I’ve been working as a mentor at Gvahim since 2014, helping Olim (new immigrants) find jobs in the Israeli hi-tech industry. In this post I would like to write about one important aspect of the Startup Nation, and the reason it is difficult for some immigrants to find a job here, despite their experience.

There are service-oriented companies and there are product-oriented companies. Most Israeli companies are product-oriented. If your experience and background is service-oriented, it may be very difficult for you to find a job in Israel.

What is a service-oriented company? Such companies develop projects for customers that have requirements. Some people in the company need to write requirements specification documents before they start implementing the software. The customer will pay for the development of the project, and the customer may ask for changes and additions during the development. In the case of big companies such as banks, there may be an IT department developing projects for internal customers. Service-oriented companies may have the role of Systems Analyst.

What is a product-oriented company? Such companies create the concept of a new product and start developing it according to their own vision. There is no customer and there are no requirements. There is a Product team that maps the vision into features and plans the roadmap. Eventually this company will start selling its product. If it is a B2C company it will have users, and if it is a B2B company it will have customers. But the company decides how to evolve the system and what should be the new features. Product-oriented companies in general don’t have Systems Analysts.

As I said before, most Israeli companies are clearly product-oriented. Besides that, many of them are based on deep-tech: they are really creating new technologies. Besides that, many of them are data-driven and based on experimentation: this means that they decide about the new features after performing experiments with their current users and collecting data from these experiments. This is drastically different from a service-oriented company, and this is the kind of experience that companies are looking for here in Israel.

Sorry to say that, I don’t want to be rude, but: if you have worked abroad for service-oriented companies, perhaps you have developed new software systems, but this does not mean that these systems were really innovative. Service-oriented companies are not deep-tech, they are not data-driven and they are not based on experimentation. It is very important to understand that when looking for a job in Israel. Good luck!