Yaroslava Pavlenko

HR Director with 10+ years of experience across HR, Talent Acquisition and People Operations. Currently leading HR and Recruitment at Work.ua — #1 job service in Ukraine.

Recent achievements

• Implemented AI-powered HR and recruitment workflows, saving approximately 11 hours monthly across HR operations and 5–10 hours weekly per recruiter • Automated onboarding, offboarding and turnover tracking processes • Built and launched a new careers website from scratch, including employer branding content and candidate communication strategy • Led a large-scale Sales hiring initiative that resulted in 60 Sales Manager hires within six months • Designed and launched company-wide learning initiatives based on employee needs, including programs focused on leadership development, professional growth and strengthening Ukrainian cultural identity Previously led recruitment expansion across 20 countries, delivered 500 hires in Ukraine during wartime, 80 international hires within 2.5 weeks, and coordinated the migration to a new HRM system within one week.

HR Director at Work.ua (2024-12 – Present)

Lead a 17-person HR & Recruitment department supporting 240+ employees. Strategic partner to CEO and leadership team on organizational design, workforce planning and business growth.

• Own the full employee lifecycle, including talent acquisition, onboarding, employee engagement, learning & development and offboarding
• Develop and implement HR OKR aligned with business goals
• Manage HR budget, workforce planning and people-related initiatives
• Lead HR analytics, reporting and decision-making processes
• Manage compensation review cycles, preparing salary analysis and recommendations to support data-driven compensation decisions
• Partner with company leadership on organizational development and people strategy
• Build and develop HR and Recruitment team capabilities
• Oversee employer branding and candidate experience initiatives

Head of Recruitment and HR at Work.ua (2025-03 – 2025-11)

Head of Recruitment at Work.ua (2025-01 – 2025-03)

Head of Recruitment at Mindy Support (2022-07 – 2025-01)

Member of the Management Board, contributing to strategic decisions related to growth, workforce planning, organizational structure and talent strategy.

• Built international recruitment operations from scratch across 20 countries, including market research, hiring strategy and process implementation
• Led and developed a recruitment team across Ukraine, India and other locations (up to 20 people)
• Owned talent acquisition strategy, workforce planning and recruitment delivery for client and internal hiring needs
• Built scalable recruitment processes to support rapid business growth and high-volume hiring
• Managed recruiter performance review, team development and individual learning initiatives
• Personally designed and delivered training for recruiters to improve hiring quality, process consistency and team performance
• Work on retention strategy together with HRD

Recruitment Team Lead at Mindy Support (2020-09 – 2022-06)

• Supervise and develop the recruiting team and report on its performance

Recruitment Lead at Nika Tech Family (2021-10 – 2023-08)

• Building and developing the recruitment function inside a holding and close the positions
• Manage the positions of companies inside the holding
• Monitor the recruitment metrics
• Oversee together with team leads of portfolio companies an allocation of new vacancies among recruiters
• Perform salary benchmarking
• Prepare talent acquisition budget proposition

Higher in Practical psychologist – Grinchenko University (2007 – 2012)