Election/Job Campaigning in the Air…

The Israeli elections are over, yet we are still in the extended waiting period, without knowing what the government coalition will look like.

For those Big-Time Wrestling fans out there, it may remind you of the WWF Battle Royals:

Everyone in the ring at the same time, and you keep fighting until there is one person left standing.  And ironically, as we are accustomed to in Israel, notice the referee in the picture that is supposed to make sure the rules are being followed is not even paying attention to the action, maybe being distracted by media with cameras in the front row as so often happens.

And by the way, anyone that is interested in this spectacle, I highly recommend the documentary/movie: I’m From Hollywood.  It will give you a better appreciation of this "sport" – you can find this Andy Kaufman movie on YouTube.

Anyway, on to employment…

You know, the new MKs in the Israeli Knesset are not so different from more traditional job seekers.  They had to go through a grueling recruitment process, being subjected to scrutiny and uncertainty, before being offered a job.  For those fortunate enough to make it into the Knesset, the natural inclination at that point might be to feel the fun has finally begun.    Plenty of press, congratulations from friends and family, and warm welcomes from veteran politicians. 

But the reality can be quite different, something that they will be reminded of many times over. 

This is of course not surprising to anyone that remembers what it is like to start a job at a new company.  Once you accept a job offer, you are generally thrust into an environment that has many unknowns, both in terms of personalities and expected behaviors.   Who will be your allies and who will be your adversaries?  For MKs, on the face of it, these distinctions are more straightforward, as those in your party are meant to be your friends, and those outside are somehow more suspect.  New employees don’t have the luxury of this pre-defined label, and must feel their way around more by trial and error.  At the end though, personal relationships based upon concrete shared objectives are generally more lasting than political party allegiance, which at least in Israel is tenuous at best.

They don’t call it office politics for nothing.  But hey, if you play your cards right, your tenure at your job will most likely be longer than most of the incoming MKs.

Translating Your CV from English into Hebrew

There are multiple issues in moving from English (or some other language) into Hebrew with your CV in preparation for your Israeli job search.

The initial thing to consider is whether this is even necessary for you to do. There are a variety of opinions.

One is that if you won’t be able to understand your own CV in Hebrew, then there is no reason for you to have such a version, and it is even misleading in giving the impression that your level of Hebrew is higher than it actually is. Others say that you should send your CV in the language that the employer used to advertise the job itself, independent of your own level of Hebrew. I can attest to the fact that in my personal experience of receiving thousands of CVs in Israel, the majority are submitted in Hebrew, with the exception of sales/marketing and technical jobs, where English CVs are a more common occurrence than in other professions.

If you think back to the objective when sending your CV, it is to move forward in the recruitment process. You have 10-20 seconds to make a positive impression. Since you don’t know what the level of English the person(s) reading your CV will have, it is dangerous to send your CV in English, even if the job requires a high level of English. Keep in mind that multiple people may be reviewing your CV, and the first can be a person simply doing filtering on keywords and/or past job titles. Again, since in most cases you can’t know who will read your CV and what their comfort level is in Hebrew and/or English, a safe approach is to send your CV in both languages, and let the reader decide which is preferable for them. The CVs can be sent in two separate files with names that make the contents obvious, or put together into one suitably-named file.

If you do decide to create a Hebrew language CV, then you need to confirm that your CV is designed according to Israeli conventions, meaning among other things, short and targeted. Of course, any English CV that you use in Israel should also conform to the Israeli standard.

The Hebrew output needs to be both grammatically correct as well as using the accurate professional/technical terms. The second requirement is as important as the first. If the translator is not familiar with the current sector-specific words for your employment objective, then the result will generally be a document that gives a clear indication that you don’t know the subject matter adequately, putting yourself immediately at a grave disadvantage.

Certainly for either one of these goals, using an automatic translating service (eg. Google Translate…) is out of the question – there is no chance to generate a suitable document.

The translator must be at a minimum mother tongue level Hebrew with relevant knowledge of sector, in order to ensure the profession-appropriate terms are used. At the same time, if you need assistance massaging the non-Israel-style English CV into an Israel-style Hebrew CV, then the translator must be knowledgeable in this area as well. Sometimes this might even require getting assistance from two separate people, one knowledgeable about Israeli-style CVs and another with the Hebrew skills to perform the translation.

