If you’re claiming skills, knowledge or experience on your CV as part of your argument for a Hong Kong Employment Visa Application – what’s the gig if you can’t fully support your claims with references or testimonials?
QUESTION
Hi, I am 8 weeks into applying for an employment visa (I’m British).
I have given the documents and a couple of weeks ago had to supply a reference which I managed to get hold of.
And yesterday my would be company heard from them again asking for another reference that was listed on my CV.
However.. the person has now left the company (the company may have even closed and now they have changed careers (it was a 5 year ago position I was referencing).
Do you think it’s OK for this person to state that they have left the company and just provide a letterheaded reference from their current place?
My other friend said it may be tricky.
Please help if you can. I’m not sure what to do.
Thanks a lot!
ANSWER
Naturally enough, if you are claiming certain skills and experience on your CV and you’re expecting the Immigration Department to rely on them as being a true and accurate statement of your experiencing and work capabilities, it’s incumbent upon you to produce the kind of documentation which speaks to the veracity of your CV.
Now of course, on occasion, it might prove impossible as you’ve encountered to pick up a particular reference from some time prior, particularly if that employer is no longer in business. So usually what the Immigration Department are prepared to do is to at least receive the second best evidence that you can supply; and if that happens to be a reference or a document that speaks to your time in that business or in the employent with that organisation, and it’s from someone who knew you at that time or possibly was your superior, the Immigration Department will certainly take that into consideration.
Whether it will prove ultimately satisfactory or not in the final analysis depends on just how important the time spent in that employment is to the relevance of your current application. Because if,for example, you’re saying that you’ve been responsible for producing moon widgets for that company and your special skills, knowledge and experience for the new employee areas to show that you’re going to be producing moon widgets and the Immigration Department have got no way of concluding effectively that you have the experience that you claim, then it could speak to the approvability; all told, however, if it’s just general affirmation that you spend time in that role in that position, there’s nothing too sensational about it from an approvability perspective, then you can expect that that second best evidence will suffice.
But in the final analysis you have the burden of proof in relation to the extent of your CV. So, as far as you can satisfy their requirements that end the stronger you’re putting yourself forward for an eventual approval.
Okay, I hope you find this useful.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
This article deals with the question of whether time spent in prison in Hong Kong will break the continuity of ordinary residence for the purposes of a Right of Abode application after 7 years.
First Published on April 10, 2016
QUESTION
I am interested to know if there is anything I could do to strengthen the case of my application for the right of abode (permanent residency) and I am also unsure if having an application rejected could be to my detriment in any way.
Just to restate my background:
I have been resident in Hong Kong under a working visa since September 2008.
I resigned from my previous role in October 2014; my employment visa was valid until September 2015.
I served a 2 months custodial sentence between November & December 2014.
Since then I have been granted a 3 year working visa as of Q1 2015 for my current role.
I believe my 7 year anniversary has already accrued as of September 2015.
What do you think are my chances of successfully applying for right of abode are at this time, especially given that I was in prison for 2 months in the last 7 years.
ANSWER
Your time of imprisonment amounted to a complete break in your ordinary residence I’m afraid.
To this end, I’m afraid your 7 year continuity of ordinary residence only re-commenced when you secured your employment visa subsequent to the completion of your period of incarceration.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Can a Chinese spouse resident on the Mainland secure a dependant visa for Hong Kong?
QUESTION
My brother is married to a Chinese girl. He is Singaporean and coming to Hong Kong on a working visa.
Can he get his wife a dependant visa for Hong Kong?
They have proper legal marriage certificate from Singapore.
His wife is Chinese and staying in Shenzhen now, but she is from Shanghai originally.
ANSWER
The very short answer to this question is that, yes, your brother who is married to a Chinese girl will be able to secure a dependent visa for his wife now that he’s moving to Hong Kong to work. And naturally enough he wants to have his partner resident with him in Hong Kong during all of that time.
The thing about Chinese spouses is that if you are a permanent resident of Hong Kong, it is impossible to sponsor your spouse into Hong Kong for dependent visa; on the other hand, if you are a temporary resident such as your brother will be, he will be in a position to sponsor his Chinese spouse into Hong Kong on dependent visa, and the application process is just the same as it always is – he is going to have to be able to show that he can conceptually put food on the table and a roof over her head and that there’s going to be a need for the Immigration Department to be satisfied that the relationship is a genuine relationship.
