The posting
This position is with Manifest Global, which also includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo, Explore, BridgeU, and Kaaiser.
What This Role Is
By 2030, the world will need 85 million more skilled workers than it has today, and 375 million people will need to reskill as AI reshapes the industries that keep economies running. Every institution that finds, develops, and places talent, whether for a company, a university system, or a country, is being rebuilt around that shift right now. Most of them are rebuilding slowly, with the same processes they used a decade ago and AI bolted on at the edges.
Manifest doesn't have that luxury, and doesn't want it. The business is built on the premise that talent mobility, at civilisational scale, needs an AI-native operating system, not a faster version of the old one. That premise applies as much to how Manifest builds its own team as it does to the students, schools, and universities it serves. A company that tells the world it is building the infrastructure for how human talent finds opportunity cannot run its own Talent function on spreadsheets and instinct, and cannot treat workforce planning as an afterthought to the business plan rather than the thing that makes the business plan achievable.
This role owns Talent at Manifest globally, in full: the hiring engine, the employee experience, the leadership bench across every business unit, the workforce plan that keeps the org ahead of the business rather than reacting to it, and the AI-powered infrastructure that ties all of it together. You are the person who translates talent into the language the executive team and the board already use for revenue and margin: capacity, capability, retention, and risk.
You own building Talent into the kind of high-performing, self-sustaining organisation that Manifest expects every function to become, and proving that Talent can lead by example rather than trail behind.
What Makes This Role Different
Most talent leadership roles inherit a function built for a single business, in a single market, with a stable headcount. This one spans five brands, multiple geographies, and a growth model built substantially through acquisition, which means the workforce plan, the leadership bench, and the AI infrastructure you build all have to absorb new companies and new people on short notice, repeatedly, without losing coherence. That is a materially harder systems and leadership problem than most "Head of Talent" titles are asked to solve, and it is why the Manifest ecosystem, the ability to move people, standards, and leadership talent across five connected businesses, is the advantage no standalone competitor for this hire can offer you.
The timing is specific. Manifest is scaling its reach across more than 150 countries at a moment when the broader overseas education industry is contracting and Manifest is growing. Building the workforce plan, the leadership pipeline, and the AI-native infrastructure now, while the function is still being shaped rather than fixed in place, is a materially different opportunity than doing it later, after the patterns have hardened.
Why This Is Worth Your Next Decade
Most people who lead Talent at this level inherit an org chart and a reporting calendar and are asked to run both well. You are being asked to decide what the org chart should be, build the workforce plan that keeps pace with a business growing across borders, and prove that a talent function can operate with the same rigor, and the same voice at the table, as finance or product. Companies that get this right in the next five years will define how the next generation of global companies build their people functions, and how talent leadership earns a genuine seat in the room rather than an invitation to it. You would be one of the people who decided what that looks like, for Manifest and for the industry watching how Manifest does it.
