Head of Talent

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 mode