Viola's Talent Guru, Jeff Shapiro, Shares 25+ Years of Executive Search Wisdom
Aliyah Success is a weekly newsletter for Olim and Potential Olim to land their dream job in Israel tech by Andrew Jacobson. For Season 1, we are interviewing 12 Successful Olim, including top professionals across finance, venture capital, marketing and more. If you got this email forwarded to you, subscribe here:
Now onto the show!
Super excited to share this first interview with Jeff Shapiro.
Judah and I met Jeff one Monday morning at Viola’s glass 16th-floor office in the downtown Hagag Buildings overlooking panoramic Tel Aviv, with the Ayalon highway on one side and Gordon Beach visible from the other. With $5 billion in assets under management and 87 active portfolio companies, Viola is one of Israel’s most successful venture capital funds. It is a multi-stage investment house, with funds that focus on early-stage, growth, credit, fintech and more. Some of their most famous portfolio companies include IronSource, SimilarWeb, Payoneer, Outbrain, Lightricks, Guesty, Verbit, Faye and many more.
After an impressive 25+ years in executive search, Jeff joined Viola in 2021 to spearhead the people function for their portfolio companies, helping them secure and retain top talent—a key driver for startup success. With Jeff’s wealth of experience, there are few people who are more qualified to offer advice on how to secure a job in Israel. You won’t want to miss this. Read below:
Where I grew up:
Stamford, Connecticut
Something most people don’t know about me:
I have seven kids. One daughter is married with a three-month old daughter, my first grandchild. That's recent news.
I lead human capital for Viola Ventures, helping our portfolio companies find great talent. This is how I started my career:
I started my career in Executive Search and moved to Israel in the mid 2000s with a midsized headhunting firm out of New York. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, I launched a new firm with my friend [Noam Eisenberg]. We built it and then ironically sold it back to the guys who I had left in 2008, [Dallas-based Kingsley Gate Partners]. It was a nice bow on that story.
At the time, Viola was my largest source of business. I had done a lot of work for them, recruiting multiple Partners to their funds, as well as the work we were doing with their portfolio companies. In 2021 they invited me to join them as a Partner, where I now lead talent—what we call human capital—for the fund. That involves assisting our dozens of portfolio companies in their search for experienced executives, both in Israel and globally, particularly at the VP and C-level.
I started headhunting pre-internet in a back windowless room. Can you imagine?
A family friend of ours growing up was a headhunter. I spent summers during my college years working with her on the phones recruiting people for different positions. That led to a part time job working at one of the largest global headhunting firms in the world [Egon Zehnder].
I worked in their research department, in a back windowless room filled with directories and nearly-prehistoric computers. My job was to quality check resumes as I inputed them manually into our database. That was my earliest introduction to global executive search.
As the Internet was taking off, I joined a boutique firm based in Cleveland [Christian & Timbers, which became CTPartners] whose biggest claim to fame was recruiting the CEO of Hewlett Packard in 1998. That was a huge deal. It put them dead center in Silicon Valley. So when I joined shortly after, I began helping the biggest venture capital firms in the world recruit CEOs for what they expected to become their next rocket-ship portfolio company.
It’s been a crazy 25+ years in executive search, from recruiting top VCs to the internet boom and beyond.
Early-on in my career, just before I joined Christian & Timbers, I was vacationing with my wife in Martha’s Vineyard. We were kayaking one day and my cell phone rings. By today’s standards this doesn’t sound so odd. But it was 1999, and while you might have a cell phone, who would carry it? Especially on vacation!? In any event, my phone rings and it’s my soon-to-be boss's assistant, Martha. She says my new boss wants me to join an important conference call in 20 minutes with Vinod for what will be our next HUGE search. Turns out we had become the recruiting firm of choice with the Silicon Valley VC firm, Kleiner Perkins. Kleiner Perkins was the early money behind many of Silicon Valley’s most successful companies and we were working directly with Vinod Khosla, the founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and a Silicon Valley legend.
I said, Listen, Martha, I'm sitting in a kayak off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard – no pen or paper and spotty cell reception. She's like, great, but you need to be on this call. So I said, Ok, Martha. Just a quick question…who’s Vinod?
I had no idea who he was. It's been a crazy 25+ years since then, seeing the Internet boom and beyond.
Israel was very different in 2005 - the economy was in recovery.
I moved to Israel in 2005 and the Israeli business markets were still in recovery from the dotcom implosion in 2000. Many venture funds had sprang up during the boom and didn’t survive the bust. Viola Ventures — then known as Carmel Ventures — were beginning to make progress with a number of their new investments. One would say that I didn’t move for financial reasons. Moving to Israel was just something I wanted to do. CTPartners had no interest in moving me to Israel at the time, but they said we could try it out. Ultimately they supported me in the move. They gave me a raise and promoted me. I was very lucky.
Figuring out my new work life abroad was a challenge. My mornings were completely open given the time difference with the US. I made efforts to develop business in Israel, but retained executive search didn’t really exist here at the time. So I stopped pitching business in Israel and began to pitch in Europe.
