Interior wall with beige marble tiles, the words 'Bain & Company' in beige letters, and a clock symbol beside the text.

How Candidate Understanding Reshaped a Global Employer Narrative

This project focused on strengthening an employer brand across multiple regions, each telling a slightly different story about what it meant to work there. While the organization had a strong mission and culture, those values were not being communicated consistently across digital touchpoints.

As a senior content specialist, I owned narrative strategy, conducting content audits, synthesizing insight, and aligning messaging to support clearer communication and decision making.

My Role

Content Audit

•

Narrative Strategy

•

Insight Synthesis

•

Message Alignment

•

Content Audit • Narrative Strategy • Insight Synthesis • Message Alignment •

The Core Question

How can an organization with global reach communicate a unified brand while still honoring regional nuance and local voice?

Why This Work Mattered

Employer branding influences trust and belonging, not just recruitment. Inconsistent messaging created confusion for candidates, making clarity essential to building confidence on both sides.

The Outcome

The final strategy delivered a clearer employer brand narrative that could be applied consistently while remaining adaptable across regions. Teams gained shared clarity around how to communicate culture, and candidates experienced a more cohesive sense of identity and belonging.

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.

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.