What This Role Is
Before the frameworks and the funnels, there is a person. Seventeen, maybe. Or twenty-three. Standing at the edge of a decision that will shape the rest of their life.
They are trying to figure out where in the world they belong. They have parents who sacrificed to give them this choice. They have ambitions they can't yet fully name. They have fears they won't admit to a counsellor or a chatbot. They open a laptop. They read something. They trust someone, or they don't. They apply, or they give up. They arrive at a university in a country they've never visited, or they spend the next decade wondering what might have been.
This is the moment Manifest Global exists to serve. Not the click. Not the conversion. Not the commission. The moment when a student becomes who they were always capable of becoming, because someone, something, some platform gave them exactly what they needed, at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way.
For years, Manifest's brands have served students well. Cialfo has guided hundreds of thousands of students through global university admissions. BridgeU has brought college counselling to schools that never had it. Kaaiser has supported Indian families navigating study abroad for nearly three decades. Explore has connected ambitious students with universities they might never have discovered.
But held together, these are still four separate experiences. Four sets of touchpoints. Four brands, each with their own idea of what great looks like. No single voice asking the hardest question: is this the best we can do for this student?
That is the question this role exists to answer. Every day. Across every brand, every channel, every counsellor conversation, every AI interaction, every moment a student chooses to trust Manifest, or doesn't.
Why This Role Has Never Mattered More
Manifest stands at an inflection point across three fronts simultaneously.
The AI inflection. Manifest is deploying AI agents across every stage of the student journey: qualifying leads, building profiles, shortlisting universities, reviewing applications, nudging students toward enrolment. The potential is extraordinary. The risk is equally real. AI designed without a deep understanding of what students actually feel at the moment of discovery, in the anxiety of the application, in the vulnerability of not knowing whether they are good enough, will be AI that optimises for the wrong things. It will be efficient. It will be fast. And it will quietly erode the trust that makes students choose Manifest in the first place. Every AI decision is an experience decision. The Head of Student Experience is the person in the room who never lets anyone forget that.
The conversion inflection. The vast majority of students moving through Manifest's funnel never receive full counselling. Students who are fully counselled convert to enrolment at a rate many times higher than those who are not. That is not a sales problem. That is not a product problem. That is an experience problem. Students are moving through a funnel that is not designed to meet them where they are. The Head of Student Experience is the highest-leverage growth role in the company.
The brand inflection. Manifest is moving from four brands operating in parallel to a genuine group, with shared AI infrastructure, cross-brand data, and an integrated student network no single brand could build alone. As that convergence accelerates, someone needs to own the answer to whether students feel the benefit of that integration, or are confused by it.
What You Own
The student experience standard across all four brands
- Define what exceptional looks like at Manifest, not as a framework document that gets filed, but as a living standard that every team understands and every student eventually feels
- Own every touchpoint across the student journey: sales teams, counselling operations, in-country representatives, marketing campaigns, university events, WhatsApp messages, tele-calling scripts, pre-departure emails. Each one either adds to the experience or erodes it. You set the standard for all of them
- Walk through the student experience yourself before deciding it is good enough. Sit with a counsellor in Delhi and understand what actually happens in that room. Challenge a decision not because it breaks a rule, but because it feels wrong for a student who is scared and confused and needs to feel seen
The commercial case for experience
- Build the commercial case for every experience investment: connect NPS to conversion rates, conversion rates to enrolment revenue, enrolment revenue to lifetime value
- Present to the CEO and COO not with a customer satisfaction score but with a clear line from experience improvement to business growth. When you propose a new onboarding approach, don't say "this will feel better." Say "this will recover 15% of students who currently go dark at this stage, and at our average placement value, that is worth $X per quarter"
- Own the counselled student rate as a primary metric, the enrolment conversion gap between counselled and uncounselled cohorts, and student NPS group-wide. These are not reporting metrics. They are your commercial mandate
AI experience design
- Act as co-architect of how Manifest's AI agents show up with students, not a passive recipient of what engineering builds
- Define the principles: when AI should lead, when it should step back, when a human being must take over because the stakes are too high for an algorithm to handle alone
- Create the rubric by which every AI agent is evaluated before it goes live, not just for accuracy, but for how it makes the student feel
- Find the moments where AI can create experiences genuinely better than anything a human team could deliver at scale: personalised, immediate, warm, and anticipatory
Building the Student Experience division
- Design the target operating model for a function Manifest does not yet fully have: a Student Insights Lead who lives in data and qualitative research, a Journey Design Specialist who can make the abstract concrete, an AI Experience Analyst who bridges engineering and empathy, a Sales and Counselling Experience Partner who earns the respect of front-line teams
- Build the case, role by role, hire by hire, for the team that will make Manifest's student experience promise real
- Become the centre of gravity for everyone in the company who cares about doing right by students
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Manifest's student experience function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
You'll start by building a complete picture of where the experience is strong and where it isn't, across all four brands, every stage of the journey, every team that touches a student. You'll have a point of view on where to move first and what the highest-leverage improvements are.
