Israel’s high-tech sector spent the last decade as the world’s clearest seller’s market for tech workers. At the peak of the hiring boom in February 2022, the country recorded 19,878 vacancies against just 2,750 registered job seekers — 7.2 open positions for every person looking. As of September 2026, that ratio has fallen to 0.95: for the first time in more than four years, job seekers outnumber available tech positions, according to the Israel Employment Service’s October “Labor Market Pulse” report, as reported by Calcalist’s CTech.
The new figures land alongside a small pile of annual layoff ledgers in other countries, but they describe something mechanistically different — and, for anyone watching Australia or New Zealand, familiar.
The numbers behind the flip
The sharpest deterioration sits in information and communications, the sector closest to high-tech. Between September 2023 and September 2026 the number of vacancies grew from 8,800 to 9,700 — a rise of about 10 percent. Over the same three years, registered job seekers climbed from 6,500 to 10,300, up 58 percent. The openings-to-seekers ratio consequently fell from 1.35 to below 1.
Software-specific figures point the same way. The number of job seekers among software developers and applications analysts reached roughly 8,900 in October, up from about 5,600 in September 2023. And the pressure is no longer only on juniors: 52 percent of job seekers in software-related occupations had at least five years of experience in 2026, up from 44 percent in 2019, per the same report.
A broader Employment Service study published in July this year, covered by Globes, had already flagged the trend. Job seekers with five to eight years of experience in tech rose 138 percent since 2023. By May 2026, roughly 16,300 people were registered as tech job seekers — the highest figure outside Israel’s emergency periods — and their share of all job seekers had grown from about 4 percent in early 2022 to about 11 percent.
The squeeze extends up the ladder. Among people with academic degrees overall, the openings-to-seekers ratio slipped from 0.8 in September 2023 to 0.7 in September 2026. Among managers it sits at 0.1 — ten unemployed managers per open position. Meanwhile, the same market shows pockets of opposite movement: industry and construction’s ratio rose from 1.8 to 3.4 over the three years, and sales and service from 1.2 to 1.5. Demand didn’t vanish; it moved.
Is AI the cause? The Employment Service says the honest answer is: not proven
This is where the story gets more interesting than the usual AI-eats-jobs framing — because Israel Employment Service researchers examined the AI question directly and declined to draw the obvious conclusion.
As Globes reported of that July study: among software workers in professions particularly exposed to AI tools, the number of job seekers rose about 18 percent between 2022 and 2026, while in other tech professions with a similar level of AI exposure the rise was only about 3 percent. That correlation is suggestive. But the Employment Service explicitly stressed it indicates correlation, not causation: the increase in job seekers began before ChatGPT’s release, and statistical tests carried out for the study found no significant causal relationship between key AI development events and the growth in job-seeker numbers.
That restraint matters for how the data travels. A tighter job market in which experienced developers compete for fewer openings is real and measurable. What causes it — a post-2022 correction in tech investment, the war economy’s fiscal effects, shifting venture patterns, AI changing how much code a team needs — is not settled by the ratio alone. The Employment Service has done readers the favour of saying so.
Not a collapse — a longer queue
It’s also not a shrinking sector. Israeli high-tech employed about 404,000 workers on average in 2025, after employment nearly doubled in the decade before. The July report’s wording, as Globes summarised it, is that the industry shows “not a contraction of the tech industry but mainly a change in its growth rate.” A separate Jobnet–Civi index analysis in the Jerusalem Post this month found recruitment activity recovering strongly after the holidays — recruiter activity up about 21 percent on September, CV volumes up 27 percent, the number of open positions roughly unchanged, and hiring decisions up 27 percent on June. More people applying, roughly the same number of seats, more competition per seat.
That is the same pattern national statistics agencies are now hunting elsewhere. The Reserve Bank of Australia’s 9 November research note and Assistant Governor Sarah Hunter’s companion speech found little sign AI has moved aggregate employment, but “tentative signs of weaker hiring, particularly among younger workers in highly AI-exposed occupations” — and Jobs and Skills Australia’s estimate that around 4 percent of Australian workers are highly exposed to AI automation against 31 percent highly exposed to AI augmentation. Our own recent coverage of the RBA’s monitoring work and New Zealand’s RBNZ analysis of AI-exposed roles describes the same adjustment happening at the hiring gate rather than through mass layoffs.
What it means for New Zealand
New Zealand’s tech job market is far smaller, but the mechanism transfers directly: when job ads in exposed occupations slow while the applicant pool grows, competition per opening rises before any headline layoff number moves. That’s the practical read for Kiwi tech workers and graduates — the job hunt is now a queue market, not a shortage market, and differentiation ( demonstrably current skills, adjacent-domain knowledge, human networks) carries more weight than it did when 7.2 openings chased every seeker. The positive ledger is intact too: Gartner’s forecast, which we covered last week, still projects technology among the biggest net job gainers from AI through 2030 — 1.9 million created against 0.4 million lost globally — and Israel’s own hiring-decision data shows offers going out, just to a deeper bench of applicants.
FAQ
How many job seekers are there per tech job opening in Israel? As of September 2026, 0.95 openings per registered job seeker in high-tech, down from 7.2 openings per seeker at the February 2022 peak.
Is AI causing Israel’s tech job slowdown? The Israel Employment Service found job-seeker growth concentrated in AI-exposed software roles (+18 percent vs +3 percent), but says the evidence shows correlation rather than causation, notes the rise began before ChatGPT, and reports that statistical tests found no significant causal link.
Are other countries seeing the same tech-hiring pattern? Yes, in hedged terms: Australia’s RBA, New Zealand’s RBNZ and the Bank of England have all flagged weaker hiring in AI-exposed occupations — concentrated on young and entry-level workers — without large aggregate employment effects so far.
Is Israel’s tech sector shrinking? No. It employed roughly 404,000 people on average in 2025, after nearly doubling over the prior decade; the report describes slower growth, not contraction.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
