Candidate Journey Mapping Case Study: SNC Career Site Redesign
Creating a digital destination that activates talent and amplifies the brand.
Case Study Snapshot
Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has delivered state-of-the-art solutions to complex aerospace, defense, and national security challenges for nearly 60 years, yet its career site didn’t reflect its intrepid thinking. They had an employer brand disconnect, which left top-tier candidates unaware of the depth of SNC’s capabilities, resulting in challenges attracting and retaining elite talent.
Ingenuity stepped in to lead an insight-driven candidate journey mapping strategy, shaping tailored paths for key prospective employee segments. By delivering a modern, scannable career site redesign anchored by an authentic, proprietary library of employee photography, we transformed their recruiting presence into an immersive cultural hub. This strategic overhaul resulted in the career site becoming the second most visited section on their domain, paving the way for a broader partnership to redesign SNC’s website.
About the Client
A trusted innovator solving the world’s toughest technical challenges
For nearly 60 years, Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) has been a trusted leader in aerospace and defense innovation. Operating in high-compliance, elite engineering environments, SNC delivers groundbreaking systems in aviation, national security, electronic warfare, and cybersecurity. As an engineering trailblazer, the company relies heavily on recruiting specialized professionals who are deeply driven by a shared, forward-looking mission.
Our Take
“A career site shouldn’t just list open jobs; it must be an active storytelling canvas. When your digital presence is disconnected from your actual culture, both your employees and your prospects lose clarity, and top talent quietly leaves. Closing this gap requires aligning your employer brand with your candidate journey from the ground up—building an authentic digital experience that speaks directly to your candidates while remaining true to who you are as a company.”
The Challenge
Overcoming an employer brand disconnect to attract & retain elite talent
SNC has solved complex aerospace and security problems for generations, but its digital recruiting ecosystem didn’t match its internal reality. The core challenge was a significant employer brand disconnect: the existing career site used a uniform, one-size-fits-all layout that obscured their vibrant culture, depth of capabilities, and bold thinking.
This disconnect caused notable challenges for recruiting. Data from the Talent Board Candidate Survey revealed that SNC’s overall candidate experience sat in the bottom 20% of evaluated companies nationwide. Internally, a baseline audit showed that most current SNC employees could not accurately recite the company’s core mission or values, highlighting a broken brand story from within.
Additionally, public perception heavily associated SNC exclusively with a single flagship project—the NASA “Dream Chaser” space plane. This narrow focus masked the immense capabilities across their other business areas.
To better represent their full capabilities and establish an on-brand career site, SNC enlisted Ingenuity to reshape their digital destination.
Our Approach
Using candidate journey mapping to uncover strategic content insights
Ingenuity began with a comprehensive audit and candidate journey mapping. We needed to tease apart the digital friction points that were preventing talent from engaging. We analyzed the current interface through every structural lens: evaluating user analytics, running an ADA accessibility audit, checking SEO health, and reviewing design and message hierarchies.
Our primary takeaway was that different professional segments require distinct, bespoke paths. We focused our content architecture around four key user personas:
- Millennial engineers: Focused on rapid innovation, cutting-edge collaboration, and career development.
- Military veterans: Seeking stability, clear mission translation, with a supportive corporate path.
- College graduates: Looking for robust mentorship, entry-level pathways, and clear values alignment.
- Women & diverse candidates: Prioritizing genuine representation, inclusive spaces, and equity in engineering.
Understanding each segment’s unique professional challenges and goals provided the essential blueprint to build a customized user experience.
What We Delivered
A bespoke digital architecture and tools for scalable talent activation
Using our target personas as the jumping off point, Ingenuity developed an ownable, scalable brand and site architecture. We pivoted SNC away from stiff, generic corporate copy and introduced an inviting tone rooted in employee storytelling.
The core components in the new recruitment toolkit included:
- Custom persona-driven landing pages: Tailored digital tracks designed around distinct candidate profiles, to ensure specialized segments like millennial engineers and military veterans found information that speaks to their career stage and priorities.
- Dedicated business unit hubs: Specialized, informational sections for SNC’s distinct departments, providing every division with appropriate visibility, while shifting how SNC is perceived as the “Dream Chaser” company.
- A refreshed employer brand guide: A comprehensive visual guideline introducing an optimistic, future-forward look and feel; emphasizing bright brand colors, cleaner typography, authentic photography, and generous white space to evoke innovation.
- Sustainable brand toolkits: A modular collection of plug-and-play assets, including scalable onboarding resources, newsletter templates, location-based guides, and specialized intern handbooks, to maintain a seamless candidate experience across all touchpoints.
The Activation
Eliminating design friction through a complete career site redesign
To bring the strategy to life, Ingenuity focused the career site redesign on deep visual authenticity. We recommended moving away from stock photos, instead executing a multi-location shoot featuring actual SNC employees interacting candidly in real workspaces. This resulted in an ownable image library that was purposefully gender-balanced, racially diverse, high-contrast, and naturally integrated brand colors.
Structurally, we mapped out responsive wireframes, intuitive sitemaps, and optimized content designed to meet the talent exactly where they are in their journey. The new site integrated SNC’s core values and total rewards details directly into the candidate experience, making it easy for job seekers to explore the culture and confidently take the next step to apply.
By pairing key audience insights with a complete career site redesign, Ingenuity Design helped Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) bridge a critical employer brand disconnect and elevate their career site to the second most visited page on their domain.
The Result
Measurable digital growth that sparked an ongoing partnership
Realigning the candidate experience completely shifted how SNC connects with talent, yielding immediate, concrete performance results:
Optimized candidate destination
Post-transformation, the career section proved its value as a primary hub for SNC’s talent pipeline, climbing from the fourth most visited section on the domain to the number two spot in total website traffic. The storytelling-driven layout created a stickier environment that successfully captured and sustained incoming candidate interest, trailing only the homepage.
Clarified candidate perception
The new digital experience reshaped how prospects view SNC because they felt seen. By designing tailored content paths around clear candidate personas, weaving in the core mission, and introducing individual division spotlights, the platform gave job seekers a complete, authentic window into the culture where they could easily imagine themselves building a career at SNC.
Internal alignment
Beyond the external website, Ingenuity established a unified employer brand narrative that enabled the client to share a cohesive, compelling, and consistent message with their own people.
An expanding relationship
Following the success of the career site redesign, our relationship grew. SNC engaged Ingenuity to redesign the entire website and roll out the renewed employer brand across additional corporate touchpoints.
Let’s transform your candidate experience.
Ready to turn your recruiting channels into a modern, storytelling-focused talent engine? Explore our HR and People Programs services to see how we help organizations build clear, meaningful connections with candidates and their people.
