A Job Advertisement

A job advertisement is the most compressed Hebrew a learner meets outside a headline. It has almost no verbs; it runs on nouns stacked into chains, on two one-word predicates that carry all the deontic force, and on a construction — דרוש — that has no English equivalent at all. It also has a piece of morphology that exists because the law says so.

The ad below was written for this page and the company is invented. Real advertisements are protected expression and carry live trademarks, so nothing here is quoted from one.

The advertisement

תיאור התפקיד — the role:

דרישות התפקיד — the requirements:

דרוש: a whole clause with no verb

The headline has no verb in it. דרוש is a passive participle — the pa'ul form of דרש "to require" — so it means "required, sought". The clause is built like this:

ל־ + the employer · דרוש · the person wanted

לחברת תוכנה מובילה דרוש מפתח תוכנה is, word for word, "to a leading software company [is] required a software developer". The employer is a prepositional phrase, not a subject; the job title is the subject; דרוש is an adjectival predicate agreeing with it. Nothing is conjugated, and the whole thing is what English needs a full sentence for.

Two consequences that trip everybody up:

• דרוש agrees with the job title, never with the company. חברה is feminine, but if the vacancy is for a מפתח the word stays דרוש. The company's gender is invisible to it, because the company is inside a preposition.
• The ל־ is obligatory. Take it off and you have two nouns and no relationship between them. It is the ל־ that says for whom.

Predicate-first order like this is not a quirk of ads — it is Hebrew's normal shape for existence and availability, the same instinct behind נשארו שלושה מקומות. See VSO inversion and the pa'ul participle.

The slash — and why it is the law

דרוש/ה and מפתח/ת are one form standing in for two. The slash attaches to the masculine stem and adds only what the feminine needs on top of it: דרוש plus ה gives דרושה, מפתח plus ת gives מפתחת. It is an abbreviation, not a word — nobody says it aloud. A reader silently expands it into whichever line applies:

Read those two aloud and you can hear why the slash exists: both words move, and the second one changes its vowels as well as its ending (mefatéakh becomes mefatákhat). Writing the ad out twice would double its length.

The device is not a stylistic choice. Section 8 of the Equal Employment Opportunities Law, 5748–1988 — marginal note מודעות בדבר הצעת עבודה — forbids publishing a job advertisement אלא אם כן הצעת העבודה צויינה בלשון זכר ובלשון נקבה, בין ביחיד ובין ברבים: "unless the job offer has been stated in the masculine and in the feminine, whether in the singular or the plural", with one exemption for jobs covered by section 2(c). (Consolidated text of the law as published on Nevo, cross-checked against Hebrew Wikisource, 15 August 2026.) The slash is how Israeli employers satisfy that in one line.

The closing sentence המשרה מיועדת לנשים ולגברים כאחד is a separate, conventional formula that appears on very many ads. It is not what section 8 requires — the statute is about the wording of the offer itself — so treat it as a widely used boilerplate rather than as a legal quotation. Other strategies for writing to both genders are on gender-inclusive Hebrew; the chat version of the same slash is on a WhatsApp thread.

Requirements are nouns all the way down

Look at what the requirement lines are made of. Not one contains a verb:

פיתוח, תחזוקה, תמיכה, שליטה, פתרון are all שמות פעולה — nouns naming the action of a verb, the machinery English does with -ing and -ion. Turning a verb into one of these is how Hebrew compresses a clause into a phrase, and recruitment writing does almost nothing else. See שם פעולה and nominalization.

The other half of the compression is smichut. מערכות צד שרת is three nouns in a row — systems-of side-of server — and מדעי המחשב, מסדי נתונים, מספר המשרה are all the same device. The rule that catches learners is definiteness: in a chain, only the last noun takes ה, and it makes the whole chain definite. צוות המו״פ is "the R&D team", with no article on צוות at all. See long smichut chains and definiteness in smichut.

חובה and יתרון

Two nouns carry all the modality in the ad, and neither is a verb.

• חובה khová — "obligation, duty". Tacked onto a requirement it means essential; without it, you will not be considered.
• יתרון yitrón — "advantage". It means nice to have.

They stand alone after a dash, with no copula and nothing agreeing with anything: ניסיון של שנתיים — חובה. In prose the same two nouns behave normally (חובה עלינו לבדוק, יש לזה יתרון גדול); it is the ad format that freezes them into labels. Read them as a scale — חובה, then יתרון, then anything mentioned with no label at all.

The application line, and what a person would say

יש לשלוח קו״ח is the impersonal instruction from signs and notices, doing exactly the same job here: an infinitive has no gender, so the sentence works for whoever is reading. Compare what a recruiter would actually say on the phone:

Both mean the same thing. The written line is agentless and addressee-less; the spoken one has picked a plural addressee and stopped pretending nobody is there. Moving between them is the whole skill of יש ל + infinitive. Note the abbreviations too: קו״ח and בע״מ and מו״פ all take gershayim ״ (U+05F4) one letter in from the end, never an ASCII double-quote — see ראשי תיבות.

Common Mistakes

1. Making דרוש agree with the company. The company sits inside ל־, so it is not the subject and cannot control agreement.

2. Dropping the ל־ on the employer. English puts the company first as a subject, and the calque leaves two nouns with nothing joining them.

3. Putting ה on the front of a smichut chain. The article goes on the last noun only, and it makes the whole chain definite.

4. Reaching for an infinitive where the ad wants a verbal noun. Both lines below are correct Hebrew, and they mean different things.

Key Takeaways

• דרוש is a passive participle, not a verb: ל־ + employer · דרוש · job title. The clause has no conjugated verb anywhere in it.
• דרוש agrees with the job title, never with the company — the company is inside a preposition and cannot control agreement. And the ל־ is obligatory.
• The slash forms (דרוש/ה, מפתח/ת) attach to the masculine stem and add only the feminine's extra material. They exist because section 8 of the Equal Employment Opportunities Law, 5748–1988 requires a job advertisement to be worded in both genders. The sentence המשרה מיועדת לנשים ולגברים כאחד is a conventional formula on top of that, not the statutory requirement itself.
• Requirement lines are verbal nouns plus smichut chains — פיתוח, תחזוקה, שליטה, תמיכה, פתרון — with no verbs at all. In a chain, only the last noun takes ה.
• חובה means essential and יתרון means desirable. Both are bare nouns used as predicates, with no copula and no agreement.
• The application line is יש ל + infinitive, agentless like a public notice. Spoken, it becomes a 2nd-person plural future (תשלחו).
• קו״ח, בע״מ, מו״פ take gershayim ״ one letter from the end.