HR in an Engineering Company Is a Specific Challenge

Most HR roles involve finding people who can do a job and creating conditions in which they are willing to keep doing it. In an engineering company, those two tasks carry a layer of complexity that general HR experience doesn’t fully prepare you for. The people you are looking for are not just capable – they need to be capable of operating in a technically demanding environment, holding themselves to a high standard without constant oversight, and functioning well in a team where the work is detailed, the stakes are real, and the margin for error is narrow.

Getting that consistently right requires more than a reliable recruitment process. It requires genuine judgment about people – the ability to distinguish between someone who presents well and someone who will actually perform under pressure, between someone who is technically competent and someone who will be a useful part of a working team. And it requires the kind of curiosity about people that makes it possible to keep developing that judgment rather than relying on pattern recognition that stops updating.

Olena Onufriienko has both. She studied at the Kyiv Economic Institute of Management, but the more interesting part of her story is what she has built with that foundation in the specific context of an engineering services company.

What the Role Actually Involves

The description of Olena’s role at GFE Solutions – the person who decides who belongs on the team, and then makes sure they actually want to stay – is more precise than it might initially appear. Both halves of that description represent distinct and demanding responsibilities, and both require a different kind of attention.

The first half – deciding who belongs on the team – means identifying engineers and technical specialists who will be effective in the GFE working environment specifically, not just in engineering environments generally. The company works on projects that require people to take genuine ownership of their scope, integrate into client teams, and maintain quality standards without a supervisor reviewing every output. The technical capability is a baseline. The question that matters for selection is whether a person will actually function well under those conditions – and that question is rarely answered definitively by a CV or a standard interview.

The second half – making sure people actually want to stay – is where a lot of HR functions underperform, because it requires sustained attention to individual people rather than periodic engagement. Olena’s approach is shaped by something that distinguishes her from many people in HR roles: a personal interest in medicine and human health that extends beyond professional requirement into genuine curiosity. She finds the subject compelling in its own right, and that interest quietly shapes how she thinks about the people she works with – not just whether they are performing, but whether they are actually doing well, and whether the environment around them makes sense for the kind of person they are.

The Connection Between Curiosity and Good HR

There is a meaningful difference between HR practice that is built on process and HR practice that is built on genuine interest in people. Process-driven HR produces consistent outcomes on the dimensions that processes are designed to measure. It handles compliance, structures onboarding, runs performance review cycles, and manages the administrative dimension of employment competently. What it tends to miss are the things that don’t show up in structured data – the person who is performing adequately but is quietly disengaged, the team dynamic that is functioning but is more fragile than it appears, the individual who has the capability to take on significantly more responsibility but hasn’t been given the opportunity.

Curiosity-driven HR catches more of those things, because the person practising it is paying attention at a different level. Olena’s interest in human health – in what makes people function well, what depletes them, and what conditions support wellbeing rather than just performance – gives her a framework for thinking about the people she works with that goes beyond the professional dimension. It is not a clinical interest. It is the orientation of someone who finds people genuinely interesting and has developed a substantive body of knowledge about what affects how they operate.

In an engineering company that depends on people performing well under sustained pressure and maintaining high standards across long projects, that orientation is not a soft benefit. It is directly relevant to the quality of the team and the durability of the working relationships that hold the organisation together.

Outside of Work

Outside of work, Olena hikes and cycles. It is a combination that makes sense for someone who spends her working days thinking carefully about other people and knows when she needs to step away from that. Both activities involve being in motion, being outside, and directing attention toward something that is entirely different from the analytical and interpersonal demands of HR work. The reset they provide is not incidental – it is the kind of deliberate self-management that tends to characterise people who sustain demanding professional roles over the long term without burning out.

It is also, in a small way, consistent with the interest in human health that shapes how she approaches her work. Someone who thinks seriously about what conditions support wellbeing tends to apply that thinking to their own life as well as to the people around them. In Olena’s case, that shows up in how she works, in what she pays attention to, and in how she spends the time that isn’t spent working.