Israeli CV

gbublick

Jul 12, 2022

5 min read

Updated: Aug 3

Writing a CV for the Israeli Job Market

A recruiter looks at your CV for a few seconds before deciding whether to keep reading. Everything below is about surviving those seconds.

What to Leave Off

Your home address. Discrimination based on where you live has been illegal in Israel since 2014 — it's a prohibited ground under Section 2(a) of the Equal Employment Opportunities Law, alongside things like age, religion, and country of origin. That's the law. In practice, some recruiters still quietly screen out candidates they think live too far away, and you don't want to hand them the opportunity. Listing your city is normal and fine; your full street address serves no purpose unless you're expecting a house call from HR.

ID number. Never, unless you're applying for a government role that specifically asks.

Date of birth. A hiring manager can work out your rough age from your CV anyway. No reason to make it easy.

Marital status or number of children. Completely irrelevant to whether you can do the job. When I was screening hundreds of CVs, one came through that said "engaged" — with a ring icon. Not a joke.

A photo. They'll see you on LinkedIn. You're not applying for a modeling contract 😁

Your travel history. Nobody cares how many countries you've been to, unless you're applying to be a travel blogger 😁. I once received a CV listing every country the candidate had visited. It was not relevant.

Your high school. If you graduated more than a few years ago, it's taking up space that could be doing work for you.

Format: Make Sure the Software Can Actually Read It

Most companies run your CV through an applicant tracking system before a human ever sees it. If the software can't parse your file, you're rejected by a machine that never understood what it was looking at.

I paid someone to design my CV. They built it in PowerPoint. After about a month of applying, I wasn't getting interviews. I hired someone else — Cara — to redesign and rewrite it. She explained that a PowerPoint file exported to PDF wasn't being read properly by the HR systems, and that the icons on my old CV couldn't be read at all, which is why I kept having to retype my whole CV into application forms by hand. Once she understood what I was applying for and rebuilt it as a simple, clean document, I got significantly more interviews.

HR Systems will not read:

Icons and images used to convey information (a phone icon instead of the word "phone," skill ratings shown as filled circles). The system sees nothing.
Text boxes, multi-column layouts, and tables. Text gets read in the wrong order or dropped.
Contact details in the header or footer. Some systems skip these entirely — so your phone number vanishes.
PDFs exported from design tools where the text ends up as an image rather than selectable text.

The safe approach: build it in Word, keep it to a single column, use real text for everything, then export to PDF.

Quick test — open your PDF and try to select and copy the text. If you can't highlight it, neither can the software.

This is why Canva and PowerPoint cause problems. It's not that they're forbidden; it's that their default templates use exactly the features that break parsing.

Layout and Design

Keep it clean and easy to scan. You have about five seconds of attention. Every design flourish is competing with the actual content.

A little color on the headings is good — bold, readable tones. Deep blue, dark green, and purple all work well. Use one color, not three.

Page size: A4, not US Letter. Israel uses A4, and Word may be defaulting to Letter depending on where you set it up. A CV formatted for the wrong page size prints and displays with awkward margins. Check under Layout → Size.

Length. One page is the target, and for most people it's achievable. If you have ten or more years of relevant experience, two pages is perfectly acceptable — just make sure the first page carries the most important material. What isn't acceptable is three.

File name. Save it as your name plus "CV" — Gila Bublick CV. Not Gila Bublick CV version 3 FINAL.

Your Header

Name
Email — and please, not the Hotmail address you made in 2004 😂
Phone number, plus your WhatsApp number if it's different. You will often be contacted by WhatsApp first; this is completely normal in Israel ☺️
LinkedIn — hyperlinked, using your custom URL rather than the string of random numbers LinkedIn assigns by default
A short summary

Content

Lead with what's most relevant. If this is your first job and your degree is the strongest thing you have, education goes near the top. If you have work experience, education goes after it.

Write achievements, not job descriptions. This is the single biggest difference between a CV that gets calls and one that doesn't. Anyone can list responsibilities. Show what changed because you were there, with numbers wherever you can:

❌ Responsible for managing social media accounts.
✅ Grew Instagram following from 4K to 22K in 11 months; increased engagement rate by 60%.

Tailor it for each application. If you're applying to several different kinds of role, adjust accordingly. The recruiter needs to see immediately why you're applying for this job. Pull the language from the job description itself and use their terms.

Languages section. Important in Israel and often left off. State your Hebrew and English levels honestly — "Hebrew: conversational (Ulpan Gimel)" is more useful to everyone than vagueness, and getting caught overstating it in the first interview is far worse than being upfront.

Military or national service. Israeli CVs commonly include IDF or Sherut Leumi service, particularly the unit and role, and for younger candidates it's often the first substantial experience listed. If you served abroad, include that too — it reads as relevant experience here.

Hebrew or English? For most tech and international companies, English is fine and often preferred. For Israeli-market roles, local companies, and the public sector, a Hebrew CV matters. If you're applying to both, it's worth having a version in each rather than sending the same file everywhere.

Before You Send

Check your spelling and grammar. Grammarly is genuinely useful here, and the paid version works on mobile too if you add the keyboard. Then read it aloud once — you'll catch things software doesn't.

Consider getting professional help. Not just anyone — someone who understands your field and the Israeli market. Show them a few job descriptions you're targeting so they can write toward them.