How Manifest Global built a global team to bring education access to 500,000 students

About Manifest Global, a company built to connect people across the world

Manifest Global is a leading student mobility group headquartered in Singapore, connecting students, counselors, parents, and admissions officers to universities around the world.

The group works with over 500,000 students annually and covers more than two-thirds of the world’s universities, connecting students, counselors, parents, and admissions officers across hundreds of markets. With international student mobility projected to reach tens of millions in the coming decade, Manifest Global has spent years positioning itself to lead that Growth.

However, every phase of that growth exposed a challenge Josh sees repeatedly in scaling businesses: talent infrastructure that struggles to keep pace with rapid expansion.

What rapid growth teaches you about talent infrastructure

“If you scale and expand without the right infrastructure, it is really just chaos at a larger size.”

Josh Chong,

VP of Talent, Manifest Global

The group’s expansion happened in waves. Between 2016 and 2017, entities were established in Singapore, India, China, and the US to capture market share after several large incumbents left the space.

During the pandemic, Manifest Global built virtual campus tours and counseling tools that took its university partners from a handful to thousands in a single year. In the years since, the company has acquired complementary businesses across multiple geographies. Each wave meant hiring in new countries. And each round of hiring added complexity that compounded over time.

Josh calls it “fragmentation debt” — a pattern he’s seen across fast-scaling global businesses: every new market adds a layer of operational complexity that, left unaddressed, quietly compounds.

When this happens across a distributed organisation, the symptoms are familiar: teams building without direct input from the markets they serve, offices operating remotely and disconnected, everyone aligned on paper but slowed by the gaps in practice.

The operational complexity compounds on the hiring side too.

Manifest Global had consolidated from four different EOR providers before partnering with Multiplier. The fragmentation created real cost — in time, in team capacity, and in candidate experience:

“Our team was spending too much time on compliance firefighting — on access issues, on payroll errors, on things that should have been handled. That left no capacity to build the talent function the business actually needed.”

When a talent team is absorbed by access and compliance issues, there’s nothing left for the work that actually moves the business.

Three hiring lessons from fast-moving markets

In Josh’s experience working across fast-moving global markets, three situations stand out as formative lessons in how to — and how not to — build a global talent operation.

The first involved a candidate in a high-priority emerging market. The hire was strong, the opportunity clear. But working through payroll setup, entity selection, compliance checks, and employment agreements took weeks — longer than the candidate was willing to wait.

The lesson: when hiring infrastructure lags behind hiring decisions, the cost isn’t just administrative. You lose the people you actually want.

The second lesson came from a senior hire in a newly opened market.

A senior leader was brought in to build out a newly prioritised market. Within months, the hire left for a competitor. The cost went beyond re-recruiting.

Momentum in that market stalled. “Cost arbitrage is not a global talent strategy,” Josh says. “We need to hire for proximity and capabilities, not cost.”

The third lesson came from a commercial team in a high-potential but hard-to-serve market. The team was missing targets consistently. The initial diagnosis was a skill problem. When Josh’s team looked closer, the issue was decision-making latency: every contract, every pricing call, every deal term had to route back to headquarters for approval. The team had no authority to act on its own.

A regional lead was placed in the market with real decision-making power. Performance improved within a quarter. “Remote teams and distributed teams are not the same thing,” Josh says. “The power and authority need to follow the people.”

Each situation points to the same pattern Josh has seen across fast-scaling organisations: when hiring logistics are tangled up with hiring decisions, you pay in markets, people, and Time.

Why Manifest Global consolidated onto a single EOR platform

“Finding the right partner is essential. Not just to be a talent operations person, but to actually be an enabler for the business.”

Josh Chong,

VP of Talent, Manifest Global

Josh evaluates EOR providers on four layers:

• Access (can we hire there legally?)
• Compliance (can we do it correctly?)
• Operations (can we run efficient processes?), and
• Experience (do employees feel like first-class citizens no matter where they sit?)

Josh’s non-negotiable: the provider has to independently manage the first two layers withouthis team babysitting them.

When providers can’t independently manage access and compliance, the talent team gets pulled into firefighting — which leaves no capacity for the operational and experience work that actually makes global hires productive.

Manifest Global consolidated onto Multiplier.

The shift replaced the patchwork of providers and manual processes with a single platform for hiring, onboarding, payroll, and compliance across Manifest Global’s international footprint.

The kind of multi-week setup that had previously cost the team strong candidates in fast-moving markets became a problem Multiplier absorbed — not one the talent team had to solve from scratch each time.

Local teams, global trust

“We are hiring genuine locals who understand the market and are able to build credibility with our clients from day one.”

Josh Chong,

VP of Talent, Manifest Global

With infrastructure handled, Manifest Global could refocus on the thing that actually differentiates it: local presence in the markets its students and university partners care About.

That presence is non-negotiable for the business. Students choosing universities and universities choosing recruitment partners are high-stakes decisions. Those relationships get built by people on the ground who understand the local education system, the counselor community, and the cultural norms around studying abroad. A student counselor in a high-growth market needs someone who understands the local education system and cultural context. A university partner needs a commercial team with the authority to close deals on the ground, not one routing every decision back to Headquarters.

Manifest Global now serves over 500,000 students annually across hundreds of markets.

The question Josh asks has changed. It used to be “how do I build a global headcount?” Now it’s “how do I build a global, scalable talent operation?” The distinction matters. Headcount is a number. A talent operation is the infrastructure that lets each hire actually Perform.

The scale of international student mobility in the coming decade is significant. Manifest Global is building the team, market by market, to meet it.