corporate world of mobility, to life on a mobility team, and to a question she has been answering ever since: what can immigration mean for a company trying to bring critical talent through its doors?

She has stayed true to the field across a string of industries since. And somewhere along the way, the job she stumbled into became something closer to a vocation.

"Immigration honestly serves as my true passion. That's at my core," she says. The reason is simple, and it has nothing to do with paperwork. "You're helping individuals start the next chapter of their lives, and oftentimes it is a very big decision for them and maybe their families. Being able to be a part of that and live vicariously through them in some ways has been really rewarding."

Why Global Mobility Needs a Seat at the Table

Having worked across multiple industries, Faison has developed a clear point of view on what separates a strong global mobility program from a weak one. Her first piece of advice is a warning against assumption.

"It's not a one size fits all," she says. "I think that's also the beauty of the space that we're in. There is so much flexibility and ambiguity with what it is that we're doing day in and day out."

The mistake she sees, particularly from experienced professionals joining a new organization, is importing a playbook wholesale. The metrics, the programs, the processes that worked at a previous company are not guaranteed to fit the next one. So her number one tip for anyone newly stepping into a mobility role is deceptively simple: understand what mobility actually means to the organization you have joined, and how that organization intends to leverage it.

From there, she argues, the function has to make itself visible, especially where the existing approach has been operational and transactional. "If you are looking to have a strong program that's intentional, you should have that seat at the table," Faison says. She knows the phrase is a cliché. She uses it anyway, because she believes it. "It's very important to be a part of those discussions to understand what's the talent strategy of the organization and how does mobility fit into that talent strategy."

How Immigration Policy Shifts Are Reshaping Corporate Location Strategy

Ask Faison how the last 18 months of policy change have affected her work, and she resists the dramatic answer. There has been no wholesale tearing down of everything her teams have built.

What has changed is the frequency with which her shoulder gets tapped. At her current employer, a U.S. headquartered company, a significant amount of work is underway around location strategy: where the business wants to focus its hiring, where it believes the right talent lives for the roles it needs to fill over the coming years. Faison and her team are now routinely pulled into those conversations to assess what a given location means from an immigration standpoint, and whether a jurisdiction would be challenging to expand into.

There is also a quieter shift, one she finds genuinely new. "There have been conversations with which I don't think I've ever had these conversations before," she says. Companies are starting to ask whether company events and on-site gatherings have to happen inside the United States at all, or whether holding them elsewhere might mean "greater inclusivity of attendees," so that everyone who wants to attend actually can, "without perhaps as much red tape that may be found today."

Technology, AI, and the End of the Spreadsheet Era

Like every function inside a modern company, global mobility is being asked how it plans to use AI. Faison hears the question constantly. Her answer is measured, and she is not apologetic about that.

Mobility, she notes, usually lives inside HR, and HR moves with deliberate care for good reason. "I can't just plop something into ChatGPT and have something spit back out when it's an employee's personal data," she says. The goal, as she frames it, is a balance: moving fast enough to keep up, but moving intentionally enough to respect the sensitivity of the work.

Where she is unreservedly optimistic is the slow death of the spreadsheet. For years, she points out, the industry has managed cases on trackers built in Google or Excel Sheets. "We made it work, and we added all of the formulas and made it fancy," she laughs. But the shift toward centralized, dedicated systems that allow for automation and for reporting visibility beyond her own team is, in her view, one of the most encouraging changes of the past few years.

That same instinct shapes what she looks for in an immigration counsel partner. She wants technology she can open and read at a glance, "without having to click multiple times." And she wants it to be customizable rather than cookie cutter, because, as she puts it, "my program has different needs than your client over here."

The data she is asking for, meanwhile, is almost humbling in its simplicity. "This may seem so silly that I'm even saying this out loud," she admits, but the basics are still hard to get: how many foreign nationals she is supporting, who sits on which work permit, how those numbers have moved over time. With her program undergoing significant transformation, that level of detail is what lets her forecast and report up to leadership with confidence.

Advice for Immigrants: Over-Communicate and Trust Your Team

When the conversation turns to the immigrants themselves, Faison's advice is direct. Know your internal contacts and how to reach them quickly. Ask every question, because none of them are too small or too large. And trust that the people supporting you, internally and at your law firm, are working to do right by you and your family. "And if ever it's felt that's not the case, then say something."

The biggest mistakes, in her experience, share a common root: going it alone. That means trying to handle matters without help, leaning on blogs instead of counsel, and failing to flag changes to internal teams, whether that change is upcoming travel, a possible promotion, or a move to a new location.

"Blogs are great, but blogs also are blogs," she says. "Not everyone's situation is the same." Her preferred safeguard is constant communication. "We love over communicating," she says, because a sponsored visa ties so many threads together that even a small change to someone's profile can trigger work that has to happen in advance.

One Change Kristin Faison Would Make to US Immigration Policy

Given the power to adjust a single piece of U.S. immigration policy, Faison does not hesitate for long. She would change how Requests for Evidence are used.

An RFE, she argues, should be issued only when the government genuinely lacks the information it needs to decide a case. Too often, in her view, it functions as a way to buy time rather than to fill a real gap. The downstream effect is a kind of defensive case strategy, where petitioners hold material back in anticipation of an RFE that may be coming regardless. A tighter standard, she believes, would serve everyone better.

Advice for Aspiring Global Mobility Leaders

Faison closes with the advice she would give anyone hoping to build a career in global mobility: get involved in the industry. Not necessarily by joining a board, but by showing up. Go to the events. Attend the regional gatherings and conferences such as Worldwide ERC.

The reason, she says, is cultural. "I feel like we are very unique in the sense of we all just want to help one another. And the only way to benefit from that philosophy is to get out there." She still remembers her first Worldwide ERC conference, where she felt overwhelmed by the crowd and the noise, and at the same time invigorated to be surrounded by professionals as passionate about the work as she was.

There is a practical edge to the advice, too. Mobility teams are often small. Faison was once a team of one, reporting to leadership that did not fully grasp the ins and outs of the space. In that situation, she says, a network of peers at other companies becomes the solve, the thought partners who help you find a way forward when there is no one else in the room who does what you do.

It is a fitting note to end on for someone who fell into this field by accident and stayed by choice. The sociology major who took a referral because she had nothing better lined up now spends her days as the unofficial everything, solving problems so that other people can begin the next chapter of their lives. She would not script it any other way.