Therefore there will be questions and calls for the kind of information that I speak to the reality that this is not a marriage of convenience, this is in fact a bona fide, genuine marriage. The only other wrinkle to an application for a Chinese spouse resident on the mainland is the process that is followed to secure the dependent visa.
On the one hand it normally is just a typical normal type of employment dependent vis application. But on the other she is going to as a Chinese national have to secure an exit entry permit from the Public Security Bureau with endorsement for Hong Kong. Once the dependenties was issued in Hong Kong, then the production of the dependent visa along with the entry-exit permit to the Public Security Bureau in the place where she keeps her family registration will lead to the requisite to exit endorsement for Hong Kong. And whilst that is a process that is handled on the Chinese side, the Immigration Department in Hong Kong expect that the dependent visa holder who is a Mainland resident entering Hong Kong on that basis.
So there’some work to be done in Hong Kong side and there some work to be done in China side, but all things considered, it would seem reasonable to assume that your brother will be able to sponsor his wife forendent to come to Hong Kong.
Ok, I hope this helps.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
Given that some countries, like Australia, organise their immigration policy to address skills gaps in their economies with specific temporary visa types, you might expect that Hong Kong would have a thriving job finding + visa service industry.
We do, after all, issue more than 17,000 new employment visa approvals each year under the General Employment Policyand genuinely talented professional workers are warmly welcomed – on the basis they have a job offer from a credible employer here.
But in Hong Kong, most employers do not recruit foreign workers ‘sight unseen’, on the strength of a CV or even after an extensive series of video Skype interviews.
No, the typical scenario is that foreign national professionals visit Hong Kong ‘on spec’, make themselves available for interview locally and, at the end of a traditional style recruitment process, an offer of employment will materialize and then the process of securing the employment visa is embarked upon.
This is, in many respects, a risky process for the intending foreign national worker as he will usually have to give up a job in one country just to pursue the chance of employment in Hong Kong.
And, until both an offer of employment has been secured and an employment visa issued by the Immigration Department, the pursuit of a new life in Hong Kong could go terribly wrong.
Remember, it is not unlawful to look and interview for jobs as a visitor in Hong Kong.
And when (or if) you do finally get yourself established in the HKSAR, you’ll discover most every foreigner here took a certain amount of risk to get their start in Hong Kong.
Risk taking is, after all, what Hong Kong is made of!
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
It is NEVER a good idea to overstay your Hong Kong visa for the reasons set out below…
Practice Update 2026 – This content must be read in light of changes to ImmD practice since it was first published
Under Hong Kong immigration law, overstaying an authorized period of stay constitutes a severe statutory violation under Section 41 of the Immigration Ordinance, triggering long-lasting legal and practical ramifications that permanently compromise an individual’s future entry prospects. In Overstay Your Hong Kong Visa, Stephen Barnes, the Hong Kong Visa Geeza, directly confronts the enduring fallout faced by foreign nationals who remain in the territory past their limit of stay.
Overstaying is a criminal offence prosecuted before the Magistrates’ Courts that routinely results in criminal convictions, suspended or custodial sentences, and formal removal. While the Immigration Department frequently states that no official “permanent blacklist” exists, the departmental reality is that past immigration convictions remain permanently accessible on case records.
Stephen Barnes – The Hong Kong Visa Geeza
In practice, case officers and boundary examining officers view prior overstayers as high-risk entrants with zero upside to admit, leading to automated visa-on-arrival revocations, repeated refusals of entry, and serial rejections of future visa petitions. Historically, individuals were often tempted to linger beyond their visa expiry to finish brief assignments or wrap up professional engagements because no agile mechanism existed to authorize short-term work. To understand how contemporary immigration policy addresses legitimate short-term specialist needs while enforcing strict compliance boundaries, Stephen Barnes provides the definitive analysis in Practice Update: The 2026 Immigration Facilitation Scheme – Short-Term Work for Visitors to Hong Kong.