Whether the person is paid or not is dependent upon the cheapest and most reliable access you have to someone that meets the above criteria. Your CV is generally your first impression-maker to the employer – make sure you consider all of the implications of your language decision.

Telephone Interviews

When I started doing recruiting, I had a lot to learn, as I didn’t come from the HR sector at all.

One such discovery was the significance and absolute danger for the job seeker related to the initial telephone call from the employer, especially when it falls on an unsuspecting/unprepared person.

At first, when one of my employer clients decided that they wanted to begin a recruitment conversation with one of my job candidates, I understood this to mean that the company would be inviting the person to their offices for a face-to-face interview. Now I understand from hard life experience that this is in fact the best case scenario, and certainly not a foregone conclusion.

My history with the recruitment process until this point was my own personal experience with job search for myself. Maybe I have a faulty memory, but what I remember was that when I submitted my CV and a company was interested in me, they would call and invite me to their offices for an interview. I don’t recall the telephone discussion being anything more than a short conversation to make the logistical arrangements.

What I started to realize very quickly was that many of the job seekers that had telephone conversations with the employer were never actually invited to a personal interview – the process completely ground to a halt for them with this one and only phone interaction.

It was clear that I was missing something - what was actually going on?

Each employer operates differently, but somewhere in their thought process, consciously or not, is the question: How much resources do I want to invest in this candidate? Reviewing a CV is the least “expensive” for an employer, followed by a telephone call, and then finally an in-person interview.

Maybe you have heard that a CV/resume is reviewed on average 20-30 seconds. Of course, this is the first stage of filtering, and most candidates are removed from contention at this point. Anyone who has sifted through large numbers of CVs knows that the majority of people that submit their candidacy don’t even meet the qualifications listed in the job posting. If the CV is especially interesting, I will invest more than the usual amount of time in reading it before ultimately deciding whether the candidate is suitable to be submitted to the company for further consideration.

So, what happened next was shocking to me at first. Not so much that people that I thought were appropriate were not all generating strong interest from the employer – that was to be expected, as I generally was not the only resource they had presenting candidates. However, a much-higher-than-expected percentage of people that the companies decided to speak with based upon the CV that I submitted had the recruitment process stop after one telephone conversation.

I became very curious – what is the employer looking for in this phone conversation, and what are they asking to allow them to arrive at the go/no go decision of whether to invest even more resources by inviting the job seeker to an interview at the office?

When the employer gets the CV, either pre-screened by a recruiter or directly from a job candidate, they do their own evaluation. Certainly the processing is different depending on whether the candidate was pre-screened by a trusted agency or is not filtered at all.

At the end, though, from the oftentimes large quantity of initial CVs, the company whittles the number of candidates down to a more manageable size – those that may meet their candidate profile. What comes next is the process that the company has created to go from “may meet the candidate profile” based upon the contents of a one-dimensional CV to a more confident understanding that this person has the skills and motivation to do the job and fit the company.

Of course, each employer has their own philosophy for the entire recruitment process, and the initial phone conversation is only one aspect of this. Still, it might help the job seeker conceptually to place an employer in one of three categories regarding how they view the call:

1. Scheduling - This initial telephone call is designed to set a time for the job seeker to come to the employer’s offices for an interview. I mistakenly thought at first that this was the only way that companies viewed this conversation, but I now realize that the majority of employers use this first encounter as something much more than simply scheduling.
2. Mini-Interview - The hiring manager/HR person knows that it is impossible to get a clear picture of the candidate from the CV, nor for the candidate to have a full comprehension of the company/position from the job listing, so the call is used to narrow the gaps. Details on the CV are discussed/elaborated upon, and additional relevant information not contained in the CV may be requested. Also, it can be used for the employer to provide additional details about the job in order to allow the candidate to understand better the specifics and respond with their level of interest. Can be 5-15 minutes in length.
3. Full-Interview - The call is the equivalent of an in-person interview, simply conducted by telephone. Oftentimes 30 minutes or more.

I have come to the conclusion that from the perspective of the job seeker, unless you know otherwise, you should be planning that the initial telephone conversation will be a short or long variation of a traditional interview, and prepare yourself accordingly.

