Legally, all you have to do is post a job offering on some dark corner of the internet for your job that pays a fair market wage. If you can't hire anyone for a specific period, you get to look for an H1-B!
The problem is that "fair market wage" is actually defined legally by congress. That wage for IT related jobs is barely enough to make a proper middle-class living in a metal trailer 2 hours outside of Las Vegas, much less San Francisco, New York City, or even Atlanta.
So you basically base your office in a city where the COL is high, require your employee to live in said city, and post job listings with a wage no US Citizen who lives in that city would take. If you get anyone actually desperate enough, you invent some magical reason they don't qualify. Not enough experience (10 years for a tech that's been out 2), didn't have experience with JMS (1 out of the 2,000 tech keywords on your listing and honestly if you can write a java application you can read a JMS queue, it's 10 minutes of google), or any of the other reasons you can invent to not hire someone. It's the exact same strategy deployed to not hire someone based on sexual orientation, gender identity, or ethnicity.
Then, you get your cheap H1-B worker who can't leave your company or even change their job title or they get deported.
That sounds more like the process of applying for a Labor Certificate, as part of a green card. For an H-1B you just need an approved Labor Condition Application, which attests that you're offering the "prevailing wage" for the region/occupation, and (I think) that there's a general shortage of that occupation in the region (and not that you had no US citizen replies to your specific job advert)
H1B is for qualified workers in specialty occupations, the requirements are a 4 years degree, if less, 3 years of experience counts as 1 year of university studies.
