Crafting personalised recruitment journeys for the US Air Force

In 2016 the US Air Force had a website packed with content, and needed one that guided different visitors towards recruitment. I was the key client contact, alongside our partners at GSD&M. The aim was to change how potential recruits, medical professionals and parents used the site, with content that adapted to each visitor’s preferences and motivations.

I wanted to move away from rigid menus and manual career searches, towards a site that understood who was visiting. That meant a component-based design system that worked on every screen size. I had the team build flexible modules controlled by the backend. Instead of targeting by demographics, the front end changed its copy, hero images and headlines to match what motivated each visitor. Recommended next steps, based on how people moved through the site and on short interactive quizzes, gave potential recruits a realistic picture of life in the Air Force.

People engage more when they get something back and can shape their own experience. So I came up with the “Satellite Profile”: an abstract, geometric element that worked as a playful onboarding tool. It told visitors openly that it was personalising the site for them, and invited them to answer quick multiple-choice questions. Behind the scenes, I helped define an always-on multivariate testing engine that tracked each visitor’s path and built their profile in real time. The same categories later fed into SEO and media planning, so the site could tell what someone was looking for before they arrived and send them to the best starting page.

Personalisation paid off. Showing the right content to the right candidates at the right time raised engagement, and conversion on lead and recruitment forms went up 60%. Media spend also became 100% attributable, so the agency could put its budget where the best leads came from. The platform won a Silver Cannes Lion and several Silver and Gold London International Awards.