Building LAWA’s first employer brand

The challenge

LAWA runs LAX and Van Nuys Airport. Its roughly 3,300 City employees keep two of the country’s busiest airfields moving. The 2026 FIFA World Cup, Super Bowl LXI, and the 2028 Olympics were on the calendar. The team needed to hire across dozens of job families, from airport police to engineers to plumbers. They were competing with well-funded agencies under civil service rules that limit how public employers can recruit. They’d also never had a formal employer brand, so candidates were left to guess what working there would really be like.

Our approach

We started where we always do, by listening. In stakeholder interviews across the organization, people kept coming back to the same thing: they chose LAWA because they wanted to give back to their community and to Los Angeles. That became the heart of the employer value proposition.

From there we built Elevate, with a version for each stage of a career. Elevate Your Career speaks to people considering LAWA. Elevate Your Future speaks to early-career talent and training. Elevate Your Impact speaks to the people already doing the work. We created the verbal identity, the visual system, and a 28-slide brand guidelines book. Then we brought the brand to life on careers pages, job platforms, social, email, print, and the employee intranet.

Results

The result we love most is harder to chart. Employees now use the word Elevate on their own when they talk about improving their work. LAWA also placed in the 2026 ACI-NA HR Excellence Awards in its very first year applying.

The work