There is a moment Alyssa Klimuszka has spoken about more than once, and it tells you almost everything you need to know about why she chose this career and how she operates within it.
Early in her career, she was working in recruiting and staffing, a role that kept her available around the clock, when she found herself in one of the most difficult conversations she had ever had to navigate professionally. A contractor in her care was struggling, and the situation required the kind of direct, emotionally demanding engagement that most people avoid. The conversation was hard. What happened afterward was not.
“It was an emotional conversation, but this individual became one of the most devoted and hardworking employees I have ever worked with,” she has said. “When I resigned and left that position, this contractor sat me down and told me that I had changed their life forever. It was at that moment I knew I was going down the right path.”
That moment, one contractor, one conversation, one life redirected, is the foundation on which Alyssa Klimuszka built everything that followed. Today, she is the Founder and President of HerHR Solutions, LLC, a Western New York-based HR consulting firm delivering strategic human resources leadership across manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, information technology, and financial services, with clients spanning multiple locations across the United States and internationally in Europe and Asia. She reached executive-level HR leadership before the age of 30, was featured on the cover of CIO Views Magazine in 2023, and was selected for inclusion in Marquis Who’s Who in 2025. These recognitions speak to both the speed of her trajectory and the breadth of her impact.
She is, by any measure, one of the most distinctive HR leaders in Western New York. And she is only getting started.
Grown in Lancaster, Shaped by Entrepreneurship
Alyssa Klimuszka grew up in Lancaster, New York, a community in Erie County just outside Buffalo, in a household that gave her an unusually clear view of what it takes to build something from nothing. Her parents built a business from scratch, and she watched that process up close from an early age. The perseverance, the setbacks, the discipline of showing up every day for something you have chosen to create, these were not abstract lessons. They were the atmosphere of her childhood.
That environment instilled in her what she has described as an unwavering determination and the unshakeable belief that through hard work and diligent effort, anything can be accomplished. It also planted, early, the entrepreneurial instinct that would eventually lead her to found her own firm. She did not grow up thinking she would work for someone else forever. She grew up watching what ownership looked like and deciding she wanted it.
She pursued that path with intention. At the University at Buffalo, she earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Human Resources Management in 2015, graduating from the same institution where she would later return as an active volunteer mentor, helping current students navigate the transition from campus to career. During her time at UB, she served as a note taker for the Accessibility Resource Center and as a student mentor for the School of Management Career Resource Center, early expressions of a service orientation that has remained consistent throughout her professional life.
Building the Foundation: From Recruiting to Executive Leadership
Alyssa Klimuszka’s post-graduation career was characterised by deliberate, rapid progression, the kind that comes from understanding not just what a role requires but why it exists and how it connects to every other part of an organisation.
She began in recruiting at Aerotek in 2017, an entry point that gave her something most HR professionals spend years trying to acquire: a ground-level understanding of the actual work being performed inside the organisations she served. Recruiting is where HR meets operational reality, where you learn quickly what a job actually demands versus what a job description says it does. That knowledge became the substrate on which everything else was built.
From Aerotek, she moved into a Regional Supervisor role at Superior Group from 2016 to 2017 and then to Human Resources Coordinator at Rummel, Klepper & Kahl, the engineering and infrastructure firm known as RK&K, from 2017 to 2020. At RK&K, she expanded her HR scope into reporting, benefits administration, and the operational infrastructure that turns HR from a reactive function into a proactive one. The work that accelerated her career most she has said was learning to map processes and conduct large-scale project implementation, the moment when she saw clearly how HR connects to every facet of an organisation, not just the people side of it.
By the time she joined 22nd Century Group, Inc. as Senior Human Resources Manager, the role that brought her national recognition via the CIO Views Magazine cover feature in 2023, she had already become an HR executive before her thirtieth birthday. At 22nd Century, she oversaw all HR operations across the company’s divisions, including strategic planning, organisational development, and day-to-day HR functions. Her team implemented a new HRIS and payroll platform that revolutionised administrative processes by integrating multiple functions into a single system. She created a comprehensive professional development programme that expanded growth opportunities for staff across the company. And she forged a partnership with an international benefits broker that, alongside strategic workforce engagement, drove a 50 percent increase in the company’s overall headcount. This metric sits at the intersection of HR strategy and commercial outcomes and illustrates precisely the kind of contribution that positions HR as a strategic business function rather than an administrative one.
