Head of Talent Acquisition
Cialfo
People & HR
Singapore
What This Role Is
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility. The irony is not lost on anyone internally: a company whose mission is to connect talent to opportunity across borders needs to be exceptionally good at finding, attracting, and closing the right people itself. Right now, that function is not yet what it needs to be.
The hiring infrastructure exists. Greenhouse is live. Recruiters are in place across regions. Roles are being filled. But the function operates reactively — responding to requisitions rather than shaping teams, filling seats rather than building toward a hiring strategy that is six months ahead of the business. The pipelines for critical roles are thin. The employer brand is inconsistent across brands and geographies. Hiring manager confidence in the TA function is not where it should be.
That is what this role exists to change.
The Head of Talent Acquisition owns how Manifest hires — across all four brands, across Singapore, Delhi, London, and beyond — and is accountable for building a function that the business genuinely relies on. Not a support function that processes requisitions. A strategic capability that helps leadership make better decisions about their teams, moves fast on critical hires, and raises the quality of every person who joins the group.
This is one of the highest-leverage roles in the business. Rohan's view is explicit: talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. The person who builds the hiring engine that delivers on that belief will have shaped every other function in the group.
What Makes This Role Different
Most TA leadership roles are either operational — run the process, hit the numbers, manage the team — or strategic — sit in leadership meetings, advise on org design, produce frameworks. This one has to be both, and it has to be both simultaneously.
Manifest is a house of brands. Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser each have different talent markets, different hiring volumes, different seniority profiles, and different employer brand positions. Building a TA function that works across all four — without collapsing their distinctiveness into a generic group hiring process — requires someone who thinks in systems and executes in specifics.
It also requires someone who is comfortable being the person who raises the bar. The Head of TA at Manifest is not the person who makes hiring easier by lowering the standard when the pressure is on. They are the person who makes the case for the right hire even when the business wants to move fast. That is a harder role to play. It is also the one that makes the difference.
What You Own
The global hiring engine across all four brands
- Own hiring strategy across Manifest Global — all brands, all regions, all seniority levels — and ensure the function is operating ahead of business need, not reacting to it
- Drive workforce planning in genuine partnership with leadership: translate business priorities into hiring strategy, shape team structures before they become urgent, and give leaders a view of their talent pipeline that is forward-looking rather than backward-reporting
- Build the pipelines for critical and hard-to-fill roles before they are open — so that when the business needs a Head of Engineering or a Senior Director of K12, there is already a shortlist
The standard for what great looks like
- Define what exceptional looks like across different role types, seniority levels, and brands — and build the frameworks that make that standard consistent: structured interviews, scorecards, calibration processes, hiring manager enablement
- Own quality of hire as a metric that the business tracks and trusts — not just time-to-fill, but whether the people joining Manifest are the people who should be joining Manifest
- Be the person who challenges a hire when the evidence doesn't support it, and who builds the credibility with hiring managers to have that conversation productively
The TA team
- Lead, develop, and hold accountable a team of recruiters and sourcers across regions — set clear performance expectations, build a culture of ownership, and create a function that operates as a business partner rather than a processing unit
- Develop each person on the team with intention — they should be better recruiters and better strategic partners at the end of working for you than they were at the start
- Build the TA team's reputation internally so that hiring managers want to partner with them, not route around them
Data, metrics, and visibility
- Own the hiring metrics that matter: time-to-hire, quality of hire, pipeline conversion rates, offer acceptance, hiring manager satisfaction — and build the dashboards that give leadership real visibility into what is happening and why
- Identify bottlenecks systematically and fix them at the root — not by working harder on the symptom, but by understanding what in the process or the pipeline is causing it
- Give leadership the data and the context to make better decisions about hiring, team structure, and talent investment — not just numbers, but insight
Systems, process, and employer brand
- Own Greenhouse and the hiring workflows that sit around it — strengthen them, automate where it makes sense, and standardise globally while preserving the flexibility that different brands and geographies need
- Shape how Manifest shows up in the talent market across all four brands — consistent where it needs to be consistent, differentiated where the brands are genuinely different
- Ensure every candidate interaction — from first message to final decision — reflects the standard that Manifest's employer brand is being built to
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where the TA function is today. The business will have moved by the time you join — new hires in progress, new priorities surfaced, new brands at different stages of growth. We'll calibrate the specifics together once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
That said, the shape of success is clear.
You'll start by building a complete picture of the current state — the team, the pipelines, the processes, the metrics, the gaps between what the business needs and what the function is currently delivering. You'll have a point of view on where to move first and what the highest-leverage changes are.
From there, the function will be measurably better. Hiring managers will have more confidence in the TA team and the pipelines it builds. Critical roles will be filled faster and with better candidates. The team will be operating with more ownership and more commercial awareness than before.
Over time, hiring at Manifest will be a genuine competitive advantage — a function that the business builds strategy around rather than reacts to, that gives leaders real visibility into their talent pipeline, and that attracts people to Manifest who would not have found their way here otherwise.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You have eight or more years in talent acquisition, with meaningful global hiring experience and a track record of building TA functions in fast-growing, multi-market environments. You have hired for complex, business-critical roles — not just at volume, but for the kinds of hires that change what a business is capable of. You have built the processes that make hiring consistent without making it slow.
You are genuinely strategic with leadership. You can sit in a business planning conversation and contribute something useful — not just take the brief, but push back on it, add context, and help leaders think about their teams more clearly. You have done this before and you have the credibility to do it with senior stakeholders who are used to being the ones setting direction.
You are also comfortable being hands-on. At Manifest's stage, the Head of TA is not a function that delegates everything downward. There will be critical searches where you are in the candidate conversations directly. There will be hiring manager relationships that need to be built personally. You do not treat that as beneath the role — you treat it as part of what makes the function work.
You think in systems. You see a hiring bottleneck and you want to understand what is causing it at the structural level, not just fix the immediate case. You build processes that scale because you have thought through how they break under pressure, not just how they work when everything is running smoothly.
You are comfortable raising the bar even when the business wants to lower it. You have had the conversation with a hiring manager who wants to make an offer on a candidate who is not quite right, and you have had it in a way that was useful rather than obstructive. That is a skill. You have it.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Manifest is building and your first reaction was "talent acquisition done well is one of the most important things a company at this stage can get right — and I know how to get it right." 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 50+ 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 that changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, talent is the number one operating lever at Manifest. Every other function — product, engineering, operations, commercial — performs at the level of the people in it. The Head of TA is the person who shapes that level across the entire group. It is not a support function. It is the meta-lever. The person who builds the hiring engine at Manifest in the next twelve months will have done more to determine what this company becomes than almost any other hire the business makes.
Manifest Global is building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.