People are by far the most important, the most essential aspect of any business. People are also the hardest to find a perfect fit, but successful leaders know how to attract and focus on the right people in the right way.

Tali Rapaport is the co-founder of Puck, the people-first recruiting CRM. Puck helps businesses tell their team’s story and hire better, faster. Prior to Puck, she was the VP of Product at Lyft for nearly four years. During her tenure, Lyft grew 20x to become a big part of how people get around in North America. In 2017, Tali was named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People. She graduated from Harvard College with an AB in Applied Math and a Master’s in Environmental Engineering. She was on the Dean’s Cabinet for Harvard’s Engineering School from 2018-2020.

Tali worked with Lyft when they were in the middle of onboarding a million drivers. She witnessed the human side of employment and the reasons that people are motivated to take on this kind of work. Flexibility in scheduling and access to easier, reliable technology are still two of the major sticking points that are keeping people from getting hired and getting a job done. Getting inside the head of your prospective employee is essential to meeting people where they are and understanding what they need from their employer.

A recruiter’s job today is to sell a brand and experience and to highlight what it means to be part of the tribe of a company. When hiring companies can highlight the motivation of their business with the motivation of the new employee, both are much better off.

When scaling a business, it can be easy to focus on the things that are urgent and forget about the things that are important. Tali shares the experience she had with a Cambridge water study and the lessons she learned about finding new opportunities when they might be least expected.

Interview Links:

Tali Rapaport

Resources:

Scaling For Any Economy

Scaling Coach

Bill on YouTube

Recruiter.com Short List (use code scaleup)

Scaling Up is the best-selling book by Verne Harnish and our team for Scaling Up Coaches (formerly Gazelles). We share how the fastest-growing companies succeed where so many others fail.

Bill Gallagher, Scaling Coach and host of the show, is an international business coach who works with C-Suite leaders to achieve breakthrough growth.

We help leadership teams with the biggest decisions around People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash so that they can Scale Up successfully and beat the odds of business growth. Scaling Up is based on Verne’s original best-selling business book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits.

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Tali Rapaport — People and Time

Scaling Up Business with Bill Gallagher