How a psychology-driven casting strategy unified a global employer brand across 65 offices

How do you build a single creative idea that makes the world's smartest candidates across radically different markets feel like they already belong?

This case study includes the following research and creative methods:

Campaign strategy

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Casting strategy

•

Audience psychology

•

Paid & organic amplification

•

Content production

•

Campaign strategy • Casting strategy • Audience psychology • Paid & organic amplification • Content production • 

my
role

I owned the casting strategy for the Be More campaign, identifying and selecting the right people to feature based on the psychological dimensions of the Be More mission and ensuring each story mapped to a specific candidate persona and behavioral motivation.

I also owned the full amplification and syndication strategy, ensuring the videos were deployed and optimized across Bain.com/careers, LinkedIn, and Instagram, integrated into paid media campaigns, activated at global and local recruiting events, and distributed across appropriate third-party platforms.

The Challenge

Bain had fragmented employer brand recognition that was strong in the Americas and EMEA markets, but low in APAC, with inconsistent messaging across markets that left candidates with an unclear picture of who Bain really was and what made it distinct.

The Approach

A psychology-informed casting built around the Be More mission. I selected talent whose personal stories made each dimension of the campaign idea tangible, human, and person-specific across 8 talent areas and 65 global offices.

The Outcome

A unified global employer brand narrative delivering click-through rates and engagement rates significantly above industry benchmarks across LinkedIn, Instagram, and Bain.com/careers, with 3 new campaign videos actively in production for March 2026.

I reviewed global recruiting content across career pages, digital media, and regional messaging to identify patterns and gaps in the employer message. These insights informed the development of more than 30 recruiting marketing videos produced across global markets including London, New Delhi, Tokyo, Singapore, São Paulo, New York, and Boston. I also served as a subject matter expert for the rebranded careers site, working with third-party copyeditors to draft and refine hundreds of pages of copy. As part of this work, I helped develop the Build at Bain sub-campaign, spotlighting employees across roles and highlighting the impact candidates could achieve at the firm.

The Approach.

  • Through the audit, several consistent patterns emerged:

    • Inconsistent regional messaging was causing confusion
      Candidates were seeing different employer messages depending on region because each team emphasized culture and values differently, leading to uneven experiences.

    • Narrative clarity builds confidence and trust
      Without a shared narrative, candidate experiences tended toward confusion or emotional disconnect; aligning messaging helped strengthen how people imagined themselves at the organization.

    • Patterns in existing content revealed deeper narrative gaps
      By auditing content across touchpoints and focusing on repeated themes, language shifts, and what values were (or weren’t) expressed, underlying gaps became visible that surface-level reviews would have missed.

    • Storytelling guidance focused on how to communicate rather than what to say
      The strategy didn’t prescribe exact language but instead created frameworks that helped teams craft consistent, human, adaptable messages grounded in trusted values and lived experience.

    These insights shaped the strategic direction of the work.

  • The strategy centered on building narrative alignment without sacrificing flexibility.

    Rather than prescribing exact language, we developed guidance that helped teams tell consistent stories through shared values, tone, and emotional throughlines.

    The focus was not on what to say, but how to say it in a way that felt human and grounded.

  • Content recommendations emphasized clarity, warmth, and relatability. Messaging was guided by lived experience rather than abstraction, allowing the employer brand to feel authentic across regions.

    The result was a storytelling approach that could scale while remaining emotionally consistent.

  • The initial launch took 6 months. The project is ongoing to support continuous promotion and storytelling.

    The project unfolded across several phases:

    • Discovery and content audit

    • Insight synthesis

    • Narrative alignment

    • Strategic recommendations

    Each phase informed the next, allowing insights to evolve into direction.

Bain.com/careers →

Build at Bain →

Reflections

This project reinforced the importance of narrative as infrastructure. When storytelling is treated as a system, it becomes easier to scale, adapt, and remain authentic. It also highlighted how qualitative insight reveals not just what people see, but how experiences feel.