American Jewish young professionals are thinking about moving to Israel in the wrong way. They see it as a zero-sum game. If they come to Israel, they sacrifice their careers. If they stay in the US, they sacrifice living in Israel. In the minds of young American Jews, there exists a persistent notion that one who moves to Israel is more limited professionally than if they stayed in America. This is a common misperception that plagues American Jews who otherwise might consider aliyah. The truth is exactly the opposite. Today, you can thrive professionally in Israel and live where you want.
The Zionist dream of moving to Israel to build a Jewish state was a romantic vision and recruitment strategy which played a crucial role in the development of the young state. But the Israel of the today is an entirely new place, and the dream of aliyah should adapt accordingly.
In the 21st century, the Zionist vision should stress economic freedom and professional fulfillment.
Today’s Israel offers opportunities to establish lucrative careers that are on par with, if not better than, those attainable in many of the world’s greatest cities. But Israel is different from LA and NY, and success here begins with understanding that.
Understand Where You Landed
You wouldn’t move to San Francisco and complain about the lack of positions available in the entertainment industry, so don’t move to Israel and complain that all the best jobs are in tech. Tech is one of the largest sectors of the Israeli economy, and salaries and employee welfare reflect that. If you move to Israel expecting to keep your job as an industrial investment banker or marketing consultant to pharma companies and not take a paycut, you’re likely going to be disappointed. Those roles simply aren’t very common here.
The Israeli economy craves technical skills. If you move here as an engineer you’ll have a dramatically easier time finding meaningful work. If you move here with product or customer success experience, you’ll find great opportunities. But flexibility is essential. Arriving here with the expectation of immediately finding the same job in the same industry you previously worked in might be unrealistic.
When moving to a new place, it’s incumbent on the immigrant to adapt to their new surroundings. Israel does more than almost any other country in the world to help new immigrants acclimate, but the rest is up to us.
Unlike in the US, many of the best employment opportunities in Israel are at small to mid-sized companies that are rapidly growing and solving exciting problems. Before deciding to move, it’s important to understand the unique professional landscape you’ll need to navigate, including the cultural differences of working on a smaller team, and the distinct compensation structures.
Compensation
American professionals contemplating aliyah often contrast Israeli salaries to those of comparable positions in the US, and discover that salaries here are 25% — 50% lower. While this is partially true (though engineering salaries are catching up), this comparison disregards a key component of compensation in Israel: equity, or ownership.
“Ownership,” in general, is a highly regarded concept in Israel. In the Israeli workplace, you’re expected to take ownership of tasks and projects from very early on, a process Americans may be less accustomed to. This is a manifestation of the same phenomenon that impacts salaries: Israelis expect employees to be invested in the greater success of the organization. When taking a job in Israel, employees must consider and quantify their equity compensation in addition to their salary.
Many companies in Israel compensate their employees with an emphasis on equity over salary. This makes it more important to believe in the company you decide to join. Your personal success is now intertwined with that of your employer. Employees are rendered investors of sorts. But while investors invest in several companies, we choose only one, and we invest in it with our time.
The modern Israeli job market is a tradeoff of risk and wealth creation versus job security and salary-based compensation. The more secure the company that you join, the lower the risk, but the lower the potential gain as well. Security may be the right decision for some, but it isn’t how you build wealth in Israel. Joining an early stage company with significant equity compensation is riskier than joining a company like Wix or Checkpoint. However, your reward stands to be much larger should the company succeed. Understanding this dichotomy between job security and potential financial upside is what will allow you to build wealth in Israel.
Equity is important because an IPO or acquisition after 3–4 years of working at a company could be quite impactful, even life-changing for employees. This is the global compensation structure in tech and it’s even more extreme in Israel. Employees here can’t expect hundred thousand dollar annual bonuses like many of their American counterparts. Rather, we operate by joining the right companies, taking small ownership stakes in the form of stock grants and helping the company succeed.
Stock options and restricted stock units (RSUs) are complicated, but one wouldn’t take a job in the US without understanding the associated healthcare benefits. In Israel, equity compensation is a critical factor in measuring how much a position is worth, and as employees, it’s our responsibility to understand how it works.
Access to Opportunities
Israel’s economy functions differently than America’s: It’s primarily relationship-driven. People don’t get jobs by applying to them online, they get jobs through the people they meet. In America, there is a stigma around utilizing personal connections for professional gain. In Israel, however, this is the norm. It’s important to emphasize that a relationship-driven job market doesn’t imply nepotism. Benefiting from network-based connections reflects that those who know you are willing to vouch for your skills and help you find work.
Native Israelis, de facto, have an advantage over olim in this area. They have childhood and army friends and we’re the newcomers. But rather than scouring job boards, olim should invest time in building relationships, and Israelis are uniquely open to building these relationships. The tech community in Israel is exactly that — a community. No one is more than a degree of separation away from anyone else. If new olim build even a small network, they’ll find themselves able to connect with anyone, and the locals will be happy to help. This is where the best employment opportunities will be found.
There is also an advantage to this system: the opportunity to land positions you otherwise might not have been considered for. When people ask me about job hunting in Israel, my advice is to focus on companies, not positions listed on job boards. It’s entirely plausible that someone could hire you for a position they aren’t actively looking to fill simply because they appreciate what you bring to the table. These are the serendipitous opportunities you will only discover through meeting people.
American Jews fear that making aliyah means sacrificing the lifestyles they have become accustomed to back home. And many who do make the move allow that fear to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The aliyah and career game is not zero-sum — it’s quite literally the opposite. The joy of making aliyah is increased exponentially by the unique career opportunities Israel has to offer.
Let’s make the aliyah dream of the 21st century one where Jews come here in order to build great careers, not in spite of them.
I’d like to thank Michael Eisenberg (Michael A. Eisenberg:) for pushing me to write this piece and for his thoughtful comments and edits. To Abbey Onn (Abbey Onn), thanks for all your edits and introducing me to Michael in the first place. Lastly, a big thanks to my father (Andrew Kane) and sister (Jessica Kane) who always ensure the ideas I put on paper are coherent and eloquent.
