Are Your Children a Failure if They Don’t Grow up to be Doctors or Lawyers?

Jewish mothers are stereotyped as wanting their children to become doctors or lawyers.  Given the sheer number of Jewish physicians and attorneys (notwithstanding the apparent shortage of medical professionals in Israel), it seems that mothers are doing an excellent job of influencing their children.

However, when such professions are not appropriate for a particular child, what is a Jewish mother to do?

A few years ago, I heard what I considered to be a very enlightened principal of a school say something like the following: 

I had a student come to me that got 30% on a test.  His teachers and parents were criticizing him because he had done so poorly.  I told him that I was proud of him.  He got 100% on the questions for which he knew the answers.

 

 

One of my friends, as a present to his children upon completion of army duty, spends a not small amount of money to enable his children to take career aptitude/interest tests conducted by professionals.  As an example, for one of his sons, the results showed a good match for a dietician.  Almost certainly this young man would never have considered this particular job as a profession.  Yet, because he took the test, he decided to further investigate, and now, a few years later, after completing the relevant studies, he is happily working as a dietician.

Over my years of assisting job seekers find work, there have been many occasions when a mother or father has contacted me about work for their adult child.  This is an immediate red flag for me, and I always tell the parent that their child is welcome to be in direct touch with me.  Not once has the child ever contacted me after an approach from the parent.

Choosing a job/profession is difficult enough to do based upon your own interests/aptitude, without having to take into account expectations of others.  And, living in the 21^st century, making a career/job choice at one particular point of time is not as critical as it was for previous generations.  According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics in the US, people nowadays average more than five careers in their lifetime.  And while I would tend to believe that the longer someone must study for a profession, the less likely the person is to change, I have met with many professionals that were burned out and wanted to do something else.  In fact, I am one such person, leaving a hi-tech career after 20 years.

And, if you do experience anxiety that your child is not living up to your expectations for them professionally, and this worry is manifested by eating too much, you are welcome to be in touch with me - I can connect you with a good dietician :>)

Has Your Job Search Reached the Ninja Level?

Even though I am involved in the recruitment sector, I find myself somehow out of touch with certain terms that are used regularly in job titles, including ninja, rock star, samurai, assassin, mermaid… (Ok, I admit, I made the last two up).  For instance, here are some recent examples: seeking a rock star programmer, or a sales ninja needed.

A job candidate recently sent me their CV, and informed me that their English was at a samurai level.  I wrote back to ask if this was a higher than a ninja or rock-star English level, but didn’t receive a response – so I am now wondering if samurai is somehow below fluency level, and the candidate was not able to understand my question in English.  In fact, I imagine that most of the hereditary warrior class in feudal Japan (the definition I found for samurai on dictionary.com) was probably less than conversational in English.

Maybe someone reading this would be kind enough to define these terms. 

And for you creative souls out there, I would be happy to receive your suggestions of additional job titles that we can introduce into this dynamic, superhero-like mix. 

A Good Job Seeker’s Dilemma

Job seekers oftentimes must make such decisions at some point in their careers:

     ·         Stay at my current company or go to a new one? 
     ·         Which new job offer is the best opportunity for me? 

What to do???

For those of you unemployed and reading this, having trouble getting one good job offer, this might seem like a dream situation.  However, the fact is that for those that find themselves in such a situation, sleepless nights are the norm.

In these cases, whether you employed or not, the situations are actually very similar, with the only difference being whether one of the options is to remain at a current position.

These types of decisions require left-brain/right-brain agility, meaning using some element of logic as well as paying attention to your gut (emotion). 

The financial element is always present, and for some job seekers, the only issue of importance. 

For many though, besides compensation, the company itself and a person’s anticipated fit into the company are equally important.  How the job seeker perceives the environment of the new company and the people they will be working with is oftentimes critical, and this is why the interviews and conversations with potential bosses and/or co-workers are so important when making the decision. 

It is so easy for a candidate to think of the recruitment process as one-directional, trying to convince the employer that you are worth hiring.  However, the other aspect is equally relevant – deciding if the company and specific role is appropriate for you.  So, while the company is trying to make its determination, you should be doing the same.  Identify, even before you visit the company, those issues that are important to you, professional and otherwise, and use your powers of observation from your time at the interviews themselves to glean what you can.  Is the work environment quiet or loud, are people working in groups or alone, is it clean or messy, what is the average age – all of these can be factors depending upon who you are and what you want.  These are not necessarily the types of things that will be clear in interviews, but at some point you generally get the opportunity to see the actual working spaces and sometimes even have the chance to speak with potential colleagues, so take advantage when the situation arises.

