How a Gamedev Studio Eliminated Their Part-Time Recruiter and Still Hired 19 People in Two Months

The Backstory

Case and pricing note, updated 16 October 2026: this story was originally published on 26 March 2026. The subscription prices, plan allowances and ROI figures below retain the assumptions of that historical case. AINA's current published recruiting subscription is $49 per month.

A small game development studio heard about AINA through another gamedev company they knew. That other studio was already on an annual AINA subscription. No sales pitch needed. Just one founder telling another: “This thing actually works.”

The studio that walked in had a familiar problem. They build games — think Unity 3D, C# developers, the kind of technical roles where finding the right person requires sifting through hundreds of applications to surface the few who can actually ship. They had been using a part-time recruiter, but the arrangement was painful. Different time zones. Slow response loops. Everything dragged. A role that should close in two weeks took longer because the coordination overhead — messages, scheduling, resume reviews — sat in someone’s inbox across a timezone gap.

So they did something unusual: they removed the recruiter entirely.

The Bet: Non-Recruiters Running Hiring

The studio’s release manager — yes, the person normally responsible for shipping builds, not shipping candidates — took over hiring. Along with other managers on the team, they became the hiring operators.

This is the kind of setup that makes traditional HR people nervous. Non-recruiters running a recruitment process? Without dedicated TA support? With technical roles that require real evaluation?

But the studio had AINA. And AINA does not care whether the person pressing the buttons has “Recruiter” in their title. The platform generates the same artifacts regardless: structured JDs, candidate scoring, personalized outreach, screening coordination, hiring manager summaries, rejection letters, offer documents. The workflow is the workflow. The human reviews and decides. The system handles the production.

19 Roles in Two Months

Here is what “ad-hoc hiring” looked like in practice: the studio opened 19 roles in the span of two months. These were not all planned. Vacancies appeared as projects ramped up — a new game entering production, a feature team that needed reinforcement, a technical lead departure that required backfill.

At roughly 10 roles per month during peak periods (about 35 per year on average), this is the kind of volume that typically demands a dedicated recruiter. The studio was handling it with managers who had other jobs to do.

Each vacancy pulled in around 225 resumes. Of those, 188 candidates entered active communication. Five went to screening, eight got in front of hiring managers, and about five finalists received offers per role. That funnel — broad at the top, selective at the bottom — is exactly where manual work explodes.

225 resumes to review. 188 people to message. 223 rejection letters to send. Per role. Times 19.

Without automation, that is a full-time job. Several full-time jobs, actually.

The Economics of a Release Manager Doing Recruiting

The release manager’s time was valued at €15 per hour — roughly double what a junior recruiter costs in some Eastern European markets, but still far below Western norms. Even at this rate, the savings were dramatic:

• 215.8 hours freed per vacancy. Over five full working weeks of time that the release manager and other managers did not have to spend on hiring paperwork.
• €3,359 saved per vacancy in team time costs.
• 14.6x ROI per hire. For every €1 spent on AINA, the studio got back €14.60 in time value.
• AINA cost was only 6.9% of the savings. The platform consumed less than seven cents of every euro it saved.
• Historical case calculation: €111,580 annual net benefit using the original €6,000/year cost assumption (€500/month subscription).
• 7,552 hours of hiring work automated per year. That is the equivalent of nearly four full-time people — freed to actually build games.

The adoption rate was 79%, again conservative. The model assumes the team did not use every AINA feature perfectly every time. The ROI holds even with imperfect usage.

What Got Automated (and What Stayed Human)

The studio explicitly chose not to use AI interviews. All screening and evaluation was done by humans — the release manager and hiring managers. AINA’s value came entirely from artifact automation:

Candidate communications dominated — 87 hours per vacancy, or more than two full working weeks just on messages, personalizations, and follow-ups. For a studio handling 10 roles simultaneously, that is 870 hours per month of communication work alone that AINA compressed into a manageable stream.

The Referral Loop

There is one detail that says more than any ROI number: the studio that referred this team is now on an annual AINA subscription. They started the same way — monthly plan, testing the waters, scaling up as roles multiplied.

This is how adoption actually works in the gamedev and tech space. Nobody reads a whitepaper and signs an annual contract. Someone they trust says “we use this thing, it works,” and they try it on a few roles. Then they try it on ten. Then they stop imagining going back.

In the case originally published on 26 March 2026, the studio moved from paying for up to three vacancies to a plan described as €500/month with an allowance of up to 2,000 candidates. These were the historical case conditions. The current public recruiting subscription is $49/month; confirm the current plan scope for your workload.

Why This Matters Beyond Gamedev

The real story here is not about games or Unity developers. It is about a structural shift: the moment when hiring becomes an operations problem rather than an HR problem.

When a release manager can run a 19-role hiring sprint alongside their actual job — with higher consistency, structured scorecards, and a complete audit trail — it means the barrier to professional-grade hiring is no longer headcount. It is workflow.

During the historical case period, the studio used a €500 monthly subscription to support hiring documents, candidate messages and structured evaluations while its managers focused on game development.

No AI interviews. No candidate-facing bots. Just the back-end machinery of hiring, running quietly so the humans could do the parts that actually require being human.

Curious what this looks like for your team? → Talk to AINA

All figures are based on actual ROI calculations using the client’s real hiring volumes, team costs, and conservative adoption assumptions (79%). Company name withheld at the client’s request. The referring studio’s name is also withheld.