Is the Israeli high-tech party about to end? 2015 was a record year for fund raising, but the turmoil on the capital markets is already giving rise to expectations of a downturn in 2016
Placement company see.V has released figures for the final quarter of 2015 that do indicate a change in the trend. Salaries in the high-tech industry rose from the end of 2014 till September 2015, but in the final quarter of last year the average salary fell.
see.V's figures indicate that the average monthly gross starting salary fell 4% from NIS 24,630 in the third quarter to NIS 23,650 in the fourth, after rising by almost 10% over a period of just over a year.
Although the average salary fell, the company finds that the number of new jobs that opened rose by 6% in the fourth quarter in comparison with the third quarter.
see.V CEO Merav Laifer sees a link between the fall in salary and the rise in demand for workers. "The growing need for development people of the first rank is hard to meet when the entire industry is growing rapidly, and there is extensive hiring in all disciplines," she says.
"A situation has come about in which in order to fill jobs, employers are willing to be flexible for a change, and not insist on substantial experience. Both young start-ups and established companies are displaying a readiness to compromise. And so they rush to sign up candidates with two years' experience for jobs for which until not long ago they were demanding five years.
"Accordingly, companies are also demonstrating greater openness to investing time and effort in training candidates who are not perfectly suited to all the demands of the position. And since everything has a price, this leads to a fall in the salary levels of the selected candidates," says Laifer.
In the fourth quarter of 2015 there was especially high demand for mobile developers, particularly for experts in the iOS and Android operating systems. The number of such programmers hired shot up 40%, but they had less experience, and so the average salary fell 4% to NIS 22,500.
The rise in demand has made companies try to head hunt "passive candidates", people in work who are happy with their jobs. Laifer says in this context, "At any given moment we have more than a thousand positions open, and teams of dozens of customer managers dealing with them. Everything in the industry happens very quickly these days, because it's a candidates' market, and anyone who blinks misses out.
"In order to cope with the flood of jobs and the tough competition for every talented person, we take care to reach the candidates very early, through extensive activity on the web and an especially rewarding members' club. At the same time, we, and our competitors too, strive to shorten the hiring process for our customers. As a result, in many cases a candidate signs a contract and turns up for work less than two weeks after sending us a CV."
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on January 26, 2016
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