Are International Job Websites Useful for Israeli Jobhunting?

If you're a sabra and speak fluent Hebrew, you may think that Israel-based job websites are sufficient. For everyone else living in Israel or not, your Israeli jobhunt may need to involve searching international websites but will you find anything?

Let's take a look.

What I Did

1. Google for the world's largest jobsites and those that claim to be.
2. Search Alexa for highly-visited Israel-related jobsites, although Alexa's numbers should be taken with a grain of salt…
3. Check Job-hunt.org's Best Job Sites of 2006.
4. Filter the results for international sites that have job listings for Israel.

What I Found

Not much, I'm afraid.

First of all, there are only a few global/massively international jobsites and little Israel is rarely a fixture. Beyond that, smaller international sites usually cater to language-based country groupings such as Australian websites also having results for the UK or Canada. Finally, by far most of the job results found were for the Israeli hitech industry.

These are the best sites that have Israeli job results-

1. JobCentral appears to be a job spider, a site that displays jobs appearing on other sites. The nice thing about such a site is that you can theoretically rely on it and avoid wasting time surfing from one company site to another if the listings are kept updated. Unsurprisingly, big companies are overrepresented here; I imagine this is a result of only them having the resources for English-based listings of Israeli (or any) jobs on their corporate websites.
2. Monster.com, the famous US-based site, does have Israeli results through it's Work Abroad subsection (confusingly also named ‘Overseas Jobs'). Mostly the larger, international corporations appear here.
3. craigslist – although you can only choose among Tel Aviv, Jerusalem or Haifa for now, the listings are eclectic and not only hitech-oriented. This is probably because posting a job listing on craigslist is free.

That's All?!

Almost. If you are in hitech or are looking to be, you have the advantage of often being able to telecommute or work from home. If that interests you, keep your eye on any hitech job board like Jobs.joelonsoftware.com or the 37signals Gig Board.

Also, it has recently become trendy for bloggers to add a jobs section and that's why we now have GigaOM Jobs and Read/WriteWeb Jobs.

Conclusion

Your best chance of living in Israel and finding work on international jobsites is if you are in hitech and are willing to work from home. However, the pickings are so slim that unless you specifically want to telecommute, watching the international sites is mostly a waste of time. Instead, focus your Internet jobhunt on the Israeli-based sites. I'll be blogging about them soon, but if you have any suggestions, please tell me in the comments.