 Welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rosal here bringing you another video here today from Jerusalem at the end of a Shabbat. So Shavua tov to anyone who watches this before tomorrow morning, in which case another week will already be in train. I did a video a few days ago talking about five ways to live in Israel without going broke or selling organs or joining organized crime mobs because when you were planning about making aliyah, those were probably not things you envisioned being part of your future. So let's try to stay away from those areas. I mentioned that there's a few different ways to live in Israel or spend money more prudently or live more affordably. And today I want to talk a little bit about the other side of the picture because there definitely comes a point where you just can't really spend less money, right? That's kind of got a limit. What I want to talk about today is three ways to research salaries in Israel so that when you are looking for a job in Israel, you don't undersell yourself by asking for too little money. And just like in other countries, there's a very good chance if your salary demands are way below the position, the company will just say, great, let's save some budget. So you want to come into salary conversations knowing what the parameters are. Now the typical question that gets asked in Israeli interview processes and in many countries in the world, but this was sort of new to me when I started out working here is what are your salary expectations in Hebrew? So this is typically a question that will get asked by at the very first stage of an interview process, typically by someone screening you a quick phone interview before an in person interview. And the company is figuring out basically they have a usually a salary range for the position and if you're within that range. Now again, I'm not a career coach. I'm not a financial advisor, but having talked to a bunch of Olim, I've yet, I've yet to meet someone who came in too low and the company said, well, actually, our budget for this is twice what you're asking for. So again, it's really important for that reason to know where you what your worth is in the job market. The first way that I'm going to recommend for trying to figure that out is by asking around. Now this kind of works if you're doing a pretty common job in Israel that a lot of other people are doing who you might have access to in your social network. I think it's always better to try to find people who you actually know in real life than to ask on Facebook groups that if you don't know anyone who's looking for a job as a solar engineer in Israel, you can ask on a Facebook group like living financially smarter in English, if you're an English speaker, and there's also Hebrew speaking groups. Another useful Facebook community while I'm on the topic is a page called Vidue Sakhal. It's been a little bit less active in recent months than it was before, but this is a Facebook group where people write, send their salary stubs into whoever runs this page. It's anonymous, we don't know. And that person will publish them in post so you can see, okay, there is a content manager with four years of experience working in Tel Aviv and they're earning 23,000 shackles, let's say. And if your experience is roughly the same and you're also looking at a company in Tel Aviv doing something similar, that's a very valuable data point. Your salary expectation may also need to be around 23,000 shackles. Now there is definitely such a thing as asking for too little and companies are going to not take you seriously. So that's another reason why it's important to have a credible ballpark when you're coming into these situations. So you can ask around whether on a Facebook group or in your social circle, now just a few words on what factors tend to influence salaries in Israel. Now there's a couple of factors that actually aren't Israel specific. These are factors that change salaries wherever you are in the world. And those are the years of experience you have, what the normal rates are for your profession, and also what type of company it is because how profitable is the company, usually a company that's more profitable is going to have a bigger budget for salaries. Usually, of course, there is tons of exceptions to everything as big as a job market. So that's the case in Israel. Now just to give some more general thoughts about this, companies in Tel Aviv tend to pay a little bit more than companies in other parts of the country historically. The reason for that is that as I mentioned in my last video about Israel being so expensive, the whole country is expensive, but Tel Aviv is especially expensive. So just as companies in New York or London tend to pay or Dublin tend to pay a little bit more than companies in cities that have a lower cost of living, the same holds true in Israel, generally companies in Tel Aviv and the Merkaz. If you haven't come across that word Merkaz before, it means the center of Israel. So not just Tel Aviv, but also the Gushdan area in the cities that are adjoining Tel Aviv. The second factor I would say in Israel is whether the company is high tech or just a regular company. I mentioned in my last video that there's actually the central bureau of statistics, the CBS, which is Israel's national statistic body, publishes two different salary averages when it publishes them, one for companies in high tech and another for the economy in general. And the reason it does that is because high tech salaries are so significantly better than salaries in the economy in general. Now people will point out that an average isn't the most useful data point when you're looking at salaries, looking at the median, the median would be better because the average is going to be affected by, you know, outlying very high earners, but I still think it's a valuable piece of data, one piece of the puzzle you could say. So those are the factors that I think generally affect salaries in Israel beyond the classical factors. Again, whether the company's based in Tel Aviv in the Marcaz or somewhere else. And secondly, what the salary averages are for the job you're doing. That's actually what I'm going to come on to because you can get sort of the same tools that the HR person has access to if you just Google them. Two keywords I recommend Googling are Tavlaot Sakhar and Seker Sakhar. Now my Hebrew is not perfect as you can probably hear from my somewhat ridiculous accent when trying to speak in Hebrew, but these are really the words that are very useful. Tavlaot Sakhar means in English salary tables. And it's basically the big jobs companies, websites that operate jobs listing platforms, collate this information from surveying the job market. Seker Sakhar means salary survey. So you can Google that. You're probably going to find a lot of the same results. There's Yad Shtaim. There's Etheosia. There's about six or eight different salary surveys you can find pretty easily just by Googling these keywords. Now the key thing you want to be looking at is how recent is that data. So you ideally want to be looking at salary surveys that have your position and that are from if not the last year than the year before last. The bigger companies who do this research generally publish their findings annually. So again, it's always better to have more recent data points because right now we're seeing a bit of a downturn in the tech market and you're going to be looking at old data that's going to push your salary expectation beyond a credible range for today, let's say. So that's Tavlaot Sakhar. And finally Glassdoor. Now a couple of words about Glassdoor. If you haven't heard of Glassdoor before, it's like this huge website where employees leave anonymous reviews about companies, employees leave anonymous salaries and you can use it as a job seeker to see what companies are paying for relative positions. Now the caveats for Glassdoor are as follows. Firstly, it tends to be larger companies because to actually go out of your way to review on Glassdoor, it's not something everyone's going to do. So the larger companies in Israel, let's take Wix for example, they're going to have enough people leaving reviews and they're going to be well known enough that they probably have a HR manager who might have actually started the company's profile on Glassdoor. Now that's also the downfall I mentioned HR managers, not that I've anything against people working in HR, but in Israel as in other countries, there is a definite trend of human resources putting pressure on people to write favorable things about the company to give an artificially skewed review. HR on Glassdoor, I from what I understand can complain about bad listings, but obviously any good listings, it's in the company's interest to leave them up. So typically with Glassdoor, I'm a little bit for, we're talking about salaries here, not for reviews of companies. I think for salaries, it's useful data points, but it's not the full picture. Now the final tool, and this is really sort of part of Glassdoor, I mean, part of social or desk or web research would be finding past employees on LinkedIn. So you can run a search on LinkedIn. And if you're looking at joining an organization called X Inc, or let's just use Wix because it's a very well known company in Israel, you can look up past employees at Wix and you might find someone who you met at a dinner once or someone who has a lot of common connections and they look approachable. And you can reach out to them and ask if they're willing to share what their salary was. Now this is not something that I would really, really recommend. I would generally start by asking people, you know, for general salary averages rather than asking someone point blank, what did you earn in your last job? But if you want to be a little bit more forward, that's something you can also consider doing. Hope that little rundown was useful if you are looking at, you know, switching job in Israel or starting a new job in Israel. Again, I emphasize I'm not a career or a financial specialist. I'm just uploading this video because I want to pass on some of what I figured out from my tenure to date living in Israel. Hope that video was useful. If you do want to get more videos about this for me and other subjects, do consider subscribing to this YouTube channel. Thank you for watching.