The essential operational boundary highlighted in the Practice Update is that while the regularized and expanded Short-Term Visitor Facilitation Scheme—spanning 18 designated sectors as of 1 October 2026—provides lawful flexibility for temporary assignments, it offers no relief or retroactive cover for visa overstayers. Under the facilitation framework, qualifying overseas experts invited by one of roughly 490 government-endorsed host organizations can lawfully undertake specified activities for up to 14 consecutive calendar days without a conventional employment visa. However, this 14-day activity window operates strictly within the currency of the individual’s lawful visitor stay; it does not extend an expiring visitor permission, nor does it cure an overstay. Furthermore, an invitation letter does not override standard immigration control or sanitize an adverse record marked by past overstay convictions. As Stephen Barnes emphasizes across both analyses, “mortgaging your future” by overstaying an authorized stay fundamentally destroys immigration credibility. Foreign professionals and host organizations must respect lawful limits of stay, as legitimate short-term assignments demand formal institutional endorsement within lawful validity dates, while overstaying remains an unpardonable compliance failure under Hong Kong law.
QUESTION
I previously overstayed my Visitor visa for a period of 13 months; I reported to the Immigration Department, was charged and at Sha Tin court I was convicted and given a suspended sentence of 6 months. I bought my air ticket and I was allowed to leave Hong Kong on my own without being formally deported.
This was in June 2008.
Later I tried to return to Hong Kong in 2009 but at the airport I was refused entry and I was told by an Immigration Officer that I can apply for a visa before coming to Hong Kong, as a visa on arrival is not available in my case.
I submitted my Visitor visa application through a friend of mine (who is a permanent resident of Hong Kong) but my application was refused.
2 years later (that is in 2011) I applied again for a Visitor visa via the same sponsor and once again my application was refused.
I wrote an email to the Immigration Department asking if I was blacklisted from entering Hong Kong.
I was told I am not blacklisted, yet my applications keep being rejected.
Can you kindly suggest any measures that I can take to apply successfully for a Visitor visa? I have a local sponsor in Hong Kong and any information/suggestion from you will be of immense help.
ANSWER
Yes, your situation is rather unfortunate as you are appreciating because it’s seven or eight years now since you overstayed your visa in Hong Kong and faced justice for doing that. And as you’ve clearly appreciated, there are costs and penalties to pay for not complying with Hong Kong immigration law, which I think all too many people, frankly, don’t take seriously.
Hong Kong is a great place and you may indeed wish to come back in the future. And as you’re discovering, oversaying whilst gets your time on the ground, in the immediate sense, it is in a sense kind of like, you know, mortgaging your future and your ability to be able to come back to Hong Kong. So it is very unfortunate.
Getting really down to the heart of it, if the Immigration Department have told you there is no blacklist, then that probably is technically accurate. However, each time that you make an application for a visa, the examining officer is going to take into account all the circumstances of your application and if they can see that you did have history of overstaying and indeed were convicted for that and then you departed, normally there isn’t any hurry on the part of the Immigration Department to let you back in because they can’t see any upside. So I’m afraid there’s not much you can do about it; you’re just bearing the cost and consequence of something that you have in your past. And, as these things can very often do, they can come back to haunt you.
I’m afraid that’s what’s happening to you now. So you never know. Just keep on making your applications. One day you might get lucky; but for the moment, I would imagine that the Immigration Department are not particularly interested in having you back.
Okay, I realise that’s not what you hoped to hear, but essentially,that’s the position that you’re in.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
First of all I want to say that your website is amazing, easy to understand with relevant information.
My question might be very simple but I cannot find the answer myself.
I need to apply for a working visa, I found that there’s two forms one is ‘Employment as Imported Workers’ and the other is ‘ID990A as professional’.
I only have a Diploma or certificate from my country which may not be a tertiary education and is not a degree in other area which is technical, I have experience in customer service, customer care, reception, and hostels back home and in Australia and now I have the opportunity to unfold myself and work in a hostel in Hong Kong.
In which category am I, what is the best I can do.
ANSWER
So the difference between the two particular application types that you’re looking at really gets down to the difference between being a professional with a visa issued for employment under the General Employment Policy, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the application to the Immigration Department under the Supplementary Labour Scheme as an imported worker which is administered by the Labour Department. And then when that process has played its way through, then the Immigration Department will clearly be responsible for issuing the visa.
So, the importation of labour route is really the supplementary labor scheme. And this is not applicable to you. This is, a program which sophisticated employers take advantage of through a long process of proving to the Labour department satisfaction that the particular types of skills that they are seeking to import into Hong Kong for projects cannot be found locally.
And, on the basis that that project is successfully completed with the Labour department, then the Immigration Department will grant visas for up to two years as a maximum to certain imported workers who fit the particular skills profile that has been pre cleared by the Labour Department as part of the early stage of that importation of labour initiative. So for you this is not relevant.
