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When it comes to Las Vegas, there’s always a story.
This one is about Fontainebleau Las Vegas, and how the luxury hospitality brand hired 6,500 employees in just over 100 days for their new resort. The key? An AI assistant named Morris who screens, schedules, and engages top frontline talent.
Recently, Fontainebleau Las Vegas Executive Director of People & TA Sara Piper and Chief People Officer Kim Virtuoso sat down with The Josh Bersin Company’s Josh Bersin and Stella loannidou and Paradox’s Ally Bonner to discuss their hiring sprint. Below is a snippet of the full conversation:
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Josh Bersin: If you look at the frontline workforce around the world, you see that workers are in extremely high demand, and there is a shortage in almost every single industry. And entertainment and gaming is a particularly interesting one, because it's growing like crazy. Many of the traditional HR tools don't scale fast enough to deal with the issues we have in high-volume. So, this is a really interesting story about how to run a recruiting function in a high-volume, rapid hiring experience with AI.
Ally Bonner: Right, you all had to build staff across such diverse roles. Do you want to talk a little bit about how you had to hire everything from wok chefs to blackjack dealers, and how you really aligned your leadership team to move at the Vegas speed?
Kim Virtuoso: We did a lot of strategic planning, including backing into dates and hiring numbers. We knew we had a certain number of openings that we had to fill. We assumed that in order to fill them with very skilled, high-quality candidates, we would need to receive around 80,000 applications. We identified every unique position across the entire company: entertainment, food and beverage, hotel operations, marketing, and finance.
Ally Bonner: You expected to receive about 80,000 applications, but you actually ended up with over 300,000. Can you talk about how you leveraged Paradox to pivot and manage 4x the volume you were expecting?
We identified every unique position across the entire company: entertainment, food and beverage, hotel operations, marketing, and finance.
Kim Virtuoso: We definitely relied on our AI assistant Morris to really get that funnel down as much as possible. If you put it into perspective, 300,000 applications for 6,500 hires is a lot to think about from a conversion rate standpoint.
We probably wouldn't have reached the candidate pool that we truly generated in such a short period of time if we didn't have these 24/7 interactions, because everybody's working different hours across the Strip. We would have had to double or triple the size of our recruitment team to handle the volume that far exceeded the 80,000 candidates we thought we would get to 300,000 candidates.
Stella loannidou: And with Morris you achieved a 93% candidate satisfaction rate.
Kim Virtuoso: Everyone who interacts with Morris and has phenomenal things to say about him. He truly has made his mark in the candidate community. Folks who come onboard as a new team member actually ask to meet Morris, because it feels so genuine and authentic and such a great experience that it has to be a human.
