A recruiter with a perfectly straight career would be a rather suspicious creature. Pola Zucker offers something more useful: experience of changing direction. The founder and former CEO of Nisha, known professionally on LinkedIn as Paule Tzuker, built a business around decisions that rarely arrive with all their paperwork in order. A candidate wants a future. A company wants somebody who can start on Sunday. Between these ambitions lies a considerable amount of conversation.
Her son Nadav supplied the affectionate description: a walking human LinkedIn before LinkedIn existed. Family praise comes with generous allowances, of course. Yet the image catches something specific about her work. Long before a profile could announce a professional identity to thousands of strangers, recruiters had to remember the person behind the credentials. Zucker made that knowledge her occupation. Her own credentials, meanwhile, concealed several changes of scene.
She came to Israel from Tunis after six years in France, settling in Ashkelon and Ashdod. An early zero in seventh-grade mathematics gave way to graduation with distinction and mathematics and statistics at the Hebrew University. She served as an Air Force officer, studied programming and systems analysis, worked in development and project management, and moved into sales because she wanted to work with people. In 1992, the software business employing her closed. She spent a year with her three children.
The recruitment activity she started in 1995 began inside a computer-science college. The college did not survive; the activity became Nisha. There is a pleasing administrative untidiness to this beginning. The institution disappeared, while a service within it acquired a life of its own. Zucker had found work that suited her by moving beyond the job description she had previously occupied.
The graduate at the jobs fair
By 2005, she was running Nisha and its executive practice, but a conversation at a university employment fair reveals how closely she watched the other end of the ladder. The company was attending the event for a fifth year. Zucker was pleased that employers were looking for graduates again, including people without experience. A recovering market was giving beginners a chance to enter.
Her explanation was practical. When a growing company assembled a development team, it could include one or two newcomers. The opportunity depended on the shape of the team, rather than on a sudden collective affection for the inexperienced. Software engineers were particularly wanted. Other openings included quality assurance and several engineering disciplines. She also described employers' preference at that time for university graduates. It was a report from a particular hiring market, with its opportunities and its barriers.
That makes an instructive early portrait of Zucker. She was dealing in senior appointments while explaining how a first job becomes available. Both require attention to the organization doing the hiring. A candidate's ability matters; so does the employer's willingness to make room for it. The fair offered a place where those two questions could meet in person.
A market with a changeable temperament
Recruitment also gave her a close view of the technology industry's moods. In an account looking toward 2001, she described more CVs arriving while employers became more hesitant. Hiring decisions took longer. It is a peculiarly uncomfortable market when the people asking for introductions multiply just as the people able to offer work become cautious. The recruiter's address book has more names and fewer easy answers.
By early 2008, her description of executive recruitment had a different emphasis. Clients ranged from venture-capital funds and boards to founders seeking somebody to take their place. They wanted proven experience, familiarity with international organizations, and the ability to deal with directors and investors. Candidates had become selective enough that employers needed to sell them the opportunity. Even a chief executive's chair required a sales pitch.
In April 2009, the picture was harsher again. Zucker described lower pay for newly hired senior staff and fewer senior vacancies as financing became more difficult. Project-management candidates faced a shortage of openings. The aspiring executive and the recent graduate were subject to the same inconvenient truth: a qualification does not create its own vacancy.
Then came another turn. In 2010, she explained that new technologies were changing demand alongside the economic recovery. Hiring was returning unevenly, with some specialties benefiting much more than others. For a recruiter, the useful question was becoming very precise: which skill, for which project, at this moment? An impressive general account of the industry could still be quite useless to the individual looking for a job.
Selling control, buying room
Nisha's own future reached a turning point in March 2011. Danel announced a deal to buy 50.1% of Nisha Hi-Tech, with consideration reported at up to 11 million shekels and a final amount dependent on results. At the time, Nisha employed 105 people across three Israeli branches. Only 15 were men. A company supplying people to the technology sector had built a notably different staff composition within its own walls.
Zucker explained the transaction as a way to expand the business. It was a sale of control with a plan for what the partnership could make possible. Financial backing would support a longer view and more investment. The percentage mattered because it described a change in who controlled the business she had founded. For employees and clients, a transaction of that sort raises an immediate practical question: what will happen to the business?
The distinction is useful in a career often described through the language of an exit. A founder can sell shares while continuing to run the company. Zucker remained its CEO for years afterward. The next chapter of her working life was therefore still about hiring, clients and employees, rather than an immediate departure from the office.
An introduction can begin at school
Some of the relationships around Zucker formed far from a hiring brief. She met businesswoman Dina Fromovitz through their daughters, who were in the same second-grade class in Shoham. Their connection became professionally useful in both directions: Fromovitz consulted Zucker on recruitment, while Zucker sought her advice about conferences and speakers. The school gate had supplied a relationship no corporate networking agenda had scheduled.
That detail gives the human-LinkedIn description some texture. Connections grow through shared circumstances, and only later acquire a business purpose. The mutuality matters, too. Zucker could be the expert in one conversation and the person asking for help in the next. A useful network allows both roles without requiring anybody to pretend they know everything.
Her mentoring work put those conversations into more deliberate settings. In 2020 she joined a programme bringing women together with senior female managers for individual meetings about professional development. At a Jolt alumni gathering, she appeared alongside global recruitment director Orly Militzer to discuss entering technology jobs. Different audiences, different career stages, the same reason to make time: somebody was trying to work out a next move.
The title changes; the work continues
In April 2021, Dana Lavi was appointed CEO of Nisha, succeeding Zucker. The distinction belongs near the centre of her biography: she founded the company and formerly led it. By August 2023, Zucker was described as advising technology entrepreneurs and accompanying startups. She also joined Gilad Rabinovich's Kulanu Shoham local election list. Shoham had been her home since 2000; public involvement brought her experience into another setting.
Her current roles keep the connection to people and organizations explicit. CQ Global lists her as a founder, with Giora Gil-Ad as CEO. The firm's work concerns international executive search. WIZO lists her as chairperson of its Human Resources Division. A commercial search firm and a social organization have different purposes, but both need people capable of carrying them out. Her professional vocabulary travels between those settings without much difficulty.
She also appears on the board list for Shoham's Hamesh organization at its performing arts centre, and among the members of the International Women's Forum in Israel. These are concrete affiliations, rather than a vague promise to give something back. Alongside her startup advisory work, they show a career extending into local institutions, women's networks and organizational governance.
A founder can sell shares while continuing to run the company.
Ownership and leadership followed different calendars.
The next appointment
The conversations continue in longer form, too. Her October 2021 Geekonomy episode ran for an hour and nineteen minutes, covering recruitment, management, interviews and overseas hiring. Later, she joined Shai Bechor on the recruitment podcast Megaysim Hashraa. The latter introduction quotes her reflecting on the decision to commit to the field: “I realized I had the right intuition for this world - and decided to go all the way.”
Her son's enthusiastic recommendation of that conversation received an equally warm reply. Zucker described the privilege of building almost thirty years of a career in a field she loved and enjoyed. For all the acquisition percentages and job titles, pleasure in the work remains a rather good explanation for staying with it.
Her story leaves room for more than one definition of progress. There is the company founded in 1995, the control transaction in 2011 and the handover in 2021. There are also graduates finding an opening, an adviser listening to a founder, and a colleague asking for an introduction. Those smaller exchanges are the daily substance of the profession she chose. The impressive thing about a career is often how many other careers pass through it.