In addition, most job candidates don’t make an effort to reach out to people that are working at or have knowledge of the company, instead relying upon impressions from the people they meet as part of the official recruitment process.  However, just as the company asks the job seeker for references, job candidates can also take it upon themselves to use their network of acquaintances together with websites like LinkedIn to research the company itself, and speak to individuals that have an understanding of the employer.

Besides the specific details of the alternatives, there is a big intangible as well.  Something in the DNA of the person that plays a big part in these types of decisions, a person’s ability to accept risk:

·         I have seen a number of times that a person currently working gets a job offer from another company and ultimately decides to stay at their current employer, even when the conditions (financial, professional and otherwise) at the new company were considerably more attractive.  Nonetheless, risk and change can be so undesirable for the individual that they decide to stay with the known and comfortable option.

·         The converse is also true.   Someone jumps to a new company for an extra 500 shekels a month, and quickly learns that the new company is not so stable, finding themselves out of a job in a short period of time.

During your job search, choices are always a positive, but they don’t make things easier for you.  Think carefully, speak with others, and learn as much as you can about the alternatives before making a decision.

I have a dilemma of my own these days.

My team, the Golden State Warriors, is playing in the NBA finals against Cleveland, with their Israeli coach David Blatt. 

I allude to a similar far-fetched situation in a previous article about searching for work, loyalty, and sports: http://jobsearchinisrael.blogspot.co.il/2010/10/loyalty-at-work.html.  Now, amazingly, it has come true.

My childhood (and current) favorite basketball team is playing in the NBA finals against a team with an Israeli connection – whom to root for? 

Because I am getting grief about this from all sides, I feel the need to publically respond. 

I am a big David Blatt fan, and appreciate what he has accomplished throughout his career as a proud Israeli, including leading his team in his first year in the NBA to the finals.  He is the ideal representative of Israel for the sports world in America.  My brain makes a strong case for his team.

 

 

However, I simply can’t force myself to do it.  My heart tells me the Warriors, a team that has not won a championship in 40 years, is the only choice for me.  I can hopefully mitigate the potential ill-feelings by others in Israel with this choice by pointing out that the star of my Warriors, Steph Curry, has a Hebrew phrase tattooed on his arm.

 

 

Go Warriors!

Dynamic Resume/CV and Static LinkedIn Profile

I teach my job seeking clients that they should consider as if their LinkedIn profile is virtually stapled to each CV that they send out. Ignoring this is a grave danger; recruiters will find your profile on LinkedIn if they invest a small amount of time, and believe me, many do!

If the LinkedIn profile positively complements your resume, everything is wonderful. However, if your persona on LinkedIn is somehow different or adds confusion for a recruiter, you can be eliminated from contention for a job without even being aware of it.

Most job seekers create multiple versions of their resume because they have more than one objective in their job search, and/or decide to emphasize different elements in their background depending upon the specific targeted job. In such real-world situations, the static nature of the LinkedIn profile that is associated with these various versions of the resume creates a problem.

And, since LinkedIn currently gives no means to a person to create the equivalent of multiple profiles, one to match their different resumes/job targets, there is no satisfying solution.

With such an obvious inherent conflict, some people choose to make the LinkedIn profile all-encompassing, essentially a combination of all versions of their resume. Another approach is to use LinkedIn to supplement their primary job search objective, and lose the benefit of LinkedIn as a complement for the remaining career goals.

Either of these solutions is imperfect at best, and until LinkedIn allows for the equivalent of multiple profile functionality, there is no way for many job seekers to fully support their job search efforts using this otherwise excellent employment search resource.

Misreading the Job Search Situation

So, my 13-year old son starts yelling yesterday morning as he is getting ready for school.  The current fashion style where we live is for kids to wear pants that have holes in them.  They buy them that way, and from what I can see, it seems that the more holes they have, and the bigger the holes are, the more expensive the pants actually are.  I would think that since they require less material, the cost would be lower, but that is not the way it works.

Anyway, the problem my son had on this fine morning was that his pants were wrinkled.  Yes, it’s true, a kid that is happily wearing pants that have holes in them for some reason does not like it if they are wrinkled.  I naively assumed that once he had passed the point of preferring a defect in his clothes, another imperfection would be considered even more of a positive.  In fact, I even started to hope that if our kids liked wrinkles in their clothes, the amount of time spent ironing in our house would go down.  Apparently though, not all faults are the same.

We make assumptions all the time when searching for a job, and sometimes we are wrong.  Generally though, we don’t have someone so vocally telling us when this happens.

There have been a few times over the past couple of weeks that I have heard complaints from job seekers, and I am not sure they are justified.

