What This Role Is
Cialfo operates in one of the most consequential intersections in global education: the moment a student decides where to study, and whether the school and counselor guiding them has the tools and support to make that decision well. The platform now serves more than 2,000 schools across 50+ countries. The team that powers it has grown at the same pace. And somewhere in that growth, a gap opened up. Not in headcount or product capability, but in people infrastructure.
What that means in practice: business leaders are making people decisions without a real thinking partner. Performance conversations are happening inconsistently, or not at all. Managers are operating without the scaffolding that turns good instincts into reliable leadership habits. High performers lack development clarity. There is data in the system, HiBob, OKR dashboards, engagement signals, but it is not being translated into insight that leaders can act on.
That is the gap this role exists to close. Not through policy rollout or programme management. Through genuine partnership with the leaders who run Cialfo's most critical business units, sitting close enough to the work to understand the pressures they're navigating, sharp enough to translate those pressures into people decisions that actually move the needle.
This is a building role, not an operational maintenance role. The person in this seat will shape how Cialfo's people function works at the team level: what good manager practice looks like, how performance is held and developed, how the data in the system becomes decisions in the room.
What Makes This Role Different
Most HR business partner roles at companies this size are maintenance functions. They onboard, they run engagement surveys, they handle ER cases when they escalate. The work is reactive. The measure of success is absence of noise. This is not that role.
Cialfo is at the stage where people infrastructure either scales with the business or becomes a ceiling on it. The business units are growing. The managers running them are capable but largely unsupported on the people side. The data exists to make smarter decisions. None of that potential is being realised yet, and the person in this role is the one who changes that.
What you have here that you do not have at a standalone company: a multi-brand group context that creates learning exposure no single-brand HR role can match. As part of Manifest Global, operating across Cialfo, BridgeU, Explore, and Kaaiser, you are working within a people function that spans 50+ countries, multiple employment jurisdictions, and a VP of Talent who is actively building the playbook, not inheriting one. You will have access to Manifest-wide talent infrastructure and tooling, and a team that treats people operations as a competitive capability, not a cost centre.
The timing matters. Cialfo is at a growth inflection where the people decisions made in the next 12 to 18 months will set the culture and performance norms for the next phase of the company. The TBP who shapes those foundations will have built something real.
What You Own
Business partnership and leader enablement
- Own the day-to-day people partnership for your assigned business units: sit in the business, understand the priorities, and bring people solutions calibrated to actual pressures, not generic HR frameworks
- Build manager capability through coaching and structured people practices: performance conversations, goal clarity, feedback rhythms, and how to handle underperformance before it compounds
- Identify where structure is missing and design the intervention that closes the gap, whether that is a clearer OKR framework, a recognition rhythm, or a growth conversation template, whichever has the highest leverage at that moment
Performance and development infrastructure
- Build the people data foundation for your business units: an employee snapshot that maps performance, tenure, development needs, and flight risk in one place leaders can actually use
- Design and embed development plans for high and mid-performers: not career-pathing documents that sit in Notion, but concrete growth tracks tied to the skills and exposure that matter in this business
- Drive performance review processes for your business units, ensuring they are completed, calibrated, and actually used to make differentiated decisions
Employee relations and organisational health
- Own complex employee relations cases across your business units: conduct effective investigations, advise leaders on process, and ensure outcomes are consistent with Cialfo's policies and local legal requirements
- Translate engagement signals, from pulse surveys, from 1:1s, from the conversations that happen informally, into a clear picture of where each team's health stands and what needs attention
- Partner with Talent Ops on workforce planning and any people process that touches the employee lifecycle for your business units
Talent function development
- Feed lessons from the business back into the Talent team: where processes are breaking down, where tools are not serving people well, where a better practice would improve output
- Own documentation for Talent initiatives within your business units: policies, frameworks, and guides clear enough to work without you in the room
What Success Looks Like
The markers below reflect where Cialfo's talent function is today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
In the first month, you have met the leaders and teams in your business units, mapped the people data landscape, and formed a clear point of view on where the highest-leverage interventions are. You are already in the room with your business unit leaders: not as an HR visitor, but as a thinking partner who understands the business and can speak to it.
At six months, managers in your business units are having better conversations with their teams. Not because they have been trained on a framework, but because they have a partner who has coached them through real situations: the difficult feedback conversation, the performance case that needed to be handled cleanly, the high performer who needed a development plan that actually meant something. The people data that used to sit inert in HiBob is now a working tool.
At 12 months, you have built something that holds without you. A performance culture across your business units where accountability is real and development is structured. A manager capability baseline visibly higher than when you arrived. Processes the business owns, not just HR. And a track record that makes the case for expanding your remit.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.
What You Bring
You have spent the better part of a decade in HR, with a meaningful portion of that in a business partner role rather than a centre-of-excellence or generalist function. You know the difference between being embedded in a business and being adjacent to it. You have been embedded.
You are not a policy person. You can write policy when it's needed, but your instinct is to translate it into the conversation the manager actually needs to have. You understand that most HR problems are leadership problems, and your job is to improve the quality of leadership decisions, not to be the person who arrives after they go wrong.
You are comfortable with data in the way that actually matters: not running reports, but reading them and knowing what questions to ask. You have built a people dashboard before. You know that a retention risk flag in a spreadsheet is only useful if a leader does something with it, and you know how to make that happen.
You have operated in fast-scaling, multi-geography, tech-adjacent companies. You understand that the people challenges in a 200-person EdTech company are different from those in a 2,000-person corporation, and you have calibrated your toolkit accordingly. You do not default to enterprise-grade processes when a lightweight, high-trust intervention will do the job better.
You are at ease with ambiguity in the way builders are: not because it doesn't bother you, but because you know how to make progress without a finished playbook. You identify the highest-leverage action, take it, and learn from the outcome.
Somewhere underneath the business acumen, you remember why this work matters. You care about whether people are growing. You notice when someone is stuck and you do something about it. That is not softness. It is what makes a business partner worth having in the room.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Cialfo's people function is building and your first reaction was not "this sounds like a well-scoped HR role." It was: the people infrastructure at a company like this is exactly what I know how to build, and I want to be the one who builds it properly. That is 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 which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.
For this role specifically, people operations is not a support function at Cialfo. It is load-bearing infrastructure. The flywheel that drives Cialfo's growth depends on counselors and operators who are well-managed, well-developed, and working inside a performance culture that holds. A Talent Business Partner who embeds deeply into the business and raises the quality of how leaders lead is not a nice-to-have. They are part of what makes the machine run.
Cialfo is part of Manifest Global, a multi-brand group building the infrastructure for global human capital mobility, operating across 50+ countries.
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