Her credentials deepened alongside her operational experience. She earned her SHRM-CP, the Society for Human Resource Management Certified Professional designation and the industry’s leading operational HR credential, in 2019. She also holds a Certificate in Compensation Analysis and Studies from Cornell University, a qualification that gave her the quantitative grounding to approach compensation strategy with the same rigour she brought to every other area of her practice.
Founding HerHR Solutions: A Firm Built for the Market Gap
Alyssa Klimuszka founded HerHR Solutions, LLC to address a problem she had observed consistently across her career: small and mid-sized businesses, across virtually every sector, carry significant HR risk while simultaneously lacking the budget and scale to justify a full-time senior HR function. The result is a structural gap, organisations making consequential decisions about people, compliance, and culture without the expertise those decisions require.
HerHR Solutions fills that gap. The firm offers HR consulting, large-scale HR project implementation, compliance and risk mitigation, executive and leadership coaching, and policy creation, a service architecture designed to give clients access to executive-level HR thinking without the overhead of a permanent hire. Alyssa Klimuszka works directly with management and ownership teams to understand their personnel needs, crafts tailored proposals, and then puts those proposals into action.
The firm’s client base spans manufacturing, healthcare, professional services, information technology, and financial services, a breadth that reflects both Alyssa Klimuszka’s cross-sector experience and the universality of the underlying challenge. Whether a company makes physical products, delivers clinical care, or manages data infrastructure, its people are its most consequential resource, and the decisions made about hiring, culture, compliance, and development ripple through every other part of the business.
Her approach is grounded in a conviction she has articulated clearly: true success is not measured by individual accomplishments but by the accomplishments of the team and the organisation she serves. Her goal as a leader is not to meet expectations but to surpass them, to treat the minimum required as a floor, not a destination. That standard applies to herself as much as to the clients she serves.
What distinguishes HerHR Solutions in the market is Alyssa Klimuszka’s particular combination of operational precision and human sensitivity. A colleague who worked closely with her has described her as someone who paints a clear picture of the future state, showing leaders and employees what improved results will look like, and then thoughtfully guides them through the change so they feel part of the solution rather than having change done to them. Her attention to compliance and risk is exceptional; she consistently anticipates gaps before they become issues and ensures that policy, practice, and systems align. And she never loses sight, that same colleague noted, of the human element that sits at the centre of good HR.
A Voice in the Profession, Not Just a Practitioner
One of the more distinctive aspects of Alyssa Klimuszka’s career is her active engagement in the broader HR profession as a voice, an educator, and a standard-setter alongside her client work.
She is a member of the National Human Resources Association of Western New York and the Society for Human Resource Management and is actively involved in the National Society of Collegiate Scholars. She volunteers regularly with the University at Buffalo’s Career Resource Center, providing students with real-world perspective on the HR profession and the job market, a direct expression of the mentorship instinct that has been present throughout her career.
Her LinkedIn presence is notable not for self-promotion but for the quality of its professional content. She publishes regular analysis on HR strategy, compliance trends, workforce dynamics, and the evolving relationship between human resources and organisational performance, and she does so with a directness and specificity that has built a following of HR professionals and business leaders who treat her commentary as a reliable signal in a noisy space.
She has also been willing to engage with difficult institutional conversations. When questions arose about SHRM’s commitment to the DEI principles that are central to the HR profession, Alyssa Klimuszka responded publicly with a nuance that is rare: holding the organisation accountable while refusing to dismiss the educational value of its resources, because principles, she argued, do not disappear when an organisation steps away from them. It was the kind of statement that requires both conviction and clarity, and it reflected the same qualities that define her client work.
The Vision Ahead
The near-term ambition Alyssa Klimuszka has described is clear and specific: to build HerHR Solutions into the trusted HR partner of choice across Western New York, with a longer-term aspiration of expanding to the national level. The trajectory of the firm, its cross-sector client base, its international reach, and its growing regional reputation, suggests that ambition is well within reach.
The larger ambition, though, is harder to quantify and more important. It is the ambition of a leader who began her career watching an employee’s life change because someone in HR chose to have a difficult conversation with genuine care, and who has spent every year since building organisations, systems, and relationships designed to make that kind of outcome not the exception but the norm.
HR is not, in Alyssa Klimuszka’s understanding, the function you send people to when they are upset. It is the function that shapes whether an organisation is worth working for in the first place. That belief, held consistently since her earliest days in recruiting, deepened through every role she has held and every client she has served, is what drives HerHR Solutions. And it is why the people who work with Alyssa Klimuszka tend to stay.
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