These particular complaints all revolved around the concept of what is correct for a company to require when seeking a new employee.  Someone complained about a company looking for telephone sales people with the requirement that candidates can’t have a foreign accent for the targeted region.  Another protested that an employer had a requirement for specific citizenship of candidates.  Someone else didn’t agree that a university degree should be required.  Or, that candidates must live in the center of the country in order to be considered for the job in Tel Aviv.

Yes, there are laws that prohibit discrimination in the workplace and recruitment process.  But such rules are not mutually exclusive with allowing a company the flexibility to decide for themselves what the suitable profile is for its candidates. 

I think job seekers would do themselves a favor by trying to imagine themselves in the HR manager’s shoes, in Israel in the year 2014.  Today it is still a buyer’s market – companies have confidence that if they wait, they will find the person that they seek, and generally don’t feel the need to be flexible in a big way.  And from what I have seen, they are correct.  Employers that have strong feelings about specific characteristics that it takes to succeed in their environment, and have the patience to wait until they find someone that matches, usually get what they want.  I have seen companies with job openings for many months, waiting for the right person to come to their attention.

If you were the HR manager of the company, I believe that you would demand to have this ability to decide.   And the chances of a job seeker changing the minds of an employer is much smaller than finding a different company that you are more suitable for, or possibly changing the way that you approach the company.

To me, the task of the job seeker when something happens that you are not expecting is to try to infer the real world situation in the market, and then take action to improve your chances, rather than ignoring the signs and continuing to rely upon faulty assumptions.

For instance:

 ·         If you looking for a job in telephone sales and mother tongue accent is an issue, identify companies that sell in your native language, and target them.  Don’t wait for them to advertise – send them your CV and use LinkedIn or other resources to start conversations with people working in the company.

·         University degrees are often times used as filters, even if they are not the most critical element in predicting the success of a candidate.  If the company has many job seekers that seem similar, and some have degrees and others don’t, then it can be a factor.  One option is to find something (truthful) to put in your education section which is meaningful.  Or, use networking to get introduced by someone trusted by the company, a way to mitigate the importance of something like a university degree.  Another approach is to focus more on job openings where a university degree is not critical.  A longer term solution, if appropriate, is to make efforts to get a degree.  There are even online options that allow the studying to be done from home.
·         The majority of jobs are in the center of the country.  No matter what your attitude is about commuting, or how far you commuted before moving to Israel, many Israeli companies want their employees to live close to the office.  They have encountered bad experiences previously with people living further away that burn out from the traveling, and as long as they have confidence that they will find someone close by that is qualified, they will stop reading a CV if the candidate lives too far away in their opinion.   Roles that are more senior are less sensitive to location, but not always immune from such considerations.  So, your options are to be open to relocating (and make sure this is clear on your CV) and/or focusing on jobs near your home (something that can be very limiting if you don’t live in the center of the country).

When you are looking for a job, you have to constantly evaluate the responses (or lack thereof) and consider whether your job target(s) and way of searching is the most appropriate for you.  If you are not making as much progress as you would like, it is a good idea to speak with others and consider new ways to move forward.

Who is worse, the job seeker that applies for a job without being qualified, or the HR/recruiter that spends 5-15 seconds reviewing a CV?

That is like asking who came first, the chicken or the egg?

I wouldn’t even attempt to address the age-old second question, but I would like to consider the first.

I am not sure how closely these facts of life are related to each other, but I do believe that in this day and age of Internet job sites, their association is an undeniable fact.

In the ideal world, job seekers would send their CV only for jobs for which they are fully qualified.  In the ideal world, recruiters/HR people would invest the time to read each CV in its entirety, in order to fully understand the capabilities of the job candidate.

Of course, in the ideal world, I would be so rich that the entire concept of job search would be irrelevant to me.

Enough of that, back to the real world…

Let’s look at this first from the HR/recruiter’s perspective (for instance, me :>).  I advertise regularly on Internet sites and social media forums for job candidates on behalf of employers.   As can be expected, I receive many CVs in response to my job postings.  At first I was surprised, but now I have become hardened to the reality that the majority of the CVs I receive are from people that do not even meet the basic requirements of the job as described in the posting.  In fact, I am convinced that many people send their CVs without reading anything but the job title.  So, what this means to me is that I need to do two phases of sorting, first to remove the completely unqualified people, and then from those remaining, to identify the most relevant for further consideration.  Certainly in this first phase of filtering, I go very fast, spending a minimal amount of time on each CV, knowing as I do that most are irrelevant anyway. 

