Regional depth.
International best practice.
Henharen Reid is a partner-led firm specialising in executive search, HR advisory and workforce solutions across the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Leadership and workforce
advisory for the
Gulf’s next decade.
The Gulf is in the middle of a period of structural change, and leadership is its greatest challenge.
Across the Gulf, transformation is being executed at a pace few markets have attempted. The constraint is proven senior leadership, and every organisation in the region is competing for the same people.
We built Henharen Reid for this environment. The partner who takes your brief is the partner who runs the search and presents the shortlist. We take on a limited number of mandates at any one time so that this holds on every engagement, and we give clients a realistic view of what a market will support.
Three service lines,
one team.
Executive
Search
Retained, partner-led search for board, chief executive and functional-head appointments, where the cost of a poor appointment is material. One model, applied to every mandate.
→ 02HR
Advisory
A board commits to a multi-year strategy. Does it have the people to deliver it, where is it exposed, and what must be developed or hired? Advisory work built to answer that question and to be owned by your own team once we step back.
→ 03Contract & Interim
Talent Solutions
Workforce structures that allow organisations to begin operating in a new market before the supporting infrastructure is in place.
→Search and advisory,
on one mandate.
Search and advisory are usually sold by different firms. In a regulated institution they arrive together: the rules that govern the leadership team and the appointments into it are settled in the same quarter.
The situation
A Gulf bank was running senior appointments with us when a new regulatory remuneration regime came into force. It carried a fixed filing deadline, an article-by-article assessment of policy, plan rules and contracts, and board-level accountability for the outcome.
What we did
We convened a review committee of practitioners with supervisory and group reward experience, who tested the bank’s position at defined decision points ahead of the filing, while the senior searches continued alongside.
What the client kept
The assessment, the identification method, the proportionality position and the remediation plan were built with the bank’s own HR function, which runs them today. Nothing stayed with us that the bank needed to keep.
The two engagements ran as one. We appointed into the structure while advising on the structure itself, with practitioners who have sat on the supervisory side reviewing the bank’s position before it reached the regulator.
Two markets,
one standard.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia, through a UAE-licensed firm and a Saudi-licensed entity chaired from the Kingdom. One search discipline in both markets, with the candidate population, the regulator and the reward data read separately for each.
United Arab Emirates
The Gulf’s most competitive market for senior talent and its most layered: onshore banks under the Central Bank, DIFC and ADGM institutions under their own regulators, sovereign investors, and family groups professionalising at speed.
Saudi Arabia
Executive search, HR advisory and workforce solutions from one Saudi-licensed entity, chaired from Riyadh by Layth Al-Shaiban, who has spent thirty years leading financial institutions and national programmes in the Kingdom.