You’ve built a strong team in Israel. Every hire made sense. You knew the market, you knew the salary bands, you knew what a strong interview process looked like, and you knew a good candidate when you saw one.

Then you tried to hire in the U.S., and something didn’t work the same way. Maybe the role sat open for four months while good candidates went quiet after the first call. Maybe you hired fast and the person was gone within a year. Maybe the person is still there, and you’re still not entirely sure they were the right call.

None of this happens because U.S. hiring is harder in some abstract sense. It happens because the instincts that work at home don’t transfer automatically, and in my experience, that’s how companies find out: by making the mistake first, not before.

I’ve spent the last twenty years running U.S. searches exclusively for Israeli-founded companies. The mistakes I see are not random. They repeat, they compound, and they almost never show up alone. Here are the six I see most often.

1. The role gets defined the way it would be defined in Israel

A brief written from an Israeli-market template carries assumptions that don’t hold on the other side of the ocean: what a given title actually means, how much scope comes attached to it, what a candidate at that level expects to own. A “VP” title abroad sometimes describes Director-level work. A narrower Israeli title can undersell what the U.S. market expects the role to carry. Either way, the brief is wrong before the search even starts, and a wrong brief produces a search that closes on the wrong person efficiently.

I run a version of this test before almost every search: describe the exact scope and title to a few people who’ve actually done the job in the U.S., and see what comes back. More often than you’d expect, they tell me it’s two jobs bundled into one, or one job undersold by a title that doesn’t match what it actually carries. That’s usually not carelessness. It’s a template that made sense at home and doesn’t survive the trip.

2. The hire matches the resume, not the stage

A candidate with a recognizable company name and an impressive title on their resume gets treated as the safe choice, the one the board will approve without a fight. Then they join, and the job turns out to require building something from nothing, and the person who spent the last several years running an already-built, already-scaled organization struggles with exactly the part of the job that mattered most.

I don’t think of this as a talent problem. It’s a stage mismatch, and it’s usually catchable if you’re actually listening for it: what did this person personally build, versus what did they walk into already built. Someone who joined after the go-to-market motion was already working, and scaled a function that already had a shape, describes their work differently than someone who built it from nothing, once you push past the resume and ask them to get specific. The two answers don’t sound the same.

Someone genuinely excellent at scaling an existing function is not automatically excellent at building the first version of it, and the two are different jobs wearing the same job title. I see this most often in the very first commercial hire, especially the first U.S. sales leader. That pattern deserves its own treatment, and I’ve written a longer piece on exactly that.

3. U.S. market reality doesn’t match the assumptions made from Israel

I keep seeing the same pattern: a company offers a compensation package built on Israeli market logic, then expects the hands-on, always-available, rarely-complains performance that a lot of Israeli companies take for granted at home. In the U.S. market, that combination usually doesn’t hold. Strong candidates have other options, they know their market value, and a package that reads as reasonable in Tel Aviv reads as a lowball offer in Austin or New York. The company loses the candidate it actually wanted, and concludes the U.S. talent pool is thin or unrealistic, when the real issue was the offer.

This isn’t a call for an unlimited budget. It’s a call for understanding the actual market rate for the specific function, level, and region you’re hiring into, rather than applying a percentage adjustment to an Israeli number and calling the work done. Comp benchmarking done properly is one conversation, not one guess.

4. The interview process reads as a mismatch, not as rigor

An unpaid, open-ended assignment is common enough in Israeli hiring, and it’s often meant to signal seriousness. I’ve seen it land very differently with U.S. candidates who have other offers on the table: less like rigor, more like a company that hasn’t quite figured out what this market expects from a process, or in the worst cases, like unpaid work. More than once I’ve watched a strong candidate go quiet after a stage like that rather than say anything about it.

The process is part of the offer, whether a company means it to be or not. A scoped, time-boxed, paid exercise usually tests the same thing an open-ended one was reaching for, without carrying the same risk.

5. Assessment stops at “I liked them”

A polished interview, a recognizable company on the resume, and a general sense of rapport are not the same thing as evidence that someone can do this specific job at this specific stage. When the assessment stops at “I liked them,” the hiring decision is being made on the same information a stranger reading the resume would have, which defeats the entire point of running a process.

What I actually look for is different: a real situation that didn’t go as planned, and what the person changed because of it, not just what they’re proud of. More than once I’ve had to conclude that someone who interviewed beautifully wasn’t actually right for the role, and kept looking instead of filling the seat with the best of a weak set.

6. The founder is still running the search, and the hire, from 6,000 miles away

Most of the founders I work with are trying to build a U.S. team while running the core business from Israel, making high-stakes hiring calls without the market visibility someone based there would have by default. That’s not a criticism. It’s the actual structural position most of my clients are in. But it means speed and rigor pull in opposite directions at exactly the moment a company most needs both: the pressure to move fast because the need is real and overdue, against the reality that getting this right requires ground-level visibility into a market you’re not standing in.

I don’t think the founders who get this right are the fastest movers or the most cautious ones. The difference I’ve seen is whether someone with real, ground-level visibility into the U.S. market is actually feeding the decision, not just good instincts stretched thin across a nine-hour time difference.

Bottom line

• All six mistakes trace back to the same thing: instincts that work at home, applied to a market that runs on different rules, without being tested first.
• None of this is about the U.S. being a harder market. It’s about the gap between what’s normal here and what’s actually expected there.
• I’ve watched every one of these mistakes happen more than once, across more than one company. That’s most of what twenty years of doing this actually teaches you.

If you’re about to make a U.S. hire and want a second opinion before you run the search, get in touch through the Contact page.