Her circumstances really were hard when Shoshi Jambar joined WalkMe. Aged 28, two months after the birth of her second daughter, separated from her partner and owing a fortune to the National Insurance Institute, which forced her to return to work sooner than planned. She wanted a challenging job that would give her financial independence, but wound up cleaning the WalkMe offices at night.
Within two years, despite having no academic degree, connections or relevant professional background, Jambar is a manager in the growing startup.
Her previous work experience included cashier at an organic food supermarket. Her brother and former partner both worked for the company that got the cleaning contract at WalkMe. Hating it, she took the job.
However, the WalkMe sales team worked at night, when she did, and she learned from one Ido Paz of an opening in QA, quality assurance. She said she was “pretty good” at computers. “Anything you ask me, I’ll always say I’m terrific. Then I’ll study hard to prove I didn’t lie,” she says. And no, she hadn’t known what QA meant. “I barely knew what high-tech was.”
She feels the WalkMe team worked hard to help her get the job; she even consulted with them on what to wear for interviews.
But it would be wrong to ascribe all of Jambar’s success to luck or making good connections. Colleagues say she has a rare combination of amiability, irrepressible optimism, eagerness to express opinions and chutzpah – all pluses when it comes to taking advantage of opportunity.
After more than a year in QA, which involves testing software, she moved up to management and now supervises five employees.
For the most part, Jambar’s story is unrepresentative. Not many startups would give such an opportunity to a person bereft of resume, given the cost of training somebody from absolute scratch. But two weeks before she applied, WalkMe managed to raise $25 million, so at least it was feeling flush: Since its establishment, it’s raised $92 million. Today it has 460 employees in New York, Raleigh, North Carolina, Paris, Japan and southern Israel, where it employs 240 people. Its clientele includes the likes of SAP, Cisco, PayPal and Comcast.
Third of six children
Jambar, 30, was the third of six children, born in Be’er Sheva to parents who arrived from Ethiopia. The family moved to Petah Tikva when she was two. After an injury on the job, her father didn’t work for eight years. Her mother worked in kitchens and in cleaning and the family collected welfare. Her father died when she was 15 and she went to work at a pizzeria as a waitress and cashier. Jambar’s mother didn’t want her, the eldest daughter in a religious family, to be drafted.
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