Getting into Israel’s technology industry has become mission almost impossible for anyone without experience, according to figures from placement company Ethosia.
Of 5,641 current vacancies in the industry, only 88, 1.5%, are aimed at candidates without experience. The number of jobseekers without experience is estimated at about 1,800, but that is probably lower than the real figure. Just this month, 3,000 people joined a dedicated Telegram group for junior-level positions, indicating much higher demand than the supply.
Ethosia CEO Eyal Solomon says that the decline in entry-level jobs is not coincidental. He explains that the giant companies, which in the past were a common entry point for graduates of courses and degrees, have changed their recruitment strategy. They have switched to AI-based tools that replace some of the stages that were once part of the in-house training process. As a result, jobs that were once available to starters have simply disappeared. Even for candidates with one to three years experience, the possibilities have narrowed. There are currently only 500 vacancies at this level, versus 1,400 jobseekers.
Avi Lewis, a software engineer who set up the Goozali website, which displays some 4,000 relevant development jobs at about 900 technology companies in Israel, and runs Telegram groups for different areas of expertise, has identified a sharp change in experience requirements: “If, in the past, two years experience were enough, today they aren’t. Three years are the new two years.”
Widening gaps
According to Ethosia’s figures, most of the vacancies in technology today are for engineering positions: almost 56% are in development and engineering, while another 15% are in information technologies. In other words, three-quarters of the available jobs require hard technological knowledge. Non-technological areas such as marketing (4.4%), sales (4.7%), project management (3%), human resources (1.6%), and even research and development, account for only a small slice of the labor market for young people. This means that candidates from a non-engineering background, and graduates in soWith fter disciplines, are competing in a very narrow market segment where the requirements are constantly becoming stricter.
The problem becomes even sharper when the geographical breakdown is considered. More than 83% of the jobs for young people with up to three years experience are concentrated in the Tel Aviv and central area. Just 2% are in the south and 1.5% in Jerusalem. Haifa and the north together account for only 13% of the jobs.
There are also clear gender gaps. 72% of the current jobseekers are men and only 28% are women. Since most of the jobs fall into the classic technological categories, in which female representation is still low, inequality among jobseekers is becoming worse. Another factor that is making the difficulty more severe is that in a situation of growing competition, companies prefer to bet on candidates who have already proved themselves in the market.
Together, these factors create a market that is more and more biased towards people with expertise who are well-located geographically and who have connections in the industry even before they are accepted for their first jobs. For everyone else, thousands of young people around Israel, the way in is becoming steadily longer.
According to Lewis, computer science graduates who have studied more advanced subjects are among the most badly affected and are not managing to find first jobs. “The degree focuses on algorithms and computation theory, but in fact most graduates are looking for junior jobs in software development, and there are hardly any of those.”
Fierce competition, few solutions
Above all these factors there hovers a basic technological change that is cutting demand for young programmers. Lewis explains that, in the past, it took teams of developers to build a prototype, but today a basic product can be built using AI tools, even without a full team.
Solomon adds that these trends are not limited to Israel. “Companies want a quick, precise, and economical result,” he says, “and so they are cutting out the training stage. As far as they are concerned, recruiting juniors has turned from an investment to an expense.”
Lewis says that in a group he set up for junior positions (zero experience only), he tries to post a job every two days, but even that requires careful filtering. “Sometimes it’s a temporary position, sometimes the conditions aren’t ideal, but it’s a real option. The demand is huge. Many of the approaches I receive are not just about the job itself, but about how to get into the market at all, from writing a resume to how to know whether a particular job is genuine or not.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 11, 2025.
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