Syntegrus founder Tarek Zacharia
Tarek is the Managing Partner and Founder of Syntegrus and has more than two decades of international experience in ‘Big 5’ executive search industry-leading corporates in the UK and the Middle East.
Having held various senior resourcing and talent acquisition leadership roles, he has an exemplary track record of defining the talent acquisition strategy and leading complex end-to-end resourcing requirements for prominent institutions.
He helps organisations access a vast network of leadership talent on an international scale. Tarek has deep expertise in sourcing, selection and onboarding to secure top-talent board and senior executives across sectors and markets.
History
His formative career was spent with Heidrick & Struggles and Odgers Berndtson in London and Dubai, where he developed multi-year, retained client relationships with the largest government, semi-government and private sector institutions across financial services, technology, telecommunications, and industrials. He achieved outstanding completion rates, originating and delivering some of the most complex, high-profile engagements of the period.
He subsequently joined leading alternative asset management company, Gulf Capital Pvt JSC, establishing their Human Capital function from the group up with best practice policies, processes, and procedures across the full employee lifecycle. He led successful recruitment of key strategic talent, including Managing Director level members of Post-Acquisition and Investment teams, conducted extensive human capital due diligence at pre- and post-acquisition stages across the firm’s portfolio companies, and developed the firm’s carried interest structure as a key performance incentive and retention tool.
Tarek returned to consultancy, launching Zacharia & Partners with operations in London and Dubai, where he led cross-border engagements for the world’s largest financial services, oil and gas, and industrial players, and forged a strategic alliance with the Cornhill Partnership in London as MD of MENA for their financial services arm Correlate Search. He followed this by joining H.I. Executive Consulting, where he set up and led their Dubai and Riyadh operations from scratch, co-originating and delivering multiple Advisory Partner searches for top-tier consulting practices, including EY, PricewaterhouseCoopers, PA Consulting and Accenture.
He then joined Majid Al Futtaim Holding as Director of Talent Acquisition & Human Capital, leading a group-wide sourcing strategy that included three operating companies and 14 subsidiaries, spanning 40,000 employees in 19 locations and 13 countries. He built a culture of talent pipelining that significantly grew bench strength, established and implemented best practices in talent acquisition and onboarding that enhanced recruitment effectiveness and employer branding, and led an end-to-end senior executive hiring process at Holding and OpCo levels, securing top talent leaders across functions and delivering seven-figure cost savings.
Syntegrus
Tarek is now the Managing Partner and Founder of Syntegrus, an innovative Talent Management consultancy that has reverse-engineered the traditional executive search model, enabling companies to source and secure board and C-level executives swiftly and at no cost, and preparing executives for senior leadership positions.
He has built an international portfolio of board and senior executive clients in the UK, UAE, North America and Europe across CEO and C-suite Finance, Risk, Investment, HR, and Transformation roles.
Tarek has a depth and breadth of international experience in securing board and senior executive leaders for highly complex businesses with specialist and generalist talent requirements, and an outstanding record of optimising recruitment efficiency and candidate experience, partnering business leaders to deliver a critical, value-add service.