The question therefore is well, are you a professional for the purposes of the General Employment Policy? And can you expect, given the type of work that you’ve articulated in your question, to get approved to do that type of work?
Well, firstly, to be deemed a professional for the purpose of the General Employment Policy, you’re expected to be either a university graduate with two years post graduation working experience in a managerial or supervisory capacity or you have technical or vocational qualifications which you appear to have being a diploma holder plus five years post qualification working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity, or if you’re merely a secondary or high school graduate, then you’re expected to have at least ten years post secondary working experience in the managerial or supervisory capacity.
In order to get over the first hurdle of being deemed a professional then, as a second part of the approvability test which the Immigration Department applies to any particular application for an employment visa under the General Employment Policy, you would need to show that you possess special skills, knowledge and experience of value to and not readily available in Hong Kong.
So I think this is where your problem lies because you might very well be able to squeeze yourself into the bracket of being a professional. But then when you turn your attention to the nature of the work that’s proposed for you, which is to manage a hostel, I think you’re going to struggle to convince the Immigration Department that the special skills, knowledge and experience are entailed in that particular activity.
Moreover, I suspect that the Immigration Department are not going to buy into the story that the skills required to run a hostel are not readily available locally. I appreciate that the hostel might be for foreign nationals, I appreciate that there’s a certain camaraderie and a certain sort of culture that prevails among hosteling arrangements globally and the types of people that use them, but for the Immigration Department, their mandate is to protect local jobs wherever possible. And in my experience, given the type of work that’s involved and your profile particularly, I would suggest that you don’t get your hopes up that you’ll get an employment visa in order to do that work.
One other option that might be available to you although it’s not clear from your question what nationality you are, but if you’re a qualifying national for a Working Holiday Visa, then you might be able to get temporary employment permissions to engage in work in a hostel, but that’s not really the question.
Okay, sorry the news is not great, but I hope you found it useful nonetheless.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
When considering whether to apply for your visa before or after relocating to Hong Kong, it’s important to weigh the pros and cons of each option in relation with the type of visa you are applying for
As a matter of fact there are some types of Hong Kong immigration status where the rules are very strict about where you have to be on the day your application is formally submitted.
For example, if you are applying for permanent residency, then you MUST be physically in Hong Kong on the day you file your application.
On the other hand, if you are making an application under the Admission of Mainland Talents and Professionals Scheme, then you HAVE TO be outside of Hong Kong when you submit your application paperwork to the Hong Kong ID.
But, for the most part, it doesn’t really matter where you are when your application is lodged, at least not from the perspective of approvability or whether the Immigration Department will look MORE or LESS favourably on your case.
If you decide to come to Hong Kong and apply whilst you’re here, there is an advantage if you are a ‘90 day national’. By this I mean, your nationality is granted a 90 day visitor visa upon arrival in Hong Kong (or, if you’re British you even get double this).
You see, as the HKID typically need 7-8 weeks to finalise a residence visa application, the 90 days you get as a visitor will see you through the entire process so it is a relatively easy experience sitting out the time it takes for you to receive the result of your application. No sweat.
On the other hand if you are a 7, 14 or even 30 day national and have filed for your residence visa whilst you find yourself in Hong Kong, the Immigration Department will not grant you any special treatment if you apply to extend your visitor visa whilst you seek to wait out the time to case finalisation.
So, in this case, you’re going to have to do the Shenzhen Shuttle to get a defacto extension to your limit of stay as a visitor – and each time you run the gauntlet of a possible refusal of entry – not a particularly pleasant experience.
No matter what nationality you are or how long the visitor visa permissions you get, if you have applied in Hong Kong, especially if you’re trying to get an employment visa, it is absolutely vital that you stick closely to the conditions of your visitor status. Do not be tempted to start working for your future employer as that will be unlawful if your visa is not yet approved.
There is ‘Catch 22’ though, if you are applying for a business investment visa, which I discuss in detail elsewhere in this Blog (and also in the Hong Kong Visa Handbook) so I recommend you check out those resources too before you make a decision about the best way start your application.
In any event, if your visa is approved, the way you activate your new status is to receive a visa label from the HKID, leave (if you’re here as a visitor – and you can go to Macau or China, it doesn’t matter – the key is to terminate your visitor status as you go) and then enter Hong Kong with your new visa label affixed inside your passport. This will then activate your new visa and start your period of stay as a resident.
VisaGeeza.Ai – Making Hong Kong Immigration A Lot Easier
