The role
Photoroom was hiring for a Senior AEO (App Experience Optimisation) specialist. It’s a niche role, the kind where most candidates who look right on paper turn out to be wrong fits, and the right person often doesn’t fit the brief in the obvious way.
D’Arcy Turner, Photoroom’s Head of Talent, had been running the search for a while. He’d reviewed over 150 candidates. None of them had landed. The search was taking longer than it should.
Bringing in Ava
Photoroom brought Ava in to help run the pipeline. From day one, she took over sourcing, screening, sequencing, and outreach - handling the full recruiting workflow while keeping a live knowledge bank on the role that updated as the search evolved.
D’Arcy no longer had to manually track where each candidate was, chase follow-ups, or write the same screening emails twice. Ava kept the process moving and surfaced what mattered.
The candidate they nearly overlooked
As the search continued, Ava flagged a candidate that D’Arcy had already passed over. On paper, she didn’t fit the conventional brief - her background wasn’t the clean match the job description suggested.
But Ava had been paying attention.
She’d noticed patterns in this candidate’s experience that mapped to what Photoroom actually needed. Not what the job description said - what the role actually required. She brought this back to D’Arcy with her reasoning, and reminded him this candidate was worth a second look.
D’Arcy took that second look. They scheduled an interview.
She turned out to be exactly who they needed.
“Ava surfaced a candidate our team would have overlooked. She didn’t fit the brief conventionally, but Ava connected the dots we missed. She ended up being the hire.”
What changed
The Photoroom hire was the headline result, but the impact ran deeper than one great candidate.
With Ava running the pipeline, the talent team moved faster and smarter across every open role. Sourcing and screening no longer required manual coordination. The knowledge bank stayed current automatically. Sequencing happened without anyone chasing it.
Cost per hire dropped - not incrementally, but meaningfully. The overhead that usually compounds across a long search was gone.
D’Arcy and his team shifted from managing process to making decisions. Ava handled everything else.
1
hire their team had already passed over
200+
candidates screened end-to-end
↓
cost per hire vs. the previous process
The takeaway
The best hires aren’t always the most obvious ones. A candidate who doesn’t fit the brief on paper might be exactly right for the role in practice - but only if someone is paying close enough attention to make that call.
That’s what Ava does. She doesn’t just manage your pipeline - she thinks about it. And sometimes, that makes all the difference.