First things first... Since this call is generally not scheduled in advance, you can’t know when it’s coming and fully prepare in the same way you would for a more traditional planned interview. So, when the company calls, make sure that you are in a situation where you can concentrate and make a good impression. If you are driving, stop the car! If there is a lot of noise or bad reception, try to find a more suitable near-by location to talk. If you are taking care of an unhappy child, or are in the middle of something that you simply can’t interrupt, politely ask if you can reschedule the conversation. There is a risk in asking to reschedule, as the company doesn’t always call back (quickly) and you may lose your chance to be one of the initial candidates, but generally they will get in touch in a timely fashion.  Having the conversation when you are not at your best is a recipe for disaster. And if you are not available to take a call while you are in the job search process, make sure you have voice mail associated with your telephone, and don’t forget to listen to your messages regularly.

As the conversation begins, keep these points in mind:

• When the company asks for clarification, you should be happy that you have the opportunity to provide additional information, rather than have the company make assumptions that don’t serve your purposes. It doesn’t matter if the answer to the question is already contained your CV – responding intelligently and articulately makes a positive impression.
• Don’t be evasive/defensive. When a company asks why you left your previous job, why you have a hole in your work history, or what your salary expectations are, answer the question clearly. Of course you should be prepared in advance for such questions, in the same way you would be for an in-person interview, and provide pre-planned responses that serve your interests. For more details of interview questions, see this article.

Getting a telephone call from a perspective employer is an excellent sign. You have passed the initial CV review stage, generally something that very few achieve. Preparing yourself for the telephone conversation in the same way you would for a face-to-face interview will give you the best chance to move forward in the recruitment process.

Do you need an initial summary in your CV?

When working with job seekers on their CVs/resumes, one critical issue arises quickly: Is it valuable to include an initial summary/profile?

I receive many CVs from job candidates on behalf of companies that I do recruiting for. About half of them include such summaries.

What is the correct way to begin your CV?

To me, the answer is clear when we review two statistics that arise from studies focused on how CVs are reviewed by employers:

• Average amount of time that a CV is “read” – 20-30 seconds
• Position on CV where the reader starts – top of the first page

The conclusion that I draw from the above is that the job seeker has very little time to get their message across, and that in such a short period of time, there is no way that the employer can read the entire document. However, the initial part of the CV will almost certainly be read.

So, to use a hi-tech term, if I reverse engineer from the above information, I quickly can come to the conclusion that I want my targeted important message to the employer to be at the top of the first page. If the most important details are spread throughout your CV, you can’t have full confidence that you are even getting your message across in such a short period of time.

Another strong reason for opening your CV with a section that summarizes your key skills/accomplishment as relates to your job target is that it allows you to describe yourself in a favorable way to the employer. Without this, you are hoping that the employer will infer your suitability from other parts of your document (work history, education…). Why leave this critical point to chance? If you are qualified for the job which you are applying for, you want this to be obvious quickly, and highlighting the most relevant parts of your background is an excellent way to achieve this objective.

Once you decide that you want to include an opening summary, the question becomes, what to include in this section.

First, you need to understand well what employers are seeking for your job target. You can determine this based upon some combination of your own previous work experience, talking with others in Israel that do the job, and looking for relevant job advertisements. Then, for those relevant skills which you possess, it makes sense to include them in your initial summary.

However, this is not enough. The above is critical to illustrating that you meet the requirements of the job, but it doesn’t distinguish you from all of the other candidates that also have the necessary qualifications. This is one of the most difficult tasks of a job seeker when creating a CV – how to make yourself a three-dimensional person when arriving in a one-dimensional (file/paper) format, while at the same time making you different in a positive way from other qualified candidates.

An excellent way to attempt this feat is by including not only skills in your CV, but also accomplishments. The wonderful thing about accomplishments is that they are unique to you.

People working in sales usually have an easier time with this, as they are oftentimes measured by quantifiable criteria. So, mentioning quota, increasing revenues… can serve this purpose well.

However, for the majority of job seekers, accomplishments are not always so readily handy and bite-size. The goal is to include in your CV relevant benefits that previous organizations have achieved from your efforts. Again, the idea is to distinguish yourself from other candidates, while at the same time helping the company understand what benefit your previous employers received from your work, something that can be more tangible for a company to understand than simply a list of your skills.

For instance, if you introduced a process in a previous role that saved the company time, money…, then this can be something to point out. If you played an integral part of a project that made a difference to the bottom line of your company, then this can work as well.

