TRANSEARCH Opens New Offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town
September 23, 2016 – TRANSEARCH International has opened two offices in Johannesburg and Cape Town.
The Johannesburg team is headed up by Zinhle Matentji, who will serve as chief executive officer of the new location. She has a strong focus on financial services, consumer, retail, petrochemical, logistics /supply chain, mining and chemicals.
With over 16 years of experience in the executive search industry, Ms. Zinhle founded her own executive search business, SearchSpecifics, in 2005. The firm placed board level and C-suite executives in South Africa and across the African continent. Prior to that, she served as an account executive with Fusion Search. Ms. Zinhle will be primarily responsible for the organization’s strategic direction, and positioning its team both locally and internationally.
The Cape Town team is led by Gerrit Wahl, who has retained the title of managing partner. Mr. Wahl is an experienced executive search consultant and has worked on more than 100 search assignments in South Africa and Sub-Sahara Africa, in almost all industries and functional roles, for global, regional and local clients.
He was previously a partner in the executive search division of Adcorp Holdings Limited, one of the largest human capital groups in Africa. Following the merger of the division with Search Partners International, he served as a partner until establishing his own boutique search firm, Executive Search International, in Cape Town. Prior to entering the recruitment field, he held positions from intern level to board level in the human capital field.
Booming Business
The economy of Africa consists of trade, industry and agriculture. According to recruiters expanding in the region, business is booming and a number of search firms therefore have continued their migration to the continent.
South Africa has a mixed economy, the second largest in Africa after Nigeria. Despite this, South Africa is still burdened by a relatively high rate of poverty and unemployment, and is also ranked in the top 10 countries in the world for income inequality. However, South Africa is a popular tourist destination, and a substantial amount of revenue comes from tourism.
TRANSEARCH has recently been seen expanding in various other regions around the globe:
- Just recently, TRANSEARCH added Michael Catlow as a senior consultant in Melbourne, Australia. He has 30 years of experience in operational and strategic management. Mr. Catlow was managing director of Boyden in Australia, where he completed and led executive searches across the APAC region, focusing mainly on board positions. He chaired both the firm’s global compliance committee and its mining and resources industries practice group;
- The firm also launched a new office in Strasbourg, France with the addition of consultants from Neuman & Partners France. Marie-Helene Sohler and Gonzalo de Pedro joined TRANSEARCH as managing directors, along with their support team of executive search professionals. Both recruiters were part of Neumann & Partners, a firm that was acquired by now-defunct CTPartners and subsequently acquired by Chicago-based DHR International as part of its asset acquisition of CTPartners last year;
- At the beginning of the year, the firm added Vanessa Fisk and Jack Khabbaz to its Middle East team as search consultants. Ms. Fisk, who joined TRANSEARCH in Dubai, has extensive experience across the financial services sector, holding a variety of C-suite positions in a number of global institutions in both advanced financial centers as well as emerging and underdeveloped markets. Mr. Khabbaz, who is a senior client partner in Dubai, has 16 years of recruitment, consulting and commercial experience across Australia and the UAE working on both the client and supplier side.
Contributed by Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor, Hunt Scanlon Media