In the entertainment industry, hiring decisions move fast and the stakes are high. A wrong hire on a key production role has ripple effects across an entire project. But so does a delayed hire — when you need the right person on set or in the office by a specific date, a three-week screening process isn't an option.
For one high-profile entertainment agency we work with, the challenge was volume. They were growing aggressively, posting roles that routinely attracted over 1,000 applicants each, and operating with a lean HR team that simply couldn't process that volume manually without letting excellent candidates slip through.
The Problem with Manual Screening at Scale
When your team physically cannot review 1,000 applications in a reasonable time window, you build shortcuts. You filter by school names. You prioritize agency referrals. You apply heuristics that have nothing to do with actual capability — and you end up with a screened pool that looks a lot like the people you've already hired, not the best people for the role.
The HR lead at this agency had a specific concern: they were missing candidates who didn't have the "right" pedigree on paper but had exceptional raw talent. They suspected the manual process was filtering them out before a human even looked.
What Changed with AIR
By deploying Braintrust AIR, the agency was able to invite every single applicant — regardless of resume keyword match — into a conversational assessment. The AI asked role-specific questions about creative problem-solving, stakeholder management, and high-pressure production environments. Every candidate got the same questions, evaluated against the same rubric.
Completion rates landed between 30-40%, which for a high-engagement creative industry role is strong. More importantly, the candidates who completed the assessment and scored highly included a meaningful number of people who would have been filtered out under the old manual screening approach — career switchers, candidates from smaller markets, people whose resumes undersold their actual capabilities.
The Outcome
The agency successfully scaled through their biggest growth year on record without adding recruiting headcount. The AI was effectively acting as a full-time screener, processing hundreds of candidates per week and surfacing only the top performers for human review.
Several of the candidates hired during this period were identified specifically because AIR surfaced them — people who, by the HR lead's own admission, would never have made it through under the old process.
If your team is drowning in volume and worried about what you're missing, book a demo to see how AIR handles high-inbound creative and professional services roles.