What This Role Is
Every year, millions of students leave home to study somewhere else. For most of them, it is the most consequential decision they will ever make - the one that decides which country they will build a life in, what work they will do, who their children will grow up alongside. And almost none of them make that decision alone. They make it through a network. A counselor who understood their profile. A trusted partner organisation that knew their family and their context. A university representative who built enough confidence in that partner to be the first call when a strong candidate came through.
The quality of that network is what determines whether a student lands in the right place or somewhere close enough that they convince themselves it was right. It decides whether the institution gets the student who will thrive there, or the student who will quietly underperform for four years. Multiplied across hundreds of thousands of students, the network is not a back-office function - it is the infrastructure that decides where global talent goes.
Cialfo and BridgeU sits at the centre of that network. Used by 2,000+ schools globally, Cialfo's platform gives counselors and students the tools to navigate the university search and application process with clarity. The partner ecosystem and university relationships that sit around that platform are what convert reach into real student outcomes at scale - applications submitted, offers received, students enrolled, lives redirected.
Right now, both of those channels - the partner network and the university relationships - work. The question is whether they work as well as they could, whether they are structured for the volume that is coming, and whether the commercial architecture around them is built for long-term value or short-term throughput. That is what this role exists to answer.
The Associate Director, Partner & University Relationships owns both channels as a single global growth system. On the partner side: the network of placement and counseling partners across all key study destinations — who is in it, how they are performing, what the commercial terms look like, and where the next growth comes from. On the university side: the relationships with university representatives, built toward a model that scales globally. You will sit at the intersection of external relationships and internal execution - close enough to the operations and counseling teams to know when the partner experience is creating friction, and senior enough to fix it.
Most partnership roles in international education own one channel or the other - either the partner network or the university relationships. This one owns both, deliberately, because the compounding effect between them is the point.
More universities partnering with our group across more destinations makes the partner network more productive in every market - partners can offer students more options, and they can do it with the confidence that our institutional relationships will support the application. More partner volume across more source countries gives universities better proof of what the Cialfo and BridgeU relationship is worth - real applications from real students with real outcomes. Better data across both sides means smarter matching, higher conversion, and a partnership ecosystem that gets harder to replicate every cycle.
There is a version of this role at almost every player in the industry. Most of them are channel management jobs - quarterly check-ins, commission disputes, the occasional partner trip. This is not that role. This is the role for the person who has done the channel management job well enough to know exactly what is broken about how the industry runs it, and wants to build the version that replaces it.
Cialfo and BridgeU sit inside Manifest Global - a group that also operates Explore, trusted by 1,000+ universities across 100+ countries, and Kaaiser, a trusted name in student placements since 1997. That group context changes what you can offer both partners and universities - you are not representing a standalone platform, you are part of an ecosystem with reach, data, and institutional relationships that no independent operator in this space can match.
The global partner network
- Own Cialfo's partner network across all key study destinations - define the strategy for which partners to onboard, develop, or phase out based on performance, alignment, and market opportunity
- Build the commercial architecture that drives the right partner behaviour
- Build real-time visibility into what the network is producing - application volumes, offer rates, conversion, processing efficiency - and manage actively against it, scaling high performers and addressing underperformance before it compounds
University relationships in India, scaling globally
- Own relationships with university representatives
- Build value propositions that go beyond standard referral arrangements: co-branded campaigns, preferential processing agreements, exclusive pipeline access, data-driven recruitment intelligence that gives universities something genuinely useful
- Lay the groundwork for scaling the university relationships model globally as the programme matures - design it to replicate, not just to work in one market
Commercial growth across both channels
- Drive revenue growth across the partner and university channels by improving application volumes, conversion rates, and partner productivity - not by adding more partners, but by getting more from the right ones
- Lead commercial negotiations, pricing structures, and partnership agreements with the confidence and preparation of someone who has done this before and knows what good terms look like
- Identify and unlock new revenue opportunities - new corridors, new destination markets, new partnership structures that have not been tried yet
Operational integration
- Align partners with internal workflows, submission standards, and timelines - and hold them to those standards in a way that protects both the student outcome and the business relationship
- Identify friction points between partners, operations, and counselors and resolve them systematically, not case by case
Market intelligence
- Stay close to both the partner and university representative ecosystems to identify emerging players, market shifts, and new opportunities before they become obvious
- Bring specific, structured insights back into the business - not general market colour, but the things that should change how Cialfo positions itself, which relationships to prioritise, and where the next growth comes from
The markers below reflect where our partner and university channels are today. The business will have moved by the time you join - new partners in discussion, new university relationships in progress, new destinations opening. We'll calibrate the specifics 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 both channels - which partners are genuinely performing and which are coasting, which university relationships are commercially structured and which are transactional, and where the highest-leverage improvements sit across both. You'll have a point of view on where to move first.
