Dubai-founded firm sets out five pillars that carry engagements beyond recruitment into talent advisory and HR consultancy, cross-border legal coordination, performance coaching and lifestyle support, and expands into the United States, France and Monaco, with offices in Miami and Paris and a presence in Monaco.
Paris, France, 26 October 2026. Qnode Partners, the search and advisory firm founded in Dubai by a recruiter and a trader, has set out an integrated five-pillar model that carries client engagements well past the point at which executive search traditionally ends, in response to institutions recruiting senior finance and technology talent increasingly across borders. The firm’s formula is deliberately simple: search for institutions, advisory for individuals. One firm, one standard of discretion.
The firm was founded in 2024 by François Mégret and Charlotte Gervais, who are married, run the firm as co-chief executives between Dubai, Paris, Monaco and Miami, and came to the business from opposite sides of the hiring market: the desk that hires, and the person being hired.
François Mégret spent fifteen years in commodity and energy markets. He held commodity strategy roles at ArcelorMittal and Schneider Electric before building carbon and grains desks from the ground up for interdealer broker Tradition across the United States, London, the UAE and Singapore, where he led a team of brokers and served as carbon markets lead of the Dubai Sustainable Finance Working Group. He then headed gas and carbon trading at First Abu Dhabi Bank, the UAE’s largest bank, running proprietary and systematic strategies across European and global energy markets, before leaving the bank in August 2026 to lead Qnode full time. His market analysis has been published in the Financial Times, Khaleej Times, Newsweek and HackerNoon, and he has spoken at COP28, Carbon Forward London and Abu Dhabi Sustainable Finance Week.
What the trading floor left him is not a method but a vantage point. He has been recruited, he has recruited, and he has built trading desks from nothing in four countries. Qnode is that vantage point turned into a firm: humans recruiting humans, with the targeting precision of a trading desk and the service standard of a luxury Maison.
Charlotte Gervais came to search from inside the industries she now recruits for. She spent close to a decade in luxury and beauty, in retail, merchandising and global marketing roles at groups including L’Oréal, across Paris and London, before founding CG Talents in Dubai five years ago. She built it without outside capital into a global talent boutique serving luxury Maisons, hospitality groups, technology companies and private clients, with embedded human-resources mandates inside some of the world’s largest luxury groups, and is a recipient of a Dubai Entrepreneurship Award. From her comes the firm’s service standard, modelled on the houses she served: the discretion, the pace and the finish of a luxury Maison, applied to hiring. Her years running succession planning inside those organisations also explain the firm’s emphasis on whether a hire is still performing years after appointment, not just whether an offer is accepted.
The firm already recruits in the United States, where Charlotte began her career and has served clients in luxury and technology for years, and has opened its second office in Miami. The two founders lead the American development together, alongside the Dubai practice. “Dubai taught us how a young financial centre competes for people,” said Charlotte. “Miami is having that exact conversation now, and we intend to be part of it from the inside.”
In Europe, the firm is expanding into France and Monaco, with an office in Paris’s Saint-Honoré district and a presence in Monaco serving the Principality’s asset managers, family offices and private banks, where it is already running search mandates. Both founders are French, and the move returns them to markets they know from the inside. Dubai remains the firm’s headquarters: the European offices are an expansion of the business, not a relocation of it, and the founders are leading the roll-out personally. “Paris and Monaco are where a great deal of the capital our clients manage is decided,” said François. “The people they want to hire are there, and so are the firms that want to hire them. Being in the room matters more in search than anywhere else.”
The third seat at the table belongs to Karen Wisner Caferri, who leads talent acquisition and is the architect of the firm’s assessment method. A psychologist by training, born in Argentina and formed professionally across London, Italy and Dubai, she has run talent acquisition alongside Charlotte for three years. Every shortlist the firm presents passes through her reading of what a CV cannot show: motivation, resilience, and whether the stated reason for moving is the real one. “A CV tells you what someone did,” said Karen. “It does not tell you why, what it cost them, or whether they can do it again in a different room. That is what an interview is for, when you know how to run one.”
The firm, operating across the United States, France and Monaco, wider-EMEA and Asia-Pacific organises its work across five pillars, each available à la carte: Search, Talent Advisory and HR Consultancy, Legal Coordination, Performance Coaching, and Lifestyle and Concierge. Most relationships start with a single mandate and grow from there; the structure is designed around the point at which senior international hires most often fail, which the firm says is rarely the selection stage.
