Head of Marketing, Explore Full Time NEW

What This Role Is

Every year, universities across the world spend significant budget trying to reach the right international students. They run fairs, buy lists, work with agents, invest in digital campaigns. Most of them have a reasonable sense of where their international students come from. Very few have a clear picture of why. Which counsellors recommended them. Which platforms surfaced their programmes. Which moments in a student’s journey actually shaped the decision to apply.

Explore was built to change that. Launched in 2025 as Manifest Global’s university-facing platform, Explore gives institutions direct access to the largest global network of high school counsellors and students in the world, built on the combined reach of Cialfo and BridgeU across 1,750+ K12 schools in Asia-Pacific, the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond. Universities use Explore to run targeted outreach campaigns, engage students earlier in their decision journey, and understand what’s actually driving their international recruitment pipeline.

The platform is live. The university partner base is growing. The commercial model is being actively built. And the marketing function that drives Explore’s growth, shapes how universities understand the product, and delivers the student engagement campaigns that make the platform valuable, doesn’t yet exist at the scale or quality it needs to.

That’s what this role builds.

The Head of Marketing, Explore owns two things simultaneously: growing Explore’s university partner base through B2B marketing, and delivering high-quality student marketing campaigns to universities through the Cialfo and BridgeU network. Both matter commercially. Both require someone who can think strategically, build systems, and connect marketing activity directly to revenue outcomes. You’ll report to the COO and operate with significant autonomy across a genuinely new product at a consequential stage of its growth.

What Makes This Role Different

Most marketing leadership roles in the university sector sit inside a single institution or a single channel. This one sits at the centre of a platform that connects hundreds of university partners to the largest K12 counsellor and student network in the world. The scale of what’s possible from this seat is unusual.

Explore also has something most university marketing platforms don’t: a genuine data and intelligence layer. The counsellor relationships, the student engagement data, and the platform infrastructure built across Cialfo and BridgeU give Explore the ability to offer universities insight into their international recruitment pipeline that no agent, fair, or outreach platform can match. The marketing function that communicates that clearly, to the right university buyers, in language that makes them act, is one of the most important things Explore can build right now.

The broader international education market is contracting. Explore is growing. Universities that are serious about their international recruitment strategy are looking for partners that offer more than volume. This is the right moment to be building the marketing function that makes Explore that partner, at scale.

What You Own

University growth and market expansion

• Own Explore’s B2B marketing strategy globally, with clear accountability for university acquisition pipeline, conversion, and marketing’s contribution to revenue
• Build positioning, narratives, and go-to-market approaches that make the Explore value proposition land with university international offices, recruitment teams, and senior leadership
• Lead integrated campaigns across content, events, partnerships, thought leadership, and digital channels, with a clear view of what each channel is for and what it needs to produce
• Partner closely with the commercial team to ensure marketing is generating the right pipeline and that the conversation between marketing and sales is tight enough to actually improve conversion
• Use AI to accelerate campaign production, improve targeting, and scale what the team can do without proportionally scaling headcount. Build the team’s fluency with these tools as a core capability, not an afterthought

Student marketing campaign delivery

• Lead the planning, execution, and optimisation of university marketing campaigns delivered to students across Cialfo and BridgeU’s network of 1,750+ schools
• Build scalable systems for campaign planning, delivery, reporting, and optimisation that can handle a growing university partner base without degrading quality
• Ensure every campaign delivered to students is genuinely engaging, operationally clean, and producing measurable outcomes for university partners
• Act as a strategic partner to universities on their student engagement strategy, not just a delivery function. The universities that trust Explore most are the ones who see the marketing team as an extension of their own recruitment capability

Brand and thought leadership

• Build Explore’s brand reputation in the higher education market, establishing it as the platform that serious institutions choose when they want to understand and improve their international recruitment strategy
• Develop thought leadership content and institutional storytelling that speaks to the structural shifts happening in international student recruitment and positions Explore as the platform built for where the market is going
• Drive Explore’s visibility at major higher education conferences, associations, and industry events across the UK, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and beyond

Team leadership and operations

• Build and lead a marketing team across growth, campaign delivery, content, and operations, with a culture of ownership and high standards
• Hire well, develop second-line leaders, and build a function that operates with enough infrastructure and accountability that it doesn’t depend on you being in every decision
• Align the marketing function closely with revenue, product, and operations so that the team is working on the things that actually move the business forward

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Explore’s marketing function is today. The product is new, the partner base is growing, and the commercial model is still being shaped. We’ll calibrate the specifics once you’re in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.

You’ll start by building a thorough picture of the current state: what the university acquisition pipeline looks like, how campaign delivery is working, where the brand is strong and where it isn’t, and what the highest-leverage marketing investments are. You’ll have a clear view on where to move first.

From there, the marketing function will be measurably more connected to revenue. University acquisition campaigns will be generating better pipeline. Campaign delivery for university partners will be more scalable and more consistently excellent. The Explore brand will be better known among the university buyers that matter.

Over time, Explore will be recognised as the platform that understands international student recruitment better than anyone else in the market, and the marketing function will have played a material role in making that true. Universities that came in uncertain about the product will be renewing and expanding because the value is visible and the marketing function helped them see it.

The specifics will be calibrated once you’re in the role. The direction won’t change.

What You Bring

You have significant experience in marketing leadership, with a track record that spans B2B growth marketing, campaign operations, or integrated marketing in a platform, SaaS, EdTech, or higher education context. You’ve built marketing functions before, not just contributed to them. You know what it takes to design the systems, hire the team, and hold the commercial accountability simultaneously.

You’re genuinely commercially driven. You’ve been accountable for pipeline and revenue contribution, not just brand metrics and engagement rates. You can sit in a commercial review and speak about marketing’s role in revenue in terms that a sales leader finds credible and that a CFO finds useful.

You understand the higher education sector well enough to speak its language and challenge its assumptions. You know how university international offices make decisions, what they value in a platform partner, and what it takes to move from a trial to a long-term relationship. You’ve worked with institutional buyers before and you know the difference between a conversation that’s going somewhere and one that isn’t.

You’re genuinely open about AI as a marketing tool. You’ve used it seriously, you have a view on where it creates real leverage and where it produces mediocre output at speed, and you advocate for adoption because you’ve seen what it enables. You can build a team that uses AI with judgment.

You’re comfortable with the ambiguity that comes with a new product at a growth stage. Explore is being built now. The playbook isn’t finished. The person who thrives in this role finds that energising rather than unsettling.

Most importantly, you read about what Explore is building and thought: I understand exactly what universities need from this and I know how to build the marketing function that delivers it. That’s who 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.

For this role specifically, Explore sits at the point where the Manifest ecosystem meets the university market. The counsellor network, the student data, the K12 platform reach: all of it becomes commercially valuable to universities through Explore. The marketing function that makes that value visible, credible, and compelling is one of the most important things Explore can build right now. The person who builds it from this seat will have shaped how one of the most significant new products in international education marketing goes to market.

Explore 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.