What You Own
Talent Acquisition and the Hiring Engine
- Own the hiring strategy and standard across every brand, every geography, and every level, from individual contributor to executive search
- Build a sourcing, screening, and closing engine that runs on AI-native tooling as the default, not the exception
- Set the bar for what a great hire looks like at Manifest, and hold every part of the function accountable to it
Talent Operations and the Employee Experience
- Own the full employee lifecycle globally: onboarding, offboarding, compliance, compensation coordination, people analytics, and workplace support
- Build a consistent standard of experience regardless of brand, geography, or manager
- Ensure Manifest's multi-jurisdiction footprint runs with the same rigor a business its size requires
High-Performing Teams, Leadership Development, and Succession
- Build and coach a Business Partnering team embedded in every business unit, operating as strategic peers to the leaders they support, not a support function
- Own leadership pipeline and succession coverage across the group, so every critical role has a named path to readiness rather than a gap discovered under pressure
- Set the standard for what a high-performing team looks like at Manifest, and build the manager capability that makes that standard repeatable rather than dependent on any one leader
Strategic Workforce Planning and Business Alignment
- Own the workforce plan that translates business goals into people requirements, capacity, capability, and retention, the same way a financial plan translates strategy into numbers
- Build the forecasting discipline that keeps hiring, mobility, and org design ahead of the business plan rather than reacting to it
- Own Talent's presence in quarterly business reviews and board reporting, making the workforce as measurable and as credible as revenue
Talent AI and Infrastructure
- Build a dedicated capability that makes Talent AI-native from the ground up: sourcing, screening, onboarding, workforce analytics, and decision support, all running on AI rather than layered with it afterward
- Own the systems architecture that connects every part of Talent into one coherent function instead of several
- Bring the same technical standard to Talent that Manifest brings to its own products
Executive Partnership and Talent Thought Leadership
- Be the strategic talent voice at the table when the CEO, COO, and business unit leaders are shaping direction, including on acquisitions from the earliest stage
- Represent Manifest's point of view on talent and AI-native people practices externally, as part of how the company is known in its markets, not just how it hires into them
- Set the intellectual agenda inside Manifest for how leaders think about their people, so talent becomes a discipline every executive is fluent in, not a function they delegate to
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Talent is today. We will calibrate the specifics once you are in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
In the first months, you have formed a clear, specific point of view on how the workforce plan should connect to the business plan, on where the leadership bench is strong and where it needs building, and on what the AI-native infrastructure underneath all of it needs to look like. You have earned real credibility with business unit leaders and with the executive team as someone who understands their commercial reality, not just their headcount requests.
By mid-period, Talent runs measurably differently: the workforce plan is a standing input to business planning rather than a reaction to it, succession coverage exists for every critical role, and the function is visibly AI-native in how it sources, hires, and supports people across every brand. Talent's reporting to the executive team and the board is as credible and as data-driven as finance's.
In the long term, you have built a Talent function, and a leadership bench beneath you, that other companies point to as a model, and that Manifest's own executive team points to as proof that talent strategy and business strategy are the same conversation.
The specifics will be calibrated once you are in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You have built and led talent functions at real scale before, across more than one country and more than one business line, because the coordination problem here is not theoretical. You think about Talent the way a strong general manager thinks about a business: as a set of interconnected systems and bets, workforce planning, leadership development, hiring, infrastructure, not a collection of HR processes running in parallel.
You have built high-performing teams before, and you know the difference between a team that performs because of one strong leader and a team that performs because the systems, the bench, and the standards make it repeatable. You are fluent in workforce planning as a genuine discipline: translating a business plan into a people plan, forecasting capacity and capability gaps before they become urgent, and making the case for headcount and investment in terms the executive team finds credible.
You are genuinely fluent in how AI changes talent work, not as a talking point but as a practitioner, and you know the difference between AI as a feature bolted onto an old process and AI as the foundation a process is rebuilt around.
You have a real point of view on talent and you are comfortable being the voice that carries it, inside the executive team and in how the company is known externally. You have led leaders, not just individual contributors, and you hold them to a standard that is honest rather than diplomatic, while still being the kind of leader they would choose to work for again.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building, an AI-native operating system for global talent mobility, and your first reaction was not "that's an ambitious mission statement," it was "I know exactly how to build the talent function, and the team, that proves it's true." That's the person this role is for.
Why Manifest
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for how human talent finds opportunity across borders, an AI-native operating system that identifies talent, develops it, and places it at civilisational scale. Through Cialfo (AI-powered college counseling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counseling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach, 1,000+ university partners), Manifest connects students, schools, universities, and employers across more than 150 countries. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. By 2030, the world will need 85 million more skilled workers than it has today, and 375 million people will need to reskill as industries are reshaped by AI. Manifest is backed by $91M from Tiger Global, Square Peg Capital, Susquehanna Asia Venture Capital, and others. Still early.
For this role specifically: Manifest sells the world an AI-native way of moving talent across borders. Talent, the function, is where that standard either becomes real inside the company, in the teams it builds and the workforce plan it runs, or stays a claim on a careers page. This role decides which one it is.
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 150+ countries.