If your initial statement (some combination of relevant skills and suitable accomplishments) matches the company’s candidate profile, then there is a much better chance that the employer will continue reading your CV, and quite possibly give you more than just a short glance.

The rest of your CV after the summary should include details that provide more detail to what is related in the short initial section and give evidence that what you wrote there is true.

Including an initial summary on your CV is an excellent way to highlight why you are a high level candidate for the job, helping you paint the proper profile for the employer while also including details to make you stick out from the pack.

Is Your Job Search Routine?

Most people got up today thinking that it is just a normal day. Not me, though. I stayed awake until 3am watching my San Francisco 49ers beat the New Orleans Saints in a playoff game (American football for those who don’t know). What an awesome finish, the Niners got a touchdown with nine seconds left to win! So, I am especially tired, but today is a great day, not merely regular.

As a sports fan, I am by definition filled with routines; some call them superstitions. When something works previously, I stick with it. About one year and a half ago, the San Francisco Giants (baseball) were two (series) wins away from winning a championship, something that hadn’t occurred in my lifetime (and I am almost 50), so I incorporated them into my Employment in Israel article: Loyalty at Work. They ended up surprising everyone, especially San Francisco fans, by winning the World Series. So, now that the 49ers are two wins away, and I feel that their fate somehow rests within my fingertips, I have the responsibility to help push them over the top.

If you are not a sports fan, you might want to skip the next paragraph.

Actually, I am somehow feeling less nostalgic writing this article than the previous one in this series. One year and a half ago, there had been no championship for any of the Big Three of San Francisco sports in more than 30 years, and the Giants themselves hadn’t won since 1954, before I was born and before they were even playing in San Francisco. Even more importantly, after being removed from US sports since the time I made aliyah in the 1994, I reconnected to something that was almost a matter of life and death for me when I was younger. So, it was a kind of coming out party for me – I was confident enough being an Israeli to become overtly American again (not that my accent when I speak Hebrew fools anyone). Some of those components are missing this time. However, there is a big positive now. Previously I had no way to watch the games; last night I used a free website that shows the games live. Lack of sleep is a small price to pay for being able to see the action rather than just reading about it. The next improvement will be to find other San Francisco sports fans in Israel and watch together in a place where I can yell when they score, rather than restrain myself so that I don’t wake up my wife and kids.

Routines like this are building blocks in the construction of our everyday lives. In this particular case, the events themselves that make up my routine are spread apart by many months, so it is difficult to see the pattern without me hitting you over the head with it. However, the big and little things we do automatically each day without thinking about them comprise a large portion in all of our daily activities.

This seems to be especially true for those searching for work. The question is, does your routine make sense – is it the correct way to go about securing your next employment? Well, of course that depends upon what your objective is, and what you are doing to realize it. However, all job seekers should be “routinely” asking themselves these questions:

• Is your routine in tune with the realities of the 2012, or are you using what worked for you previously, before social media became so prominent in the majority of effective job searches, or before you moved to Israel? 
• Are you using resources (websites/placement companies) that someone recommended to you, even though their career objectives and yours are very different? 
• Are you focusing most of your time using job websites for your next opportunity? From what I understand after speaking with numerous job seekers, this is the routine for many people. In my opinion, this is THE number one reason why people become frustrated with job searches. Certainly people do get jobs they apply to from websites, but the majority of people working today did NOT find their job from a website. Two-thirds of all jobs are never publicly advertised, so spending so much time on job sites guarantees that you will never even be aware of the majority of available jobs. Networking is the single best investment of your time when seeking work: Employment Networking - Getting to the Other Two Thirds of the Jobs.

So, we will all know soon if my routine that began with the SF Giants will carry over to celebrating a Super Bowl victory for the 49ers. For job seekers, results of your routine usually cannot be discerned so quickly and clearly, but nonetheless, they are much more tangible to achieving your objectives than mine are.

Or maybe not…

Go Niners!

And yes, if things go according to plan, in the very near future I will be writing my third installment in the San Francisco Sports trilogy, Ode to the (Golden State) Warriors. Maybe if they sign Omri Caspi, everything will turn out good!

Israel Places Highly in Economic World Rankings - and this is not necessarily good news...

I don’t know how it can be possible!