From there, things will be measurably better. The counselled student rate will be moving in the right direction. The conversion gap between counselled and uncounselled cohorts will be narrowing. The AI agents will have a live experience quality rubric and it will be improving every quarter. The division will be taking shape, with key roles hired and the function earning genuine credibility with the teams it needs to partner with.
Over time, Manifest will have guided millions of students through the most consequential decision of their lives in a way that is worthy of that trust. Students will refer their younger siblings. They will return for postgraduate decisions. The trust, once built, will compound.
Somewhere in the architecture of that trust will be the fingerprints of the person who took this role.
What You Bring
You have been here before. Not once, but multiple times. You have built experience functions from the ground up in organisations that were not yet sure they needed them. You have earned credibility with product teams who were initially sceptical, sales teams who thought experience was someone else's problem, and boards who needed to see the revenue line before they believed. You have the scars of that work. And you have the results.
You have built or led a customer or student experience function that materially improved commercial outcomes, conversion rates, retention, revenue, more than once, in different organisations. You have driven AI-enabled experience models into production: not just approved them, but shaped how AI interacts with real people in high-stakes moments. You have operated at the intersection of product, sales, marketing, and operations, comfortable owning outcomes across functions you do not fully control. You have presented to boards and C-suites on experience as a growth lever and been believed, because the numbers backed you up.
You are obsessive about the person on the other side of the experience, the student, the family, the counsellor, in a way that is both genuine and infectious. You are commercially sharp enough to know that great experience without great outcomes is a philosophy, not a function. You are diplomatically relentless: you push back on decisions that harm students, and you do it in ways that build relationships rather than burn them. You are a natural storyteller who can make a room of sceptics feel the student's experience as viscerally as if they were there. And you are a builder: you create clarity, structure, and momentum where none existed, without over-engineering.
Experience in EdTech, higher education, or student mobility is a strong advantage, as is exposure to students from India, China, and Southeast Asia, where the family dimension of the study abroad decision is as important as the student's own aspirations.
Most importantly, you read this and recognised yourself. 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 counselling, 2,000+ schools), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally), Kaaiser (trusted study abroad counselling since 1997 across India and Southeast Asia), and Explore (AI-powered university outreach platform). 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.
In five years, Manifest Global will have guided millions more students through the most consequential decision of their lives. Some of those students will have experienced something remarkable: a platform that felt like it understood them, a counsellor conversation that gave them clarity when they had none, an AI agent that was genuinely helpful at exactly the moment they needed it. Those students will refer their siblings. They will come back. The trust, once built, is remarkably durable.
The person who takes this role will have built the standards, aligned the teams, shaped the AI, and designed the experiences that made that trust possible. That work doesn't disappear when you move on. It lives in the students whose lives went differently because of it.
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.
