Website:
manifest.inc
Job details:
Manifest Global empowers in building companies that connect the world towards growth, prosperity, and innovation. Our portfolio includes trailblazer brands such as Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser, which are dedicated to expanding global student mobility by serving their respective stakeholders in the ecosystem.
Our Mission
To create a world where every student, regardless of their ethnicity, nationality, socio-economic status, and learning preference, gets equal access to higher education through our world-class network of portfolio brands; a network that globally connects community stakeholders that provide the finest resources and support material, anywhere in the world and at any time.
What This Role Is
Talent Operations touches the entire distance between the day someone accepts an offer and the day they eventually leave, onboarding, payroll, policy, workplace, travel, global mobility, the data and systems that hold all of it together. Most companies split this work across several dedicated teams. Manifest asks a small, sharp team to hold all of it at a standard that doesn't slip, and increasingly, to run it on AI and automation as the default way of working, not a talking point bolted onto an old process.
This matters beyond keeping the trains running. Talent Operations is the function every employee touches constantly and every executive assumes just works, until it doesn't. And for a company that grows partly through acquisition, this function is where a good deal quietly becomes a bad one or a genuinely smooth integration, because onboarding, payroll, and systems migration are where new employees actually experience whether the acquisition was handled with care.
This role owns a real slice of that map, allocated as you join, and is built for someone who can move fluidly across it rather than specializing narrowly in one lane. You bring data and AI-native tools to bear on operational work that most companies still run manually, which is exactly what lets a team this size hold a scope this wide.
You own making the operational backbone of the employee experience run the way Manifest's own product does: systemized, data-informed, and genuinely good.
What Makes This Role Different
Most Talent Operations roles let you go deep in one lane and stay there, payroll people stay in payroll, onboarding people stay in onboarding. This one deliberately doesn't. You're a true generalist across the full employee lifecycle, which means a faster learning curve, far more exposure than a specialist track ever offers, and real involvement in acquisition integration work most people in this function don't get near until much later in their careers.
The Manifest ecosystem means your generalist range gets used across five brands and multiple geographies, not one company's steady-state operations. Every acquisition, every new market, every policy that has to work across jurisdictions is a chance to actually use the breadth you bring, not a complication to work around.
What You Own
Employee Lifecycle Operations
- Own onboarding and offboarding end to end, making both feel deliberate rather than administrative
- Own employee contract management with the accuracy and care that a growing, multi-country team requires
- Build the muscle memory that makes lifecycle transitions consistent regardless of which brand or market someone sits in
Policies, Compliance, and Rewards
- Own policy design and compliance across every jurisdiction Manifest operates in, treating this as a genuine standard, not a formality
- Partner on compensation, benefits, and payroll accuracy, understanding that this is the part of the employee experience with zero tolerance for error
- Own rewards and recognition programs that actually reflect the culture Manifest wants, not a generic points system
Workplace, Travel, and Employee Support
- Own the systems behind business travel, global mobility, and the talent helpdesk that employees rely on when something isn't working
- Be the person who makes navigating Manifest's operational systems feel simple, even when the underlying complexity, multiple brands, multiple countries, isn't
- Partner closely with the workplace function so the physical and operational experience of working at Manifest feels like one coherent thing, not several disconnected systems
Data, Systems, and AI-Native Operations
- Own the platforms, data, and automations that run Talent Operations, treating this as core infrastructure, not an afterthought
- Bring genuine AI fluency to how operational work gets done, identifying where automation should replace manual process rather than just supplement it
- Own talent analytics and insights that give the Talent team, and the business, an honest, current read on the state of the employee experience
Project and Vendor Management
- Own cross-functional Talent Operations projects end to end, including the operational side of acquisition integrations as Manifest grows
- Manage vendor relationships with real discipline, holding external partners to the same standard Manifest holds itself
- Run projects the way a strong operator does: scoped clearly, tracked honestly, delivered on the timeline you committed to
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Talent Operations is today. We'll calibrate the specifics to your actual ownership areas once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
In the first weeks, you've learned the real shape of Talent Operations at Manifest, met the people and systems behind each area you own, and formed a genuine point of view on what's working well and what needs a better process behind it.
By mid-period, the areas you own run visibly smoother, employees experience less friction navigating them, and you've brought real automation or data thinking to at least one process that used to run entirely by hand.
In the long term, you're the person other members of the Talent team turn to when something spans more than one area of Talent Operations, because you're one of the few people who can see the whole map, not just a single lane of it.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You've worked across multiple areas of Talent or HR Operations before, not just one specialty, and you're genuinely energized by breadth rather than wishing you could narrow your focus. You think in systems and processes, and you have real project management instincts, you scope things properly, track them honestly, and finish what you start.
You're authentically data-driven, comfortable pulling and interpreting your own numbers rather than waiting for someone else to hand you a dashboard, and you use that data to actually change how something runs, not just to report on it. You're genuinely AI-native in your own practice, you've used AI tools to automate or improve operational work yourself, and you instinctively look for where a manual process should become an automated one.
You're comfortable with a role whose exact ownership isn't fully fixed until you join, and you'd rather find out what needs you most and move than have it all mapped out in advance.
Most importantly, you read the description of how wide this role's scope is and your first reaction was not "that's a lot to hold," it was "that's exactly the kind of range I want in a role." That's the person this role is for.
Why Manifest
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, connecting students, schools, universities, and employers across 150+ countries. Our portfolio spans 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). Together, we move talent across borders at scale. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030. We're building the operating system which changes that. $91M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically: Manifest grows in part by acquiring other companies, and every acquisition is a test of whether Talent Operations can absorb new people, new systems, and new complexity without the employee experience taking the hit. This role is one of the people who makes sure it doesn't.
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 150+ countries.
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