Sure, many people have noted that Israel seems to receive a disproportionate amount of news coverage throughout the world. I grew up in America and was used to seeing Israel on the news, even though most people in the rural county where I lived would have little chance to find it on the map, let alone understand what the relevance of the situation in Israel is to them. Then, when I began to travel to different regions, including Europe, Asia, and Africa, I also found that on newscasts Israel is mentioned possibly more than any other country in the world.

Today, I read two reports ranking countries for quite different economic characteristics, and again Israel appears in both of them as one of the top ranked countries, once negatively and once positively.

Take a look for yourself:

• Countries with the Widest Gap Between Rich and Poor - Israel ranks number 5
• The Happiest Countries in the World - Israel ranks number 9

According to my quick research, there are anywhere from 189 to 196 countries in the world, depending upon how a country is defined. This confirmed my suspicion that Israel is not the only country in the world. So, what is going on here? How can it be that whatever the question, the answer includes Israel?

Maybe because in Israel we live such vibrant lives, more on the edge, this translates into extreme readings, no matter what is being measured. I remember some years ago that the Israeli stock market was the number 1 performing stock market in the world, and the following year was the worst performing stock market in the world. Economists may not find this odd, since a country with small companies and inherent security risk is by definition going to have great volatility, both positive and negative. Maybe this logic carries over into other arenas.

The report about happiness is interesting in that for many of the factors under consideration in the study, Israel ranks poorly, yet for some reason, Israelis are still inexplicitly happy. This is not strictly economic, but of course a large portion of people’s happiness is related to their current economic situation and future outlook. Without economic security, other issues seem less important.

Israel’s gap between rich and poor is worrying, as even with low unemployment, the average income of the poorest 10% of the country actually decreased, while the richest 10% income increased, thereby widening an already bad ratio. There is no way to interpret this except extremely negatively, with the trend going in the wrong direction. The richest 10% will pay a high price for this situation sooner or later if it is not rectified.

So, who are these happy people in Israel, and why are they happier than people in other countries? What do they have to be happy about? Is simply having a job enough? Or are there factors more critical than economic/employment that engender a happy person? And, if so, what could they possibly be that would cause Israel to rank highly, with just a quick look at the local news (or remembering the most recent of the many missile sirens we have heard on my moshav) being a daily reality check?

I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I'm sure there will be a new study soon, and that Israel will rank highly in the results.

Discrimination in Israeli Employment

Two issues have come to my attention in recent days related to discrimination in the workplace, so I thought others might benefit from considering them as well.

First is an article recently from the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Judaism/Article.aspx?id=247862. The issue here is whether it is acceptable, legally, morally or otherwise, for companies to discriminate against job candidates because of race (in this case, Arabic).

The second time was a question raised by a reader to a job that appeared on our website, Israemploy. The job was for a religious organization, and specified that the employee must be male.

What is allowed?

In Israel, we have the Employment (Equal Opportunities) Law, 1988. This law forms the main legal basis for prohibiting discrimination in the workplace, both in the public and private spheres:

Section 2.(a)

Employers shall not discriminate between their employees or between candidates for employment because of their sexual orientation, because they are parents, because of their age, gender, race, religion, nationality, land of origin, opinion or party, in any of the following:

- hiring;
- working conditions;
- promotion;
- professional training or studies;
- discharge or severance pay;
- benefits and payments provided for employees in connection with their retirement from employment.

Yet, there may be certain exceptions in which discrimination of a sort may be permitted:

a) In relation to women, the most important of these are 'genuine' occupational qualifications, which include:

- Reasons of physiology (not enough physical strength)
- Reasons of decency or privacy
- The provision of personal services promoting welfare or education; and jobs affected by legal/religious restrictions, where customs are such that the duties could not, or could not effectively, be performed by a woman (actually, this can be relevant for men as well – for instance, mikva attendant role)

b) In the case of ethnic minorities the exceptions are:

- Dramatic performances, where the dramatis personae requires a person of a particular racial group.
- Artists or models for advertising purposes, for reasons of authenticity
- Where services are rendered for the welfare of the particular group

So, what does this all mean?

Certainly, in the case of a religious organization where the requirements of the job are such that only one particular gender can fulfill it, this type of limitation is allowed.

And what about the newspaper article example, restricting a race from jobs for non-employment specific reasons (rather nationalistic objectives)? Well, I am not a lawyer, but it seems to me that the equal opportunities law was created in part to specifically restrict such instances.