The technology crisis has led to the loss of thousands of employees in Israeli companies in Israel and abroad. The biggest victims are not technical employees themselves – experienced programmers and engineers – but other professionals in areas such as marketing and sales, human resources and recruiters, as well as finance, specializations who, until recently, were employed in large numbers in technology companies.
Not only has the number of people being laid off increased recently, with the second wave of cuts at tech giants including Meta, Amazon and Salesforce, but also the time it takes to find new jobs. The average number of months to find a new job has risen from an average of 10.8 to 13.3, a 23% increase since November last year.
New research by tech human resources consultancy Ethosia finds that candidates with particularly long new job search streaks are finance professionals at tech companies, who spent an average of 14 weeks on the job. looking for a job since November 2022, compared to 9 weeks before in November last year. Among administrative staff, the job search time went from 6.5 weeks to 10 weeks, and among human resources and recruitment staff, who were already suffering from a particularly long time to find a job before November, the lead time went from an average of 18 weeks to 20 weeks. It is estimated that around half of the layoffs at Meta globally were to recruitment teams, while at other tech giants – recruiters – those who were hired quickly during the Covid pandemic to establish recruitment teams products, development and engineering – were the first to pay the price of the technological crisis.
“Even particularly good candidates have been thrown into the market”
Batel Segal-Darmon specializes in a job called sourcing – internal recruitment for companies helping locate candidates through social media, managing the recruiting process and ensuring that most of them agree to sign on. This sector has seen exceptional growth during the Covid pandemic, when competition for jobs was particularly strong and it was important to maintain a permanent link with quality candidates with many options.
She recalls: “In 2021, the market was flooded and I was interviewing three to four times a week. As a sourcer, they offered to triple my salary and agreed to pay an ‘au pair’ to s take care of my children.
In February, Segal-Darmon lost his job at PayPal after 18 months, along with most of the recruiting team. “We came to a dead market. If before 12 to 18 months it was like a supermarket where you could choose the job you wanted from full shelves, the experience today is that the supermarket is empty and that there are only a few products that have not expired. You enter the LinkedIn network and hear your own echo. The fact is that the supply of candidates in the field is particularly large, and many of them they are very high quality candidates who were suddenly thrown into the market.
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While Segal-Darmon was only fired a month ago, the few jobs and the large number of applicants had her considering alternatives. “I was faced with the choice of registering as unemployed or changing fields.” Eventually, she decided to stick with the HR field, but found employment outside of the tech industry. She will soon start working for an Israeli company in the field of data services.
Those who remain are responsible for several areas at once
Founder and CEO of Ethosia, Eyal Solomon, who specializes in placing employees in the technology and life sciences fields, said: “The situation for human resources personnel has been serious for a long time, so the worsening over time of the chances of finding a new job is immaterial Their options are worse than during the Covid pandemic as they were then still needed for employees who switched to remote working.
“The giants’ decision to lay off thousands of employees has meant that at a ratio of one senior human resources manager for every 150 or 200 employees, hundreds of employees in the field have been left jobless. time, small and medium startups have kept administrations that multi-task – like social protection and employer branding in addition to recruiting. Unfortunately, hiring managers position themselves as support staff who are the first to go in a crisis.”
Lital Ankory had been a talent acquisition manager for a US fintech company for more than a year when she was offered a job by then rapidly growing Meta to recruit professionals. When she began her work, the war in Ukraine broke out and interest rates in the United States began to rise. She and her colleagues soon found themselves recruiting fewer and fewer employees, culminating in the first round of layoffs last November.
Ankory chose Meta over countless other companies that courted it over the past year. When she found herself back in the job market, she reached out to companies that had tried to hire here but were repeatedly met with the same response: the job posting is no longer relevant.
“The contrast between the high demand for high-tech recruiters in 2021 and early 2022 and the current situation is so great that it is impossible to compare the two periods at all,” she says. Meta’s layoffs in November were quickly followed by hundreds of other companies, including giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Salesforce, which flooded the market with additional recruiters. “I was faced with a dilemma. Was it time to look for a new type of job? Should I be flexible with the requirements – high-tech companies are mainly looking for production workers in the area of recruitment – or should I keep looking for the perfect job?”
Ankory, with over 10 years of recruitment experience, decided to leverage her extensive knowledge and experience in strategizing and managing complex recruitment processes and go independent, her target audience being small and medium-sized technology companies recruiting employees. These companies, according to Ankory, cannot and do not always know how to manage effective recruitment processes, if at all.
She is convinced that there is a market for strategic consultants in the field, even as subcontractors. “Experienced consultants have economic value: they can save companies from unnecessary meetings with unsuitable employees, manage more appropriate recruitment processes for them, and help them choose recruitment and assessment tools. I decided that I wanted to offer my knowledge and my experience as an external and not an internal consultant in a position that perfectly matches my skills,” she explains.
“Candidates understand that they have to compromise on salaries”
The number of jobs on Ethosia’s books in the areas of software and hardware between April and November 2022 fell by more than half, but in the area of human resources and recruiters, the increase was even greater. The number of jobs in the field fell by two-thirds and recruiting jobs increased 8 times. Salaries, of course, fell accordingly: an experienced recruiter with 2 to 5 years of experience had a monthly salary between 17,000 and 22,000 NIS in 2021. Today, salaries range from 11,000 NIS to 13,000 NIS. An experienced HR manager who earned NIS 28-30,000 in 2021 will today receive a salary offer ranging from NIS 21,000-23,500.
Solomon says, “The average salary is about half that. It all depends on how many choices you have and how you view your role and job security. An experienced engineer can afford to be interviewed and receive more offers and doesn’t always have to compromise, but if you’re only invited for an interview once every two weeks, you know you end up compromising.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – March 26, 2023.
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