Website:
manifest.inc
Job details:
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 is being rebuilt around that shift right now. Most 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 translate 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 Manifest expects every function to become, and proving 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 people on short notice, repeatedly, without losing coherence. That is a 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 an 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 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 talent leadership can earn a genuine seat in the room rather than an invitation to it. Companies that get this right in the next five years will define how the next generation of global companies build their people functions. You would be one of the people who decided what that looks like.
What You Own
Talent Acquisition and the Hiring Engine
- Own hiring strategy and standard across every brand, geography, and level, from individual contributor to executive search
- Build a sourcing, screening, and closing engine that runs on AI-native tooling as the default
- Set the bar for what a great hire looks like at Manifest, and hold 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 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
- Own leadership pipeline and succession coverage across the group, so every critical role has a named path to readiness
- Set the standard for a high-performing team at Manifest, and build the manager capability that makes it repeatable
Strategic Workforce Planning and Business Alignment
- Own the workforce plan that translates business goals into people requirements, 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
- Own Talent's presence in quarterly business reviews and board reporting, making the workforce as measurable 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
- Own the systems architecture that connects every part of Talent into one coherent function
- 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
- Set the intellectual agenda inside Manifest for how leaders think about their people
- Equity participation is part of the package for a role at this altitude.
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 point of view on how the workforce plan should connect to the business plan, where the leadership bench needs building, and what the AI-native infrastructure underneath it all needs to look like. You have earned real credibility with business unit leaders and the executive team.
By mid-period, Talent runs measurably differently: the workforce plan is a standing input to business planning, succession coverage exists for every critical role, and the function is visibly AI-native in how it sources, hires, and supports people. Talent's reporting to the executive team and the board is as credible 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 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 interconnected systems and bets, not a collection of HR processes running in parallel.
You have built high-performing teams before, and know the difference between a team that performs because of one strong leader and one that performs because the systems and standards make it repeatable. You are fluent in workforce planning as a genuine discipline: translating a business plan into a people plan, 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 know the difference between AI 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 are comfortable carrying it, inside the executive team and in how the company is known externally. You have led leaders, not just individual contributors, and hold them to a standard that is honest rather than diplomatic.
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, 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.
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