Maurine Opar

Maurine A. Opar Email: - LinkedIn Lavington, Nairobi Kenya Mobile; - /-; - An accomplished Global Head hunter & HR Leader with extensive exposure across Africa, US, Europe & Asia driving various Talent programs and engagement initiatives while playing a critical role in championing growth in people to succeed in demanding & complex environments. I have gained substantial experience both at corporate & consulting capacity within multiple sectors; IT & Fintech, Financial Services, Education, Manufacturing, Aviation, FMCG and Digital Business/Tech solutions. With deep Talent insight & knowledge across Africa & EMEA growth markets, I have supported placement and executive search in some of the most difficult geographies to find talent; like Angola, Mozambique, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Brazil, Tanzania, Equatorial Guinea, Cape Verde and Mali – in addition to other emerging markets. Passionate about shaping and inspiring possibilities through coaching and mentorship to unlock potential for excellence in others. Core competencies are: Strategic Talent expertise & Organizational development, Professional Development, Coaching & Mentoring, Solid Interpersonal & communication Skills, Executive Search/Headhunting, Project Management, HR Consulting & Advisory, Business Partnership & Relationship Management, HR Service Delivery, People, Change & Culture Alignment. Pula Advisors July 2022 to Date Director, Talent Acquisition - Global Expansion (Africa, SE Asia, LATAM) As Director of People & Talent, I serve as the gatekeeper of our company’s culture & values, while working to provide an incredible experience & growth trajectory for all Pula Advisors employees. In this role, my day-to-day responsibilities involve driving recruitment of rockstar talent, creating & executing an incredible onboarding experience for new employees, managing all our employee success and growth initiatives, supporting and coaching managers on leadership, and ensuring that our end-to-end HR processes are both executed in a compliant manner and prepared to scale. Key Achievements; Served as business leader to fully configure and roll out the organization's first global people system, a global ATS. Examined organization’s recruiting spend by examining funds spent on TA staff, sourcing, and assessment. Led expansion into Latin America - Mexico and Brazil (setting up office and hiring over 30 resources) Led the expansion hires across Africa and set up Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Mauritius, Mozambique, Malawi & Tanzania. Lead 6-member global talent acquisition team located in Asia, Europe, Middle-East, and East & West Africa. Developed initiatives to diversify talent pools, reduce time-to-fill, improve candidate assessment, train hiring managers, and build capacity among country based HR officers and recruiters. NewGlobe Education July 2020 to June 2022 Director, Talent Acquisition - Global Expansion (Africa, SE Asia, US, UK) NewGlobe supports visionary governments to transform public education systems. With a comprehensive system transformation platform and data-driven educational services, NewGlobe delivers rapid and dramatic improvements in learning outcomes at state and nationwide scale. Our high growth talent acquisition group drives hiring globally - focussed on sites across Africa, the US, the UK and Asia. I joined NewGlobe in 2020 – tasked with overhauling the Talent Acquisition group and leading expansion in all new territories and government partnerships. This involves specific projects around leading Talent Acquisition strategy and implementation, talent analytics and employer branding globally – with operations spanning Africa, the US, UK and Asia. Key Achievements; Led TA function growth from a team of 2 to 15 staff across the globe, while volume of hiring tripled since 2020. Worked to structure and build the function to support NewGlobes's growth into the future, including investing in candidate sourcing and employment branding efforts - which were new to the organization. Continuously examined and trained on NewGlobe's assessment methodologies including fighting bias within the process. Led expansions and hires across Rwanda, Nigeria, Pakistan, India and Ghana. Have prioritized diversity and globally dispersing jobs that have typically been based in the US, into other markets around the world. Building awareness and consideration for hiring in markets in the US, UK, Europe, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East. Developed career video and launched career fairs. Filled global roles and regional roles in 14 countries up to date.Increased volume of jobs filled by 44.5 percent. Reduced time by 42 percent. Built in-house sourcing team in response to market changes. Working to find the best talent as quickly as possible to reduce vacancy lag and to get ahead of the hiring requests that we know will service across our 20+ countries. SolarNow BV. (Shell Global Subsidiary) June 2019 to July 2020 Director of People & Talent – Kenya, Uganda & Nigeria My role as Director of People & Talent was to lead the people strategy including employee experience, engagement, retention, company culture and values by partnering with the leadership team in building a world-class people function that will support our ambitious plans for growth and expansion. l worked with all areas of the business, serving as a strategic consultant and Human Resources expert to help drive the delivery of our business objectives. Key Achievements: Restructured the Board and team with the buy out from Shell Global. I was responsible for a lean team and creating all policies and implementation with the new structure on board. I reduced operational HR cost by 56% by focusing on reducing overhead costs and expenditure. Magnate Ventures Ltd July 2017 to January 2019 Head of Human Resource (Kenya, Uganda and South Sudan) A strategic Senior Partner in Talent Management, spearheading the development of a total HR strategy for a staff complement of 500 across 3 countries in Africa, as well as providing executive level HR direction, strategy and counsel for over 300 employees. Strategy: Developed the group HR Strategy Document by year end and implemented about 65% of the adopted recommendations in Year 1. . Negotiated Robust staff retention benefits at highly discounted rates e.g. New superior Year 2018 Group Life /GPA /WIBA cover, Medical cover that included Families with superior benefits at 27% (12 Million) premium reduction. Policies Developed: Designed & Cascaded the Performance Management and departmental PIP policy, Call Out and On Call Policy, Prolonged sick leave policy, Telephone Policy, Bonus Policy and Equity computation framework driven by business performance. Techno Brain Group Sept 2013 – to July 2017 Regional Expansion Talent Head – 28 African countries (Based in Nairobi, Kenya) Leading Technical Talent strategy & sourcing initiatives/campaigns within TBG’s most dynamic growth markets in Africa. I was focused on Tech hires and retention. I was in charge of expansion to 23 countries across Africa. Key Achievements: I led all talent acquisition, employer branding and retention activities at TechnoBrain. I was the first ever talent leader joining after the Series A round. Managing a growing recruiting and people operations team that grew to 13 and across 28 countries. I was responsible for building all people's processes, tools and strengthening the employer brand and scaling across markets. I've led growth, leading a people team to delivering approximately 400 full time employees in FY '17 alone in Pricing, Sales, Operations, Guest Experience, Finance, Tech. I've also tried my hand at most other generalist tasks: HR Operations, Compensation & Benefits, Employee Relations. I implemented a variety of HR systems that enable greater efficiency given TechnoBrain's hypergrowth: Greenhouse (ATS), HiBob (HRIS), Lessonly (LMS). We scaled rapidly in just three years to be the African leader with international teams in offices in major destinations - Kenya, Zambia, South Africa, Nigeria, Liberia, Ghana, Dubai and India. Fortitude PMC - Recruiting for Banking, FMCG, Insurance and Tech) June 2010 – to August 2013: Talent Sourcing Leader Responsible for the MEA hub in driving Talent CoE process & acquisition across emerging markets within the African & Middle East Markets (Nigeria, Kenya, Angola, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, UAE, Qatar, Pakistan & Iraq) Barclays Bank - Kitale Branch June 2008 – to August 2010: Responsible for the sales of Loans and Accounts. Educational Background: Bachelor’s Degree – Human Resource (Second Class Honors) Professional Memberships, Awards & Other Engagements Institute of Human Resource Management (KE) – Full Member Kenya Institute of Management (Full member) Certificate of Achievement: Exemplary performance in Championing Growth in people, 2015-TBG Referees Available Upon Request