Pathé is one of Europe’s best-known cinema brands, recognized for consistently delivering great guest experiences. To keep theaters running smoothly, Pathé depends on having enough frontline service employees in place at every cinema at all times.

In a fast-moving and seasonally affected industry like the cinema business, hiring needs can change quickly. And although the process at Pathé was delivering what was needed to keep operations running, behind the scenes, things were difficult to manage.

The challenge‍

The hiring process for service roles was largely manual. Applications were screened by hand, and recruiters spent much of their day repeating the same tasks. They had to check basic requirements like shift availability, travel time, and motivation – information that was essential, but time-consuming to collect at scale.

That workload created another issue: delays. The team would reach out to candidates with ‘no caller ID’ phone numbers. Many candidates wouldn’t pick up calls from unknown numbers, which meant recruiters were stuck in endless rounds of follow-ups and playing “phone tag.” 

During peak periods, the hiring demand simply became too large to handle efficiently, and pressure on the recruitment team continued to rise.

As a result, when a location urgently needed people, the team couldn’t always move fast enough; not because the demand wasn’t valid, but because the system wasn’t built to adapt to the volatility in demand.

It became clear to the team that something needed to change. Combined with a push from upper management to dive into the usage of AI across departments of the business, the team reached out to multiple AI recruitment vendors. After carefully vetting the players, the team decided on Carv because of the custom setup of the agentic platform and the team’s experience in building solutions tailored to volume hiring processes. 

The solution‍

Pathé introduced Carv’s conversational AI agents to automate and accelerate the first stages of recruitment – the high-volume work that previously consumed most of the team’s time. Now, candidates apply through Pathé’s job site by simply entering a phone number, and the Carv agent immediately engages them via WhatsApp. Instead of waiting days for a callback, candidates start the process instantly and can respond whenever it suits them.

The conversational AI agent then conducts the full initial screening: asking about availability (including late nights), travel arrangements, salary expectations, and motivation. Once completed, Carv compiles the intake into a clear candidate report and automatically routes it to the right hiring manager through the ATS. That shift removed the central recruitment team as a bottleneck and allowed local theater managers to move directly from screening to interviews.

The result

The results were immediate and measurable. Pathé cut its average time-to-hire by more than half, reducing vacancy fulfillment from 32 days to 14.5 days. With screening automated, the recruitment operation became dramatically leaner as well, without losing the ability to support hiring at full volume, leading to an overall cost reduction of 50%.

Besides increasing efficiency and optimizing costs, Carv made the process more flexible. Theaters can now open or close vacancies on demand, with the recruitment team able to respond within minutes instead of operating around fixed cycles.

“We can now work according to the real needs of the theaters, which is a huge benefit for the business” says Louka Bot, Recruitment Advisor at Pathé.

Candidate experience improved, too. While there was initial hesitation about introducing AI into hiring, feedback quickly proved the opposite: candidates found the process fast, clear, and user-friendly.

With these early wins, Pathé is already looking ahead. The next step is automating interview scheduling to remove the last manual bottleneck, and the company is exploring expanding Carv to other roles beyond service staff.

“I would 100% recommend Carv,” Louka concluded. “If you look at how much we can do now and how we’ve accelerated the entire process, the value is undeniable."