About the firm
Caliber Talent Group, established 2020.
Boutique senior search across the Lahore-Dubai-London corridor. Two practices — technology and finance. Eleven people. Three offices.
Founding
Caliber was founded in January 2020 by Faraz Iqbal, then country lead at Hays Pakistan, and Aisha Tanveer, then a senior tech-search consultant at Robert Walters Dubai. The shared founding observation was that the corridor between Pakistan and the GCC had a deep, persistent senior-talent gap that the volume-recruiter model was never going to serve well.
The firm started with a single desk in Gulberg, Lahore, and one open mandate — a Senior Software Engineer brief for a Karachi fintech that the founders had committed to deliver pro-bono to prove the working pattern. That role closed in week eight. The second and third paying retainers came in the same quarter.
Conor Brennan joined as a London affiliate partner in 2022 through Brennan Partners Ltd, anchoring the GBP-paying side of the desk. Imran Mehdi opened the Dubai DMCC office in 2021. Six years on we are eleven people across the three offices.
Our timeline
| 2020 | Firm founded by Faraz Iqbal and Aisha Tanveer in Lahore. |
| 2020 | First paid retainer closed: Senior Software Engineer for a Karachi consumer fintech (week 8). |
| 2021 | Dubai DMCC office opened. Imran Mehdi joined as Senior Consultant, Finance. |
| 2022 | London partnership formed via Brennan Partners Ltd. Conor Brennan joined as Partner. |
| 2023 | Headcount crossed 20 staff. First retainer with a tier-1 Pakistan bank closed. |
| 2024 | First Group CTO retained search closed (11 weeks). Atelier internal screening tool deployed firm-wide. |
| 2025 | Median brief-to-offer drops to 9.4 weeks across 27 retainers. 91% twelve-month retention on placements. |
| 2026 | Crossed 30 staff and 87 closed searches since founding. |
Written commitments
The four things the firm will not do:
- · Run a search before the brief is signed by the budget owner.
- · Subcontract the candidate-facing work on a senior brief to a junior consultant.
- · Use a model or any other automated tool to reach an in-or-out decision on a candidate.
- · Approach a candidate's current employer for a reference before they have an offer in hand.
See the process page for the full discipline. See privacy and terms for the legal framing.
Regulatory and insurance
- · Caliber Talent Group (Pvt.) Ltd. — SECP registration 0182729 (Pakistan)
- · Caliber Talent Group MEA DMCC — DMCC licence DMCC-743219 (Dubai)
- · Brennan Partners Ltd. — Companies House 13412809 (United Kingdom, London affiliate)
- · Professional indemnity cover: Hiscox £8M (Brennan Partners) · AXA AED 4M (DMCC entity)
- · Data controller registrations: ICO (UK) ZB678234, DIFC DPL 5/2020 controller, Pakistan PECA-2016 NTC submission