Her Story
About Karina
Karina Bensko, SPHR, is a seasoned human resources leader and founder of CultureKrew, where she partners with early-stage founders to solve complex people challenges and scale high-performing teams. Karina fell in love with HR at 19 while studying psychology in college. Initially planning to pursue a career as a therapist, she discovered HR through an introductory business course and was captivated by its history, purpose, and impact on organizations. She pursued further coursework, internships, and community connections, launching a 12-year career that has allowed her to witness HR’s evolution from an operational function to a strategic business engine, central to leadership and organizational success. Before founding CultureKrew in September 2025, Karina held senior HR leadership roles at Boston Medical Center, Brightcove, and Vistaprint, where she led global HR teams, directed organizational transformations, and implemented performance and onboarding strategies for hundreds of employees across multiple regions. Her work consistently balanced operational rigor with cultural care, ensuring organizations could grow efficiently without sacrificing engagement or morale. Karina specializes in organizational design, leadership development, change management, and people strategy, enabling founders and executive teams to translate headcount and talent decisions into measurable business outcomes. At CultureKrew, Karina combines her strategic insight and operational expertise to build tailored HR solutions that scale with a company’s growth. From fractional HR leadership and executive coaching to HR audits and onboarding systems, she helps organizations accelerate without chaos. With a Bachelor of Science in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and a Professional Certificate in Human Resources Management from Champlain College, along with multiple HRCI certifications, Karina continues to champion HR as a central driver of business success. In just seven months since launching her own business, she describes her journey as a “rocket ship,” excited to help leaders maximize their most valuable asset: their people.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Karina
01What do you attribute your success to?
Starting a business that takes a lot of guts to go out on your own and build something really by yourself. But I've been very fortunate to have a whole community of people helping me out.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
You are only in true competition with yourself. What that means is don't look try to follow someone else's path exactly or be distracted by others achievements. Sometimes to be effective, you need a time in the role for a number of years to master the skills before you're ready for the next level. Keep your blinders on, keep looking forward, keep working on your own career, and don't get distracted by how other people are building their careers, or how other people are moving up, because you just don't know what's going on in their growth. So just focus on you and be really good at what you do.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
Own the room. If you have an idea or you have a thought, don't be afraid to voice it - even if you have a question or clarification. I think that there are amazing talented women entering the industry - they are already bold and have such big voices, and I want to make sure that they keep them and don't get intimidated by those other people that are also in the room as well, because we're all figuring it out. You bring some really great experience and perspective too, so bring it, talk about it, ask questions, because you were hired for a reason.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
AI is here, and I think it's figuring out how to use the tool effectively to amplify what teams can actually accomplish without taking people out of the role. That's a big trend I'm seeing - folks trying to use AI in replacement of people, rather than amplifying what the people can do. At the end of the day, AI is a tool, but a lot of people are seeing it as a replacement. I think that's the biggest thing that a lot of HR professionals are trying to grapple with - how to articulate how to actually amplify the work without replacing the people.
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