Olha Buzovska

A Linguist, a Blacklist, and a First Placement That Lasted a Decade

Her degree was in linguistics. As she was finishing university, a small company in Florida was hiring recent graduates into recruiting, so she applied, went through the process, and joined. The training was good, and somewhere inside it she recognized something about herself. She liked talking to people. She liked finding opportunities for them.

Her first real test came in the form of an account nobody wanted. One of her earliest clients sat on her firm's internal blacklist, written off as a company that would never actually hire. Buzovska worked it anyway and found a genuine, urgent need for strong logistics managers. She made two placements there. Both of those hires stayed with the company for roughly ten years.

That detail is the one she still returns to. Not the fee, not the difficulty of the account, but the fact that two people built decade-long careers out of work she did as a beginner. "Seeing the result and knowing that people that I placed there were happy with their jobs, they got what they wanted, was kind of it for me," she says. It is the reason she has stayed in the profession.

Hiring the People Who Create the Hiring

Most recruiters measure themselves in requisitions closed. Buzovska learned to measure herself against the growth curve. Her mandate at SoftServe centered on sales hires, and in a year when the company completed something on the order of 5,000 hires, she understood where her piece sat in the sequence. "I just knew that people that I brought to the company was the reason why we were hiring more, more and more," she says. Fill the commercial roles well, and demand arrives for engineers, delivery leaders, and everyone downstream of the work those salespeople win.

That framing changes how a leader behaves. Scale, in her telling, is not simply a bigger number of openings; it is what happens when the people you place go on to expand the organization around them. She calls the growth she watched substantial, then corrects herself upward: exponential. Her word for the volume of that peak year is tremendous, and she does not say it as a boast. She says it as a description of what a recruiting team can set in motion when it is aimed at the right roles.

The Case for Recruiting as a Sales Discipline

Buzovska is refreshingly unsentimental about the mechanics of the work. Talent acquisition, in her framing, is largely sales, and it operates on three fronts at once. You sell yourself to the hiring managers. You sell your candidates. Then you sell the company to those candidates. Communication, persuasion, and networking are not soft extras layered on top of the job. They are the job.

For someone else that might read as a burden. For her it is the appeal. "That is exactly what drives me," she says. She likes meeting new people, and the compounding effect of a wide network is precisely what makes difficult roles fillable.

The Manager Who Widened the Lens

When Buzovska joined SoftServe, one of her first questions to her new manager was blunt: once I have staffed these positions, what comes next? The answer reshaped her career. Instead of a list of openings, she got an overview of how the company was growing, and the point that in a large, expanding organization the opportunity for an ambitious recruiter is effectively limitless. Join a startup, she notes, and there is a certain percentage of growth you can expect. Join a company that is scaling, and the ceiling keeps moving.

That manager is approaching a decade with SoftServe and led the transformation of its recruitment function. Buzovska is careful with the credit: not built from scratch, she says, but genuinely transformed. Many of the practices the company relies on today, and the way those practices are run, trace back to her manager's work. The two spent several years working hand in hand, and in that period Buzovska scaled inside the company and grew her own team.

The lesson she took from it is the one she now passes on. A good manager does not just hand you targets. They show you how your work moves the business, and what that movement means for you personally.

She is equally quick to spotlight peers. One colleague, now with the Ukraine-based services provider Brightgrove, she describes as crazy about AI and rigorous in his approach to sourcing and recruitment; he is pursuing a PhD on AI in recruitment, and she believes his best work is still ahead of him. Another recruitment lead she works alongside is her example of senior search done properly: dedicated, focused on high-level roles, and able to get people who usually talk to no one to talk to him. He is also, she says, "a wizard" at presenting data to stakeholders, and the finalists at the bottom of his funnel are as keen to be in the room as the company is to have them there.

Where AI Helps, and Where It Stops

Buzovska reads the arrival of AI in recruiting as a positive change, and her reasoning is candidate-centered rather than cost-centered. The clearest gain, she argues, is experience: faster answers from the company, basic pre-screening handled without delay, automated follow-ups that actually happen. Candidates who are not a fit can see it immediately, on the strength of a simple screening, instead of waiting on a conversation that was never going to go anywhere. Nobody's time gets wasted, on either side.

She draws the line at the bottom of the funnel. When you are down to a single finalist, negotiating and making certain that person is genuinely excited to join, she does not believe AI will do it well. She is direct about it: AI will not replace recruiters one hundred percent. That final stretch is human work, and she expects it to stay that way.

People Hire People

Her advice to talent leaders reflects both halves of that position. Use the tools. She is firmly in favor of anything that speeds up the process and makes life easier for a recruitment team, and she sees AI as something that can strengthen a team rather than shrink it. But the decision about how far to push automation should be governed by one principle, which she states without hedging: people hire people. That, she says, is what companies need to keep in view as they decide how to use AI in their processes.

It is a conviction she earned in stages. It goes back to a blacklisted account, two logistics managers who stayed ten years, and the recognition during her very first training program that this work is fundamentally about conversation. Everything she has built since, including a team of 11 and a hand in thousands of hires, rests on that.