From there, both channels will be demonstrably better. The partner network will be sharper - fewer partners doing more, better commercial terms, stronger alignment between partner behaviour and student outcomes. The university relationships will be deeper - more structured, more commercially valuable, with engagement cadences that make Cialfo the partner universities plan around rather than react to.
Over time, the partner and university channels will operate as a single compounding system - each making the other more valuable, with the data and the commercial architecture to show it. What you build here is meant to outlast you. Five years from now, the architecture you put in place should still be running = refined, scaled, extended into corridors that don't exist yet, but fundamentally the system you designed. That is what this role is building toward.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
You have eight to twelve years of experience in international education, student recruitment, or partnership and university relationship management - long enough to have seen what good looks like on both sides and to know the difference between a partnership that is working and one that looks like it is working. You have managed partner networks before. You have sat across the table from admissions directors and international recruitment heads and had commercial conversations that went somewhere.
You understand the study abroad ecosystem in India specifically - how partners operate, what drives their loyalty, how university representatives think about their channel relationships, and what makes a relationship worth investing in over multiple cycles. You have probably worked across multiple study destinations: the UK, Australia, Canada, the US. You know that each corridor has its own dynamics and you know how to navigate them.
You are commercially serious. You track what your channels are worth, what they should be worth, and you build the case to close the gap. You have restructured a commercial agreement that was working and made it work significantly better. You have phased out a partner that the business was attached to because the performance didn't justify the relationship. You make those calls with clarity and without apology.
You think in systems. You understand that the partner network and the university relationships are not two separate things - they are one system, and the decisions you make on one side affect what is possible on the other. You build with that in mind.
And somewhere underneath the commercial instinct, you remember why this work matters. Every application processed cleanly is a student who got the offer they deserved. Every partner held to a higher standard is a family that got honest counsel instead of a sales pitch. Every university relationship structured well is an institution that got the students it was actually looking for. The numbers are real, and the lives behind the numbers are real. The best people in this industry never forget that - and they do the commercial work harder, not softer, because of it.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Cialfo is building across these two channels and your first reaction was "I know exactly how to structure this and I know where to start." That's the person this role is for.
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), BridgeU (university guidance for international schools globally) combined network of 2000 schools, 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.
The numbers around this are larger than they look. $700B flows annually in remittances from migrant workers - money that rebuilds families, funds schools in the next generation, lifts entire communities out of where they started. 85M workers will be missing from developed economies by 2030, a gap that will be filled, one way or another, by people who managed to cross a border in time. The question is whether they cross with the right preparation, into the right institutions, toward the right outcomes - or whether they get lost in a system that was never designed for this volume. We're building the operating system that decides which it is. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, the partner and university channels sit at the commercial heart of Cialfo's student placement business. When these channels work well - when the right partners are active, the right universities are engaged, and the commercial architecture aligns everyone toward student outcomes - the entire flywheel moves faster. Every percentage point of improvement is thousands of additional students placed correctly. The person who builds that from this seat is doing some of the highest-leverage commercial work in the group, and some of the most consequential work happening anywhere in international education right now.
Cialfo is part of Manifest Global -a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries with $80M raised from Tiger Global, SIG, and Square Peg.
