Building the digital experience of a premium brand

The problem wasn’t design, it was architecture

For many people, their first meaningful experience of Bain wasn’t an interview, a campus presentation, or a consultant across a table. It was the careers site. Long before they stepped into an event or met a leader, they encountered the firm in digital form, and that interaction quietly shaped expectation, tone and trust at scale.

When I joined, the careers experience sat outside the main bain.com architecture on a separate CMS platform. It worked, but it felt detached from the rest of the brand; showing its age, not yet optimised for mobile, and difficult to evolve at pace. Updates required process, iteration was constrained, and the design and structure were inherited from an earlier era of web thinking. Careers also represented a significant proportion of overall traffic, which meant this satellite site was, in practice, one of the most visible global touchpoints.

The first refresh improved the experience, but the trade-offs remained

The recruiting marketing team operated separately from the core corporate marketing function responsible for bain.com, but we worked closely and well together, and they were an impressive team to be part of. Early on, the focus was pragmatic rather than transformational, because the platform constraints were real.

Within the limits of the existing CMS, the careers experience was refreshed; structure clarified, tone modernised, visual expression tightened, and storytelling shifted towards more authentic voices and lived experience. It made a real difference, but it still sat on the same old platform with the same constraints, which made one point unavoidable: content can evolve, but architecture eventually dictates what’s possible.

A few years later, Bain initiated a full redesign of bain.com, led by the central digital marketing team through a formal RFP process. From the careers perspective, this was the moment where the work moved from improving what sat on a separate island to embedding the careers experience properly into the core platform, recognising that it wasn’t a peripheral section but a primary brand environment.

The build was hands-on creative direction inside Episerver

Throughout the vendor phase and subsequent build, the careers perspective was actively represented. I sat in on vendor presentations, joined project sessions once the agency partner was selected, and stayed close to the work as the new experience took shape. The detail mattered, not only what the pages looked like but how governance, scalability and day-to-day usability would work across markets and teams.

As development progressed, I became very hands-on with Episerver and learned an incredible amount by working directly in the platform rather than simply reviewing decks. This wasn’t just oversight. It was proper creative direction, translated into a functioning digital environment.

The work covered information architecture, page hierarchy and candidate journeys, but also the craft layer that makes a site feel like a brand rather than a database. Copy was written and rewritten until it sounded human without losing rigour. Imagery was defined and produced with a clear visual point of view, not stock-photo blandness. Video and story components were shaped to move employer branding away from abstract claims and towards real voices and lived experience. Templates and modules were designed with enough consistency to hold the brand together, but enough flexibility to be useful across markets and hiring programmes.

Just as importantly, we worked to ensure the digital touchpoints aligned with the live ones. Campus events, presentations and recruiting materials were updated in tandem so that what candidates experienced in person reinforced what they encountered online, and vice versa. The aim was a single candidate journey, not a website on one side and an event programme on the other.

In the end, the shift wasn’t merely cosmetic. Embedding careers into the main platform improved mobile behaviour, clarified governance and made iteration faster, but more than that, it made the careers experience feel like an organic expression of the brand rather than a functional add-on. It reinforced a lesson I’ve carried ever since: some of the most consequential brand experiences are the quiet, repeatable ones, the platforms people return to, not the moments that flash and disappear.