Adele Mezher

Adele brings to her clients and candidates over three decades of experience in the executive search industry and a track record of successfully completing hundreds of searches across industries, sectors, missions, and functions. She manages a full portfolio of executive search and talent strategy engagements and has introduced new, market‑responsive service offerings and partnership models that keep clients closely supported through search, transition, and culture change. Her clients span global university systems and independent schools to academic medical centers, research institutions, foundations and grantmaking organizations, federated organizations, and nonprofits at pivotal inflection points.

As Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Pearl Street, Adele leads Pearl Street’s search enterprise, scaling a boutique platform to deliver outsized performance. Now as Senior Vice President and Managing Director with Lindauer, she ensures clients benefit from the combined research capabilities, talent networks, and executive search services that Lindauer and Pearl Street bring to the nonprofit sector.

The first half of Adele’s career was spent implementing strategies for media relations, new market entry, and practice expansion as head of Marketing for multiple Top 10 for-profit search firms and an international search and M&A advisory firm. She also carried a portfolio of CEO and VP-level searches for Fortune 500 and venture/private-equity backed technology and manufacturing clients. Responding to her own mission drive, she found herself transitioning to the nonprofit sector, where she has spent the last 15-plus years building an expertise in CEO and advancement and development searches.

Adele’s hallmark is a hands-on model. She personally recruits on her client engagements so that she can directly take their opportunity to market and guide conversations with candidates who value her career counsel. A student of human behavior, she directs the search process with highly developed instincts, emotional intelligence, and expert pacing. Her sincere interest in people means that she engages with openness and a natural warmth that builds confidence among hiring teams and talent alike.

Her interest in advancing mission driven work was borne of her own family’s search for a better life. As a child, they fled civil war in the Middle East to settle north of Boston, in a vibrant community known for its culturally diverse population as well as its poverty rate and the barriers to success that creates. Those life experiences created within her a drive to advocate for access to opportunity. Of the 100 searches that she completed in the last five years, more than 40% of her placements represented leaders who were underrecognized in their prior roles.

In addition to advancing access through her daily work, she finds significant opportunity in her volunteer roles as an academic mentor with SquashBusters Lawrence and advisory board member to Aaron’s Presents. The proud daughter of schoolteachers, Adele is an Instructor for Boston University’s Certificate in Fundraising Program. Occasionally you’ll see her pinch-hitting as a substitute teacher at her high school alma mater, the Greater Lawrence Technical School, where the teenagers give her the education. She is a member of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, BoardSource, SHRM, and Women in Development-Boston, and both a member and mentor of Women of Color in Fundraising & Philanthropy.

A lifelong learner, Adele is often refreshing her language skills or taking a course to satisfy her interests in human resources, sociology, and psychology. During off hours, she can be found literally running after her four-time marathoner husband and picking up shiny trinkets that her beloved rescue cats Vincent and Mia have pushed off tabletops.