Now, let’s consider this from the job seeker’s viewpoint.  When all you have to go on is a job posting, even in the best case, it is virtually impossible to understand exactly what the employer seeks, which “requirements” are critical and which are simply nice-to-have.  It costs virtually nothing to send a CV, neither financially nor time-wise, so it is always better to err on the side of sending and hoping for the best.  Besides, even when a CV is sent for which the job seeker feels there is a perfect match, the chance of getting a positive response from the employer hovers around the 10% range at best.

So, what we have here is a problem brought on by the nature of the medium.  I don’t mean to imply that the introduction of Internet job sites created the new situation of such a large number of CVs being sent, many not suitable.  I have no doubt that HR professionals from previous generations had the same complaints.  However, it is certainly true that when the job seeker has easy access to hundreds of jobs daily and can apply with the click of a button, the problem is exacerbated exponentially.

HR personal certainly won’t invest a great deal of time in reviewing CVs when they know the majority are irrelevant.  And job seekers have no incentive not to send their CVs as frequently as possible.

Is there a better way?

Consider this…  A general rule of thumb in the job search industry is that two-thirds of all jobs are never publically advertised.  This is generally agreed to be true worldwide.  If you stop to think about this, it seems counterintuitive.  If an employer is seeking job candidates, why wouldn’t they be advertising in as many public forums as possible?

The answer is that many companies come to the conclusion that having a recruitment process that includes filtering (via some combination of manual and automated process) large quantities of unknown people is not effective.  It doesn’t bring the results that they require, but rather a huge administrative load with a poor return-on-investment.

So, what do they do instead? 

Some may use placement agencies to do the initial filtering, meaning that candidates that are presented to the employer are only those that have been pre-filtered based upon their specific requirements.

However, informal networking (word-of-mouth) introductions play a huge part in the actual filling of these unadvertised roles.  And these entire interactions are completely hidden to those outside of the process.

One of my favorite stories told to me by a job seeker using our Israemploy website illustrates this point.  The person had seen a perfect job posting on our site, and sent in his CV as instructed.  He heard back nothing.  So, he decided to take additional action.  The company name was included in the job listing, so he used LinkedIn to find people that worked at the employer doing a job similar to his.  From LinkedIn, he introduced himself to a couple of these people, and was able to begin a conversation.  At some point in the conversation, as is not so rare, the person inside the company told the job seeker to send them his CV, and he would forward it to the HR person.  Remember, the job seeker has already sent his CV to the HR person via the job site.  Now, he takes the exact same CV, and sends it to his contact within the company.  The contact within the company takes this CV and sends it to the exact same HR person that has already received the CV via the job site.  The CV is the same, the HR person that receives it is identical; the only difference is the way that it is delivered – via a known/trusted person.  However, in this case that was the critical factor – because the internal person sent the CV to the HR person, the HR person treated it differently, and ultimately the job seeker was invited to an interview.

From this real world example, it is easy to see how networking benefits not only the employer, but also the job seeker.  This is the real (and oftentimes invisible) way that companies identify new job candidates. Job seekers must understand the significance of networking in the recruitment process, and take steps to insert themselves into the mix.  Without such awareness, the job seeker is guaranteed to be missing many job opportunities which can be perfectly suitable – and that is the biggest shame of all. 

Related Articles:

·         LinkedIn – Tying it all Together

·         Not Getting Responses to E-Mail Job Applications?

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.

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.

Is Your CV Perfect?

Job seekers focus their precious time resources way too much on re-working their CVs/resumes.

I have a theory about why this is true.

In the recruitment process, many elements are beyond the control of the job seeker. You send your CV in response to a job listing and then must wait to hear back for an interview request from the employer that in many cases never arrives. You identify and reach out to professionals as a part of your networking efforts, and hope some of them will agree to begin meaningful conversations with you. You go to an interview, and then wait to hear back from the company whether a job offer is on the way.

Sure, you do decide some things, such as which jobs to apply for, which companies/people to target for networking, whether to accept a job offer… , but when you think of your day-to-day job search elements, it is normal for everyone to periodically feel a lack of progress, that your efforts don’t seem to be paying off in the short-run.  This missing control and constant waiting on others is something that can be difficult to live with.

So, to solve this problem, job seekers invariably concentrate on an obvious thing that seems to return control of the process to them, a component of the initial stages of the recruitment process with employers, and oftentimes something that is sent at the early stages once a networking conversation is begun: the CV/resume.

Other reasons for the never-ending focus on the CV:

• Job Application Average Response Rate – The average response rate for applications to jobs from Internet sites is 5-10%, meaning that between one out of every 10-20 CVs you send out will generate contact back from the employer. So, the fact is that on average 90-95% of your CVs sent in answer to employment advertisements will enter into the dreaded job seekers’ black hole, never to be heard from again. With such a high rate of “failure”, it is natural to investigate where you can improve, and invariably the focus falls on the CV.

