What This Role Is

Choosing a university abroad is not a search. It is a series of decisions - about destination, about subject, about whether a family's investment in a degree from the UK or Australia makes sense against the alternatives. For the student navigating this from within a school system that may never have sent anyone to Bristol or Monash before, the process is opaque in ways that admissions offices don't fully appreciate. There are forms with requirements that aren't obvious. Timelines with consequences that aren't explained. Documents with standards that differ by institution, by programme, by intake. Most students don't fail the process because they're unqualified. They fail it because nobody translated it for them.

Direct Apply is Cialfo's answer to that translation problem. Built into the platform used by over 2,000 partner schools globally, Direct Apply gives students a single, structured pathway to apply to educational programmes around the world - with Saige, Cialfo's AI layer, helping them identify the right options, and with the school counselor retained as the relationship that makes the decision meaningful. But Direct Apply is a product. And products don't enrol students. People do.

This role sits at the intersection of platform and human guidance. You work directly with students at every key stage of their application journey - from first search through to offer acceptance and enrolment — in a way that makes the platform indispensable to them. You manage their queries. You introduce them to programmes that fit their profile. You coordinate with their counselors and guardians. You run the events that bring universities into their world and bring them into ours. And you lead a small team of advisors who do the same.

The University Enrolment Advisor owns the student engagement layer that makes Direct Apply deliver on its promise — and builds the relationships with schools, counselors, and university representatives that make Cialfo the platform students and counselors choose to stay on.

What Makes This Role Different

Most advisory roles in international education are agency roles — incentivised to send students to whichever institution pays the highest commission, structurally disconnected from whether the placement was right. This role is the opposite. Your incentive is student outcome, and your infrastructure is a platform that 2,000+ schools have already chosen, with an AI layer trained on data those agencies don't have access to.

You are not building a business from scratch. You are working within an established network and adding the human judgment that makes the platform convert. Cialfo already has the school relationships. Saige already narrows the shortlist. What the student needs at the critical moment — when they're uncertain about a programme, when a document hasn't arrived, when an offer comes with conditions they don't understand — is someone who knows the UK or ANZ admissions landscape deeply enough to translate it in real time. That person is you.

The broader overseas education industry is contracting. Cialfo is growing. The platform has network effects no standalone counselor can match, and no standalone advisor can replicate the infrastructure you're working within here. Direct Apply is live, the school base is real, and the opportunity to build the student engagement function that makes this product category-defining is now.

What You Own

The student application journey

Own the end-to-end engagement with students across every stage: search and shortlisting, application and documentation, offer acceptance, and final enrolment
Guide students through programme identification, ensuring the match between their profile and a university's requirements is one they understand and can execute on
Drive application completions by removing the blockers that cause students to stall — document gaps, unclear requirements, conditional offer terms — in real time
Identify students who are under-activated on the Cialfo platform and convert them into engaged, registered applicants

School and counselor relationships

Build and maintain working relationships with school counselors from Cialfo partner schools, positioning yourself as the person they contact when a student has a complex application question
Respond to inbound enquiries from students, parents, and counselors with the speed and depth that earns trust and reinforces the platform's value
Identify opportunities to improve how Cialfo supports the counselor's workflow, and translate that feedback into concrete input for the product and commercial teams

Events and market activation

Lead and execute student-facing events — university fairs, representative visits, student workshops, and brand awareness activities — that activate new students and deepen engagement among existing ones
Coordinate with university partnership teams to identify and facilitate representative events at schools, ensuring the right institutions are in front of the right students
Represent the market — its student profile, its counselor expectations, its competitive dynamics — back to Cialfo in a way that drives product and commercial decisions

The team

Lead and mentor a small team of advisors and associates, ensuring they are aligned on goals, trained on processes, and supported to deliver high-quality student engagement
Oversee daily operations, assign responsibilities, and track progress against shared targets without creating overhead that slows the team down
Build a team culture where high individual contribution and strong coaching coexist — this is not a role where you hand off your targets; you're working alongside the team, not above it

What Success Looks Like

The markers below reflect where Direct Apply and the student engagement function are today. We'll calibrate the specifics once you're in the seat. These are directional, not fixed.
In the first few months, the work is diagnostic and relational. You get close to the student journey — not the platform version of it, but the lived version. Where do students stall? What questions repeat? What do counselors actually need from you versus what they expect? You build a point of view on where the friction is and what it would take to remove it, and you share that view with the team running the product. You are also getting to know the university network — the UK programmes, the ANZ institutions, the admissions staff behind the portals — at the level of depth that makes you genuinely useful to a student mid-application.
By the middle of your first year, things are measurably better. The students coming through your pipeline are completing at a higher rate. The counselors in your schools are contacting you, not just being contacted by you. The events you've run have generated new registrations and driven application volume. Your team is operating with real clarity on what they own and why it matters, and the overlap between their work and yours is creating force multiplication, not duplication.
Longer term, you've built something structural. The student engagement function has a playbook — for activation, for journey support, for event execution — that doesn't depend on you being in every conversation. The market intelligence you've accumulated is shaping how Direct Apply is marketed and how it's built. And the students who enrolled through your pipeline are the proof points that make the next cycle of school partnerships easier to close.
The specifics will be calibrated once you're in the role. The direction won't change.

What You Bring

You have two or three years of experience working in university admissions, international education advisory, or student recruitment — specifically in the UK and ANZ markets. You don't need a decade. You need depth in the corridors that matter: you know how UCAS works, you know what Australian universities look for in international applicants, and you know the difference between a student who is genuinely suited to a programme and one who is reaching. That knowledge is what makes you useful in the moments that count.
You are comfortable being both the expert in the room and the person on the phone at 8pm when a student has a documentation question. This role has a team leadership component, but it is not a role where you manage your way out of the work. You are a practitioner who also coaches. You can hold both without confusing them.
You understand that trust with students and counselors is built through consistency and accuracy, not enthusiasm. You are thorough with documents, precise with deadlines, and patient with the parts of the process that are genuinely complicated. You communicate clearly, and you know how to adjust your register — from a first-year student who has never applied abroad, to a parent navigating a conditional offer, to a counselor who needs you to handle something quickly and accurately so they can move on to their next student.
You're coachable. You have opinions about how the job should be done — good opinions, earned from real experience — and you're also open to doing things differently when the evidence suggests that's right. That combination is rarer than it sounds, and it is exactly what this role requires.
Most importantly, you read the description of what Cialfo is building through Direct Apply and your first reaction was not "this is a student support job." It was "this is the infrastructure that finally makes international applications work the way they should — and I know exactly how to be the human layer that makes it deliver." 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 which changes that. $80M raised. Still early.

For this role specifically, Direct Apply is the part of Cialfo that closes the loop between platform and enrolment — and the University Enrolment Advisor is the person who makes that closure possible. Every student who finds the right programme, submits a complete application, and lands in a university cohort that fits them is a proof point that the Manifest model works. The data that student generates comes back into the platform. The counselor who witnessed it tells the next counselor. The school that trusted the process renews. This role sits at the hinge point of that flywheel — and the person who does it well is not a support function. They are a driver of the network effect.

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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