30,000 CVs a Year: How Etihad Built an AI Hiring Machine

Etihad Airways gets over 30,000 cabin crew applications a year — and instead of drowning in them, they built an AI-powered recruitment stack to process them at scale. In this episode, we break down the three-layer AI system Etihad uses to hire 2,500 to 3,000 people a year: AI-driven video interviewing, automated ATS screening, and an internally-built onboarding chatbot. In 2025 alone, the airline hired more than 3,200 new employees — while running global recruitment drives across 17 cities. We also look at what's driving this: Etihad's plan to double both its fleet and workforce by 2030, going from 12,000 employees today to roughly 24,000. When you're growing at that pace, AI doesn't just help — it becomes the only way the funnel works. For HR leaders and talent acquisition teams in MENA handling high-volume hiring, this is a case study in what happens when you treat recruitment as an engineering problem.