• Job Search Professional Marketing Efforts – Professional CV/resume writers are plentiful, taking advantage of the above conditions to send the message that by following their advice for CV creation, your response rate will markedly improve. Or, take a look at the cover of this book:

or of many others you can find in the career section of bookstores. In my opinion, to turn around the book title above, you would be a complete idiot to think there is such a thing as a perfect CV. :>) If you ask 10 experts for their opinion of your CV, you will receive 10 very different responses, so the concept of perfect and or even correct has no place in your thinking.

Am I saying that all CVs will serve the same purpose for you? Certainly not! There are many things you need to take into consideration when creating your CV. My point though, is that the goal should not be to create the “perfect” CV, but rather to create a CV which serves your objectives and gives you a proper chance to get to the next stage in the recruitment process. Sure, this is less sexy and will never be the title of a book, but it is a more effective strategy nonetheless.  And once you have done this, you can confidently move on to other aspects of your job search.

Remember these quick facts of CVs, illustrated by various studies:

• Average Amount of Time CV is Read: 20-30 Seconds
• First Place the Eye Falls on the CV: Top of the First Page

You must keep these factors in mind when building your CV, together with Israel-specific characteristics:

• Israeli CVs are short – one page is great; two pages is maximum
• Israeli CVs are focused/narrow – if you are targeting different professions, you will need to create different versions of your CV

To summarize my outlook in one sentence, much more important than the contents of your CV is whose hands you put it into.

For those of you that want to learn more about how to create a CV for Israel, you are welcome to read the following articles:

• A CV/Resume is not an Obituary
• CV/Resume – Chronological or Skills Based?
• Will Including “Good Team Player” on a CV Help Get You Invited to an Interview?
• Women Should Not Include Their Picture on their CV/Resume!
• CV/Resume File Type – Is it Important?

Job Seekers in Israel – Favorable Conditions Abound

The holidays are over, so employees are back from their holidays, and companies are operating full steam ahead, including recruitment departments.

The Israel unemployment rates are at historical lows (5.4% as of July 2011). Compare this with the US (9.1%), UK (8.1%), and France (9.3%).  And, the average gross national salary is NIS 8,900 as of July 2011, never higher.

This is a wonderful combination for jobs seekers in Israel, whether you are unemployed or looking to change jobs.

I have updated the Job Search in Israel site to make older articles more accessible. You are welcome to visit the new pages, which contain articles for the most popular job search topics:

• CV/Resumes & Cover Letters
• Networking
• Recruitment Process
• Sectors/Professions
• Complete Job Seeking in Israel Archive

Best of Success!

Translation Profession in Israel

In the on-going attempt to highlight professions that are most suitable for immigrants in Israel, I am delighted to introduce an article describing the translation sector written by Micaela Ziv, former chairperson of the Israel Translators Association.  

Several good things about the field of translation in Israel

• The need for translation in a variety of language pairs is ever-growing in the global marketplace and is thriving in Israel
• Translation is easier than ever before – it can be done anytime, anywhere, and now with a wealth of information and linguistic resources at your fingertips
• The Israel Translators Association welcomes newcomers and veterans in the field alike, offering professional development, mentoring and networking opportunities throughout the year

Who should consider the field of translation in Israel?

• Anyone with prior experience in translation from abroad
• Anyone who:

o writes well
o has fluent knowledge of two languages (Hebrew does not have to be one of them) and a very good grasp of their respective cultures
o is ready to keep on learning
o enjoys the idea of translating!

Remember – all your education and work experience can contribute greatly to your value in the field. A useful rule of thumb: focus on the areas you really know about – being a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ is not an advantage here.

• Fields in demand include marketing, finance, legal, academic, technical, scientific, localization and literature

Employment opportunities

There are virtually no in-house salaried positions for translations (other than a few positions with governmental bodies, such as the Bank of Israel or the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and at newspaper desks). Most of us are independently self-employed, working either directly with our own clients or through translation agencies, or both. Obviously, pay rates from agencies are lower, but then they are the ones who find the clients and deal with the problems of following up on payments, advertising, and so on! Many newer translators start off working for agencies while developing their own clientele through personal contacts, networking, advertising and so forth.

Payment is usually calculated on a per page basis, with a page defined as 250 words.

It is a free market with quite a wide price range (and prices differ for different language pairs), but the ITA does have information on rates that can provide a guide.

Does knowing two languages automatically make you a potential translator?

In a word – NO!

Translation lies somewhere between a profession and an art, so a good translator should have a certain natural aptitude that can then be greatly enhanced by attending training courses. Israel offers many opportunities – academic and other – to do this. These include courses at Bar-Ilan University, Tel Aviv University, Beit Berl College, Oranim College, and programs offered by companies like WritePoint. It should be said that the commercial courses are probably less detailed (and less theory-oriented) than the academic courses.

