OPT hires are easy. You’ll just do an at will contract as you would for any employee or consultant who’s not a foreigner. In other words, nothing needs to be filed or done by you.
The only caveat is for the OPT graduate (I assume your friend is no longer in school). They will lose time against their OPT allocation that they could otherwise save.
That being said, it depends on the details of their OPT and the kind (pre / post completion, etc) at which rate their remaining time in the US gets deducted when they don’t work. You can look up the details online.
This means your fiend needs to evaluate whether it may be potentially better to be able to stay in the US longer and not work vs. working for you and getting something in their resume but that work time may potentially deduct from their OPT allocation faster.
Not a lawyer, just a former student who worked in OPT a few times. This stuff has changed since I went through this so don’t take my world for it.
What has not changed much is that OPT is pretty easy for employers (as opposed to, say, a visa) - because that’s the point of OPT.