Ultimately a three-month trial in the summer of 2005 has become 18 years and counting.
In 2008, the global financial crisis hit and things went south. We felt the impact strongly in Israel and I was laid off. That was the big turning point for me. It truly forced me to adapt to Israeli society.
Thinking about moving to Israel? Stop worrying so much about your salary. People make it work.
The prevailing wisdom amongst Olim, is that they will likely take a pay cut when they move to Israel. Salaries are so much lower, they say. How will I be able to make that work? The short answer is, everybody does. You will too. The Israeli attitude is, there’s something impossible in front of me? Yalla, let’s figure it out and go through it.
In my case, after my American firm let me go in 2008, my friend and I established our own headhunting firm. In 2009, we both made more money than we each had the previous year. That’s how Israelis do it. They figure it out.
It is entirely possible for an Anglo who arrives in Israel with legitimate skills in sales, marketing, or anything in the go-to-market world to find an interesting opportunity. But you must, must, must have the “figure it out” attitude.
Don't underestimate learning Hebrew.
For a long time, I did most of my work with Americans and other English-speakers. But now I do a ton of business in Hebrew. All of our meetings at Viola are in Hebrew. My Hebrew was solid when I joined three years ago, but I needed to learn expressions and slang too. So I hired a tutor.
It’s very important to be able to interact with colleagues but also others, outside the professional world. It’s very important to integrate into Israeli culture, and Hebrew is an important way to do that.
A lot of resumes cross my desk. This is how I isolate the needles from the haystack:
Years ago, people tended to stay at one company for all or most of their careers. Nowadays that is clearly not the norm. What headhunters are looking for in people’s backgrounds is a clear progression. How one moves from one position to the next. Did they get promoted? Take on more responsibility? It takes about 2-3 years to truly accomplish something. Plant to stay at a company until you can look back and see the rewards of the efforts you put in.
It does not reflect well if a candidate worked at 12 companies but only spent 9-12 months at each one. That's your typical “job hopper.” Ideally one should try and spend three to four years progressing from individual contributor to team lead, to manager to director, etc. Once you arrive at the executive level, this is where I spend the majority of my time.
"That's why I tell people, regardless of how young or junior they are, be willing to put yourself out there. Be proactive."
But individual contributors are different
But if somebody is a front-end engineer, and they're always going to be a front end engineer, that's a different story. There are individual contributor (IC) roles that will always be ICs.
I don't place a lot of weight on a CV or LinkedIn profile.
I use it as a quick identification of who I am looking at. I place the most weight on the interview. A real conversation with the candidate best reflects the impact a person can have on a company.
Come to Israel to find a job even if you haven’t made Aliyah yet.
It's more difficult to get a job here from a distance. It’s hard to compete with the volume of people who are already local and actively looking for positions if you’re overseas. I know it's a big jump. I know people are scared. But what do you have to lose if you’re serious?
Your relationships can take you further than you think.
People talk a lot about social circles and who you know. Use the people you know to create opportunities. Anybody who gets off the boat in Israel is likely to have 3-4 friends. People underestimate how far a connection can take you. But once you make the connection, if you don't have the ability to sell yourself, all you're doing is sending around your resume and asking people to take a look at it, nothings going to happen.
Israelis are judgmental. Make it work.
Israelis tend to be pretty judgmental. What I mean is, when they tend to look at your LinkedIn profile, your CV, they’ll size you up. They'll look at how old you are, where you came from. They might also test your Hebrew skills quickly or make five phone calls to find out what other people think of you.
Don't be frugal with your LinkedIn profile or CV. Put enough.
You can choose to have the bulk of your info on either LinkedIn or a CV, but make sure it's somewhere. Ideally, you should have a well-defined LinkedIn profile with as much information as you might put into a resume. Sometimes people get too stingy with their LinkedIn profile. And the same goes for your resume. Pick 2-3 things with any given experience that make people say, wow, this person has achieved something.
The biggest mistake job-applicants make is having silly questions.
The biggest thing that makes candidates stand out is having a certain element of confidence in whatever it is, in whoever, whatever it is that you are. I've met people who are nervous during the interview process, and it’s general because they just don't have enough experience. They talk a little bit too much. The other thing that grabs me the most are the ones who come with the smartest questions.
I don't mean questions like “When are days off?” or “When are bonuses paid?”. The people who took the time to both research the company and whoever it is they're being interviewed by, it could be the hiring manager, it could be anybody. But the people who invest in the interview process in an intelligent way.
I tell people that the best interviews are not interviews, they're business conversations.
Some good questions to achieve that sort of dynamic are: “Why is the search open?” “Why did the person leave the position I am filling?” “What are the business challenges that this person faced while in the position?” “What has yet to be achieved?” You will be remembered more for the questions you ask than for whatever monologue you might give about your background. The red flag is the inverse of that, which is somebody who just talks.