What’s the difference between a translator and an interpreter?

A translator works with the written word and provides a written product. Interpreters work with the spoken word. Interpreting may be either simultaneous (while the person is speaking) or consecutive (speaker says a few sentences, you interpret, speaker talks some more, you interpret, and so on). This is a skill that requires prior training, which can be obtained at some of the institutions mentioned above. Payment is usually on an hourly or per-diem basis.

What other skills and equipment do you need to get started?

It’s an online profession. So you should start off with a good computer, printer, fax and scanner. You should be familiar with Word, Excel and PowerPoint (or similar programs), know how to use search engines well, use general and field specific online and printed dictionaries, and be easily reachable by email.

As for any freelance work, you should find a good accountant who can handle your questions and show you the required bookkeeping procedures. For those of you who read Hebrew there is also a software program called Avodat Milim designed specifically to make the translator’s bookkeeping easier. You will also need to be registered with the tax authorities (VAT, Income Tax and National Insurance).

If you are planning to work in areas with a lot of repetitive text (for example, legal, financial, technical) you might consider investing in a Translation Memory program. “What’s that?” you say. Don’t worry – your colleagues at the ITA will be happy to explain all this and a good many other concepts, which is another way of saying that the smart move is to become a member as soon as you have decided that translation and interpreting is going to be your field! Membership in the ITA indicates a seriousness of intention that enhances your CV and is a marketing booster, especially for beginners.

The Israel Translators Association

The ITA is the home base for the translation profession, and welcomes both self-employed and salaried translators (as well as editors, localizers, and other language-related professionals). With an informative website in both Hebrew and English, monthly lecture evenings, and an international three-day conference in February, the ITA’s mission is to help its members develop professionally as well as to upgrade the status of the profession in Israel.

To help new members of the profession hone both their translation and business skills (avoiding pitfalls, handling clients), the ITA has set up a flexible mentoring program, which also helps people gain the experience they need to be eligible for the Certificate of Recognition – the first phase of its accreditation program. The ITA is often able to offer its members discounts on certain field-related publications and software. Membership forms are available on the website. If you have questions, write to info@ita.org.il and a member of the committee will get back to you within a reasonable time (remember – they are all volunteers!).

In addition, the ITA is itself a member in LAHAV, an umbrella organization that lobbies for the rights of the self-employed and small businesses.

Job Seekers – Don’t Like What You See in the Mirror?

I heard of a study done some years ago that stuck with me. Most people, when they look in the mirror, are not happy with their appearance. According to this research, a person has a much lower evaluation of their looks than someone else does. What was the explanation for this phenomenon? Well, it seems that every person has something(s) about their face that they wish was different - for instance the color of their hair, the shape of their nose, or the size of their ears. This one aspect of their face that they don’t like is the exact area that they hone in on when looking in the mirror. However, when someone else looks at that same face, they are looking at the entire package, and most everyone seems to be put together nicely (after all, we were created in God’s image).

Job seekers can get stuck focusing on a small detail that causes them to forget the overall value that they offer.

Many people intuitively and automatically identify one or more factors that they feel are causing them to not get hired. Recently I heard the following explanations:

• Don’t have a university degree
• Live in Jerusalem (too far from the center)
• Over 50
• Don’t speak Hebrew well enough
• Don’t have work experience in the sector

Any of these issues can certainly increase the difficulty in landing work. But keeping in mind that you as a job seeker are a combination of many elements, only one of which it seems is causing you problems, may help in putting things in their proper perspective.

When an employer is seeking to fill a role, they generally have a conception of the candidate that can meet the requirements. Oftentimes it is difficult for the job seeker to infer this vision from the advertised description, but that doesn’t change the fact that it exists in the mind of the employees responsible for the hiring process.

When an employer creates their job listing, some of these profile characteristics are included and other are omitted, purposely or not. They can ultimately be divided into two categories: required and nice to have. In a perfect world, all of this would be clear to the applicant from reading the job posting. However, as we all know, we are living in a world far from ideal. For instance, sometimes in the job requirements section there is an entry for a university degree, even including the additional request “from a known university”. It is impossible to understand if this is an absolute requirement or a nice to have; being listed in the requirements section is not always an accurate indication. And whether my university is considered “known” in Israel, especially when I graduated from a university in the US, is totally unknown to me. Another possibility is a requirement for fluent Hebrew – who can accurately define what the employer considers fluent? Other examples can include a listing that previous work experience in the Internet sector is nice to have; I know some of these companies and a candidate that doesn’t possess work experience in the internet sector won’t receive even the slightest consideration, independent of the job listing wording implying it is not a requirement. The unwritten absolute job requirements are silent killers – candidates that are sure they are perfect for the job may not hear back because they don’t live in the right part of the country, are deemed overqualified and/or fall outside the age range.

