When it comes to high-tech salaries, the focus is usually on developers and technicians. There is a chronic shortage of these workers, and according to Israel Innovation Authority data, at the end of 2020 there were 13,000 vacancies for tech workers in Israeli high tech.
The market assessment is that things have only gotten worse since then, with more and more well-funded Israeli tech companies launching major recruiting drives. The continuing scarcity of tech workers naturally drives up wages.
However, data obtained by “Globes” reveals that an even more dramatic phenomenon has occurred in recent months in the wages of workers in the high-tech sector in non-technological auxiliary positions.
The figures, taken from a database of salaries and benefits provided by the Israeli start-up Compete, reveal that these occupations have enjoyed a significant increase in wages over the past six months. Compete’s figures are based on salary data from more than 10,000 employees at 200 Israeli high-tech companies.
Pay tens of percentage points
The median wage has increased, in particular, for highly experienced auxiliary workers. For example, according to Compete, the median monthly salary of a Customer Success Manager (people responsible for maintaining contact with customers, after-sales) with five or more years of experience has increased by 30% in the last six months. to reach 26,000 NIS. Likewise, the median monthly salary of senior marketers has increased by 34% in the past six months to reach NIS 34,000. A high-tech sales vice president hired in the past six months received a median salary of NIS 45,000, an 18% increase from the previous period.
There has also been a significant increase in wages for auxiliary workers with relatively limited experience in certain positions. According to Compete, a project manager with up to four years of experience, for example, newly hired in high tech in the past six months, received a median salary of NIS 23,000 per month, 35% more than for the equivalent position six or more. months ago.
An accountant with four years of experience received a salary of NIS 13,000 per month, a 13% increase over the industry standard accepted six months or more ago.
Many companies remain independent
The surprising salary increases for various auxiliary positions are apparently linked to major changes in Israel’s high-tech sector in recent years. Traditionally, Israeli startups have tended to be acquired quickly and swallowed up in the development centers of multinational giants. These foreign-owned development centers had a limited need for non-technological auxiliary workers. However, over the past two years there has been a significant decline in acquisitions of Israeli startups which, in the meantime, have continued to grow independently.
The fact that Israeli start-ups remained independent, some even going public, led to a strong demand for workers beyond the traditional development chain.
In addition, Covid-19 has brought many sales and marketing positions back to the local market; jobs Israeli startups previously preferred to hire in the United States.
“Traditionally, Israeli companies have recruited these types of workers in their target market, which is usually the United States,” explains Amit Rapaport, CEO and co-founder of Compete. “But the coronavirus has taught everyone that sales and marketing are not location dependent and that anything can be done through Zoom. It has brought new jobs to Israel and increased both demand and wages. for these positions. “
Moderate increases in developer salaries
Surprisingly, data from Compete reveals that compensation for development engineers in Israel’s high-tech industry has increased at a relatively moderate rate over the past six months, especially when it comes to workers with 0 to 4 years of age. years of experience. For example, the median monthly gross salary of a full-stack developer with up to four years of experience hired for a new job in the past six months was NIS 26,400, similar to the salaries of employees hired ago. six months or more.
Among inexperienced mobile developers, too, the median salary has not changed, at NIS 26,000 per month for the past six months. A DevOps engineer hired in the past six months received a median monthly salary of NIS 26,500,000, 6% more than DevOps workers in the previous period.
When it comes to more experienced tech workers (five years or more), the pay increases over the past six months are a bit larger. The median salary of a full stack developer hired in the past six months was NIS 30,000, a 3% increase from previous data. Mobile developers received 32,500 NIS, up 4%. In contrast, the median monthly salary of an experienced DevOps engineer has climbed 15% to NIS 35,000 in the past six months.
Rapaport says moderate increases in developer salaries are mainly due to rigid policies adopted by many companies. “As someone who also hires employees, I can say that I saw crazy requests. When I was looking for a front-end developer, for example, a candidate asked for a signing bonus of 300,000 NIS. sure I refused. And I think many other companies also refuse this sort of thing and maintain their compensation policies. Our database provides real time data to high tech companies and also helps to end the madness of the sector. “
A real-time payroll report
Rapaport worked for years as a head of human resources and recruiting at the development center of Palo Alto Networks in Israel, then at the cyber startup SentinelOne. She remembers the feeling of uncertainty within the industry during this period over accepted salary levels. “I was never sure how much I would have to pay for new hires and what benefits my competitors were offering in the form of signing bonuses, advanced training funds and meal vouchers,” says Rapaport.
“Sure, we had payroll reports, but these were usually only updated once every six months and they went through a few months of analysis before they were released, so the data were never sufficiently up-to-date. The information in those reports was “not exactly suited to tech companies in terms of roles and didn’t give me meaningful comparisons with other cyber startups, for example.”
At the end of 2019, Rapaport quit his job at SentinelOne and spent six months thinking about what’s next. During one of her morning runs, she came up with the idea of creating a start-up that would solve this information gap and offer salary data updated in real time and tailored to high-tech companies. She brought in Jonathan (Yoni) Wasserman, a developer who had worked with her at Palo Alto Networks (and who is also her husband), and the two formed Piplwize, who announced a name change to Compete last week.
Compete was born in May 2020 and currently works with 200 Israeli tech companies, including Lemonade, Fiverr, WalkMe, Gong, Via Transportation and Riskified. Companies pay a monthly subscription and agree to provide their salary data to Compete. In return, they have access to the comprehensive database, which is supposed to tell them the precise salaries paid to employees in various positions in their markets.
Last week, Compete announced that it had raised $ 2.5 million in a seed funding round led by Aleph Venture Capital.
The start-up was founded at the height of the global pandemic, but it actually worked in its favor. The period of Covid-19 generated a significant shift in hiring practices for all industries, especially high tech, with companies blindly trying to figure out what exactly their competitors were doing.
“Because companies started hiring remote workers, there were a lot of questions. For example, if my company is located in Tel Aviv but the job seeker lives in Karmiel, should they be paid according to the median salary in northern Israel or the central region? Another question that arose in many companies was whether they should continue to pay employee travel expenses remotely. Our database provides them with information on all of this, ”explains Rapaport.
Posted by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on June 23, 2021
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2021
