Q: Can you talk a little about your professional journey with Amrop?

A: I joined Amrop Ukraine in 2018 as an intern and was fortunate to gain valuable experience from the start. This helped me learn the firm’s culture and envision my future here. Over the years, I’ve progressed through roles such as research analyst, project manager, part of Amrop Explorers Team, consultant, principal, and up to my current partner role. For the last two years, I’ve also been actively involved in business development, successfully onboarding clients, especially in the Tech sector.

I enjoy working across a wide range of industries, including Banking, Digital, Crypto, Fintech, B2B Tech, Wellness Tech, Cyber Security, and Software Development & R&D. I’ve also gained exposure to Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, Defense, FMCG, and Pharmaceuticals, which has broadened my understanding of sourcing and tailoring unique and out-of-the-box recruitment strategies. I’ve handled public sector and international assignments across Europe and Asia, such as a COO search for a crypto mining company originating in the CIS region and expanding into the U.S. This role required a strong industry track record and cultural expertise. I have dozens of other unique cases when seeking unicorns transformed into inspiring growth leadership for both our client company and the candidate. Overall, my journey at Amrop has been diverse and enriching, continuously expanding my expertise across industries, markets, and cultures.

Q: All in all, your career has developed on the backdrop of not only COVID-19 but also the war in Ukraine. You could say this could be a separate entry on the CV in its own right… How has it been working under such incredibly challenging circumstances in Ukraine?

A: I’ve been working in this business since 2018, but I’d say there are two main contexts. One is the overall regional context: Ukraine, Europe, and the global market have been changing significantly.

Personally, I wouldn’t describe any year since I joined the organization as quiet - we've always been focused on building and rebuilding to stay competitive. That’s part of our core values, including agility. As for COVID-19, it definitely influenced our work because it made everything less predictable. However, here at Amrop Ukraine we were somewhat fortunate because we received a few assignments in banking that helped us survive through that initial phase.

Q: Were you part of the PrivatBank project that started in 2020? Amrop Ukraine assisted with the recruitment of 5 core members of the bank’s IT leadership team, which just after the beginning of the full-scale war, under the guidance of the COO at the time Mariusz K. Kaczmarek, completed a Cloud migration of its whole operation in only 30 days – that was an unprecedented feat, which many other Amrop clients globally wanted to hear more about.

A: Yes, that was truly unprecedented, and we really could be proud of having played our role in such a fantastic accomplishment. I have worked with PrivatBank projects from my early start in the company in the role of a researcher and continued as a consultant, driving excellence and successful delivery. So, yes, I did work on those impressive searches in 2020. This was an interesting period, and it helped us navigate the unpredictability, especially in the first few months when everything was very uncertain due to pandemic lockdowns. That was also the time when clients really started making decisions online. Before that, interviews and meetings still took place in person - candidates coming to the office, clients visiting, or onsite visits. Surprisingly, this approach worked quite well and has become a continued practice. Most of the people we hired for the bank are still working there. So, while COVID-19 did have an impact, it wasn’t as significant as one might think. But that cannot be compared with the uncertainty about what to do next that hit us all when the war started.

Q: Where were you and what did you do?

A: I was in Kyiv and stayed there until the third day of the war; then I tried to get home to Ivano-Frankivsk by train, which took about 28 hours. All trains were full, and my train was the last one to leave that day, so the crowd at the platform was enormous; we had to wait for 3 or 4 hours to depart. The first days, of course, shook us all, but I soon realized that work can really help me. Work for me has always been something that helps maintain stability. At first, I was, like everyone else, watching interviews and videos on what’s going on, but after a couple of days, I started contacting candidates whom I worked with and all client leads. My idea was to just make sure everyone was ok, as that was the only thing I could do. I really wrote to everyone I had been in touch with. After a while, I was able to start thinking again about business.

Of course, 2022 was hard for us from a business perspective too, but we got some assignments from clients we’d worked with before and who were not heavily impacted by war, mostly international searches. Afterwards we started receiving assignments from the public sector – state-owned enterprises, and that helped us a lot. Even and perhaps especially during wartime, it was clear that these large companies needed proper governance, proper supervisory boards, and we were able to help. Amrop has a very strong position in the market, a strong reputation, and it’s clear that we are able to get the seat at the table even when the stakes are very high.