Let us take a more in-depth look at a situation where the company has a candidate profile requirement that the applicant must have a university degree. You meet all of the job requirements, except this one. You have two options:

1) Don’t apply for the job
2) Apply for the job

Probably readers this far into the article can guess that I believe this job should be applied for, because nobody can know if it really is an absolute requirement, and even if it is, if it may be overcome anyway.

OK, so if you apply for the job, how should you go about it? Alternatives:

• Include on your CV a fake university and degree that fulfill this requirement
  
  • Never do this! No additional explanation required…
• Send your CV without any indication of university/education
  
  • This is not the best of all worlds, but if you have absolutely no post-high school education, you may be forced to use this approach.
• Include on your CV that education which you do have, including university courses even if you didn’t graduate.
  
  • Most people that I come across without university degrees do have some post-high school education credits, whether they be professional classes, junior college, or university courses without obtaining a degree. Listing these may get you to the next round.

I am sure some people may find the reasoning above faulty. Why waste time applying for a job if you don’t meet the requirements? In fact, as a recruiter, I generally agree with this, as many of the CVs I receive are from applicants that don’t approach the published requirements – something tremendously useless! However, if you are close, then I certainly don’t hold it against anyone for trying, and there are times when I have the ability to present a candidate that does match in all ways except for one, and help them to get invited for an interview.

And let’s remember, what is the objective of a CV? The correct answer is to get yourself called for an interview. And for any of the issues that are sensitive for you, including certainly job requirements which you don’t match, it is much better for you to be able to address them in a face-to-face (or at least telephone) interview, rather than when you are a one dimensional CV piece of paper. Keep in mind that according to studies of how CVs are processed, a CV that arrives is checked for 20-30 seconds on average. Therefore, there is no chance that the entire CV is being read in that short period of time; it is simply scanned, possibly electronically. So, if including truthful information in an education section, even if it doesn’t fully meet the requirements, is enough to get you to the next stage, then this approach makes sense.

If we return to the initial concept of thinking about the big picture rather than focusing on a single (negative) item:

• The initial objective in submitting your candidacy is to get to the next stage, giving you the ability to speak with the employer directly. Creating a CV that increases your ability to reach this goal is the only objective when considering what to include. Approaching the company in the correct manner is equally critical. In conjunction with sending your CV in response to job posting that you find on Internet, if you can develop a contact within the company (using LinkedIn or some other manner) to also submit your CV can do wonders for your response rate. An advocate inside the company oftentimes can mitigate the fact that you don’t meet all of the job requirements. I have seen many cases in which applicants arrive to the HR group via an internal company contact and go to the head of the list compared to others whose CVs arrive in response to a public job announcement. Networking is the most effective way to have the employer consider you by looking at the big picture, rather than the small individual details.
• Once you get to the interview, you now have your best chance to make a big picture impression. Yes, it may be true that you don’t have the required university degree; however you have the opportunity to show all of the value that you can deliver to the employer, which sometimes can cause them to reconsider whether the university degree is really so significant for candidates. Or, it may allow them to consider you for another position where you are appropriate.

All job seekers are made up of a variety of skills, aptitudes, and personality. Different subsets of these characteristics are relevant for each individual job, and when going through the recruitment process, if you remember to focus on the attractive overall “package” that you create, you will find that you will move from appearing defensive about particular items you perceive as negative to portraying a more rounded and positive image of yourself as a future employee to the company.

Don’t be afraid to look in the mirror – most people will find you attractive if you give them a chance, so why can’t you?

Age Discrimination – Stanley Fisher, et al

Stanley Fisher is the president of the Bank of Israel. He has held this position for 6 years, encompassing a very difficult global financial period. Israel has a small domestic economy, and is heavily dependent upon exports as well as tourism – so when the world economy tanks, Israel is very directly impacted. Most Israeli experts seem to agree (and it is very rare to find economists that agree, let alone Jewish economists ;>) that Israel has weathered this economic period quite well, and the international community seems to concur in general. Although Stanley Fisher is not solely responsible, clearly he has a strong impact on Israel’s current enviable economic situation.

Recently the position of Head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) became available, and Stanley Fisher, with his impeccable credentials, was interested in being considered for this post. Very early in the process, he was dismissed as a candidate because he was too old (the maximum age is 65 and he is 67).