Search, run retained or on contingency, covers front office, leadership, quantitative, risk, engineering and operations roles, alongside the business and private support functions a demanding firm requires, from the household to the boardroom. What the client experiences is deliberately spare: no noise, no padded lists, a handful of people worth meeting, and the firm’s honest view in writing. Everything else happens off stage. The machinery behind that economy is where the firm says it has invested most, and it is François’s design. Building trading desks from nothing means building operations from nothing, and fifteen years of it, in businesses where discipline is survival, shaped how Qnode runs internally: an organisation engineered so that consultants spend their time with clients and with candidates who have already passed several layers of filtering, rather than on internal process. How that filtering works, the firm treats as proprietary.
If the machinery is François’s, the experience is Charlotte’s. The service runs the way the luxury houses she served run theirs: present, available, personal, one person who answers, and no hour that matters left waiting. And the way the firm recruits carries her conviction that a candidate is a person before a profile, treated with the same care whether hired or not, because how a firm treats the people it does not hire is how the market learns what it is.
Talent Advisory and HR Consultancy sits on the other side of the table: career and contract counsel to individuals, together with HR consultancy for firms on compensation, performance and team structures, from design to build-out. The firm is direct about the tension in serving both sides of a market, and about how it is managed: search is mandated by institutions, advisory by individuals, the two are run as separate engagements behind an information barrier, and Qnode states publicly that it will not act on both sides of the same negotiation without the informed consent of each party.
The remaining three pillars address the period after an offer is accepted.
Legal Coordination brings together specialist employment, immigration and structuring counsel across jurisdictions under a single point of contact, extending in the UAE to PRO and government services, with the firm stating that it is not a law firm and does not provide legal advice itself.
Performance Coaching provides one-to-one coaching for the people the firm places, or for a client’s own team, through onboarding, transitions and the step into leadership. Delivery is ICF-credentialled and neuropsychology-informed, shaped by a team that includes a trained psychologist, and the firm is explicit that the pillar provides coaching rather than therapy.
Lifestyle and Concierge handles relocation, housing, schooling, travel and family transition, with private household and office staff recruited through CG Talents, the firm’s luxury recruitment boutique.
“The best people are never on the market,” said Charlotte Gervais, Co-Founder and Co-CEO. “They are running businesses and client books, and they will not answer an advert. But they will answer a good reason, and finding that reason, person by person, is the job. Every mandate here is looked at twice, once by someone who has hired for a living and once by someone who has been hired at the highest level. The five pillars are simply what clients kept asking us for. Look at the offer we are about to make. Untangle our new hire’s visa. Find someone the family can trust. We organised those requests into one firm.”
Though Qnode dates from 2024, the record runs deeper. Through CG Talents, the boutique from which Qnode grew, the same team has spent five years serving luxury Maisons, family offices and private households across Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific and the Americas. The firm has placed talent in more than sixteen countries, from Monaco to Singapore, and reports a 97 per cent retention rate across three years of placements, analysed in January 2026.
Source background
Qnode Partners was founded in Dubai in 2024, is headquartered in Dubai and operates from offices in Dubai, Paris and Miami, with a presence in Monaco, covering the US, France and Monaco, wider EMEA, the UK and Asia-Pacific. François Mégret and Charlotte Gervais are Co-Founders and Co-CEOs. The firm runs search for institutions and advisory for individuals, and states publicly that it is not a law firm, coordinating specialist counsel rather than providing it.
François Mégret has been published in the Financial Times, Khaleej Times, Newsweek and HackerNoon, and has spoken at COP28, Carbon Forward London and Abu Dhabi Sustainable Finance Week. Charlotte Gervais is the founder of CG Talents and a recipient of a Dubai Entrepreneurship Award. The firm does not publish client names, placements or deal terms.
Media contact
François Mégret, Co-Founder and Co-CEO
Charlotte Gervais, Co-Founder and Co-CEO
Qnode Partners, Dubai, United Arab Emirates · Paris, France · Monaco · Miami, United States
francois@qnodepartners.com · charlotte@qnodepartners.com
Interviews, additional commentary and photography available on request.
About the Author
Sowmiya Sri Mani is a prolific writer covering AI, Business, Technology, Markets, and Lifestyle. She loves turning complex subjects into something readers might enjoy and understand. For her, writing is about finding the interesting side of a subject and making it worth the reader’s time.
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