A new comprehensive report on human capital in Israel by the Israel Innovation Authority and Startup Nation Central found there’s a shortage of tech employees for Israeli startups and scale ups. What about the solutions? the reports offers a few suggestions, mainly incorporating Arabs and Orthodox jews in the high tech economy.
Israel’s high tech sector employed 321,000 people in 2019, representing 9.2% of overall employees in the Israeli economy. According to the report, there are over 18,400 unfilled positions in tech in 2019. In a way, this is a story about success – Israeli high tech did phenomenally in the past decade, with over $39 billion raised and Israeli tech M&A and IPOs reaching $111.29 billion between 2010-2019, with $21.74 billion in exits in 2019 alone.
This is a multi dimensional problem, described below.
Challenges:
- Competition on top talent – Israeli high tech employees are in high demand from corporates (over 380 multinational R&D centres) and scale ups. Their ability to pay (above market) has the potential to starve startups from access to top talent
- Increase of demand for talent – It’s important not to conflate demand with shortage. The study addresses this point by comparing actual recruitments with open positions.
- High churn/voluntary departures – the shortage in talent causes employees to leave for wage premiums, ultimately hurting startups who can’t afford to pay as much.
Solutions:
- Outsourcing – while more of a consequence rather than a solution, a large percentage of companies use outsourcing to address the talent shortage. Mainly to Eastern Europe, which is now almost an integral part of Israeli startups and scale ups.
- Training is needed – the larger the company the more open it is to hire inexperienced employees as it has the resources to train them.
- Diversification and inclusion of under represented minorities is needed – Numerous government entities and nonprofit organizations offer various training programs designed to facilitate entry to the high-tech industry, in particular for populations that are currently under-represented in this sector, but more action is needed.
Read the full report here.
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