I have a friend who is a doctor in Israel. At the hospital where he works, he will have to retire well before the age of 70. His father is a doctor in the US and is still working each day at a hospital – he is 85 years old!

At least in the case of Stanley Fisher, we can assume that not being allowed to head the IMF will not cause him financial hardship (after all, he continues to hold an excellent job), something not true for everyone that approaches retirement age. As baby boomers advance in age, with looming high health costs and less than expected savings, the question of when to stop working becomes more difficult. At least in Israel, with basic universal health coverage, these costs are less of a factor in this decision.

For most people seeking work though, official retirement age is not the main roadblock, rather the difficulties in getting a job while still at pre-retirement age. Employers have a profile of their ideal employee, and age range is often (sometimes unconsciously) part of this vision. If the job seeker falls outside that range, the person reviewing the CVs may well stop reading when they get to the birthdate entry.

From the legal perspective, things in Israel are clear. It is not allowed to make a negative hiring decision based upon age. However, as with all things in Israel, there is the law and there is the way that it is implemented. For instance, I was living in Israel for many years before I understood that the traffic laws in Israel and the US are very similar – the difference is only in the enforcement. However, this enforcement difference, meaning that the traffic laws in Israel are enforced much less than they are in the US, leads to an outcome where drivers in Israel don’t fear penalties and drive recklessly. Most drivers simply don’t appear to take the law into account when driving.

Age and job seeking is quite similar. It is standard for a job seeker to include their age/birthdate on their CV in Israel. If age is not supposed to be a factor, why would a job seeker do this? The answer is clear - because potential employers expect it. The fear, and justifiably so, is that if a person submits a CV without their age listed, this raises red flags to those reading it – essentially inducing the question “what is this candidate hiding?”. If the person is particularly relevant, the company may contact them and ask them some questions, including age, but in many other cases the job seeker will simply be eliminated from contention. Of course, not all companies operate this way, but it is a calculated risk to take such a chance. Most people that are “young” simply put their age, as it would generally be considered a positive to perspective employers; job seekers that are in their 60s (or 50s [or 40s]) must constantly decide what to do.

In my work at Israemploy, I am in touch with many companies in Israel seeking employees. I always try to understand what the profile is of the candidates they seek, and age often plays a role. Although companies are never going to make a straight statement that violates the law, it is possible to learn a lot from what they do say.

Each company and hiring manager’s philosophy is different. Some will state that age is not relevant, a factor absolutely unrelated to the recruitment decision (from my experience, this is a rare statement to hear, and even more rare when it is true).

Generally most job seekers assume they come across age limitations only at the higher end of the working-age spectrum, but in fact there can be lower age limits as well. Some companies have had bad experiences with young employees, those that may lack responsibility/stability. In this case, they prefer workers above a certain arbitrary age, for instance 25 or even 30. Other companies have a work-force with an average age of 20s, and have found that introducing someone significantly older than this is a mismatch.

Nothing is absolute, age preferences are flexible, and can become relaxed based upon the urgency of filling an opening and/or the expected difficulty of identifying a candidate that meets the requirements. If a company needs to find an employee quickly, then their optimum age profile becomes elastic. And for a company that is seeking a hard-to-find person, such as a Swedish speaker, age issues become less critical by necessity.

It would be wonderful if it was possible to educate employers to eliminate or at least reduce their false prejudices, whether they are related to age, gender, race, religious affiliation… Especially in the case of not considering “older” employers, it is not difficult to create a list of the advantages for an employer of hiring a mature worker, including:

• No young children at home that require attention, meaning availability for longer work hours
• No military obligations for men, no pregnancy leaves for women, translating to more days available to work
• More experience, higher capability to do the job [this I have found to be a two-edged sword in the eyes of employers, as often they tell me that they prefer a person without too much experience, as those with long work histories are many times set in their ways, and not open to learning/considering a new way of doing things]

The truth is, though, that attempting to have a rational discussion about such issues typically doesn’t help if the preconceived notion itself is not based in logic. Job seekers tell me that there should be more efforts made by the government at enforcing the law, but it is unclear whether this would lead to an improvement “on the ground”.

In the short-term, I tend to believe that job seekers that are outside the typical employer ideal profile range would be better off investing their resources in identifying and pursuing opportunities that are more suitable. Of course this is easier said than done, but focusing on smaller companies that don’t have an existing large workforce of young employees, or speaking with others to find companies that already do employ “older” workers, or looking for companies that market their product/services to the greying population – all of these may help you uncover new possibilities.

And please remember, as you do integrate into the Israeli work force and arrive to a position where you impact hiring decisions, remember when you were looking for a job and the difficulties that you encountered, something that is bound to make a cumulative positive impact on the overall Israeli recruitment process.