When it comes to Las Vegas, there’s always a story.
This one is about second chances, staffing at scale, and how Fontainebleau’s new luxury resort redefined how the Strip searches for talent by hiring over 6,500 new team Members in less than three months.
Starting from scratch on the Strip.
The vision for a luxury resort at the northern end of the Strip began in 2005, inspired by the area’s rich history as a home to Wayne Newton, the Rat Pack, and Liza Minnelli. After years of evolution, Fontainebleau Development and Koch Real Estate Investments acquired the project in 2021, bringing it to life with renewed commitment. On December 13, 2023, that vision was fulfilled as the doors opened to a 67-story, 3,644-room luxury resort, marking a new era for this iconic location.
Like every successful resort, Fontainebleau Las Vegas is defined by its people — the driving force behind every guest experience.
In early 2022, Fontainebleau’s newly hired Chief People Officer Kim Virtuoso and Executive Director of People and Talent Acquisition Sara Piper were a People team facing a very complex task: build a 6,500-person workforce by the resort’s late 2023 opening.
“We were the first two HR hires,” Piper recalled. “There was no system, no infrastructure — just a vision.”
Their small task? Assemble a workforce for the $3.7 billion Fontainebleau Las Vegas from scratch, without inheriting employees from a previous iteration. Adding to that, Fontainebleau — a notable name in Miami Beach — had no brand presence in Las Vegas or the broader gaming community to help them attract talent.
This made building a strong employer brand, and developing targeted recruitment marketing campaigns, both a challenge as well as a priority. Many hotel and casino professionals had spent their careers at established brands with longstanding VIP networks and lucrative loyalty programs. For Piper and Virtuoso, hiring for Fontainebleau was more than just filling roles — it was about building trust in a brand that, for Las Vegas, was being introduced in the market.
“When I stood in board meetings, making the case that we’d be able to hire 6,500 employees in this timeframe, it couldn’t just be a hopeful promise,” Virtuoso said. “It had to be real.”
Redefining perks and benefits.
One of their most significant moves was a strategy that focused on meeting their prospective talents’ needs. They wanted to push the industry to rethink its approach to employee well-being by bringing it to the forefront of their recruitment strategy. As part of the value proposition to potential members, they offered a number of benefits for parents and prospective parents:
- Childcare solutions via Tootris – The first resort on the Strip to offer vetted childcare providers, flexible scheduling, and overnight care for employees working late shifts.
- Paid parental leave – A benefit uncommon in the hospitality sector, providing paid time off for new parents.
- Family-forming benefits – Including fertility support, adoption assistance, and other family planning resources.
- Competitive PTO and wellness programs – Above-industry-standard paid time off, with an emphasis on employee well-being.
“It wasn’t just about perks — it was about removing barriers that had pushed talent away from our industry in a post-covid era,” Virtuoso said.
Scaling quantity and quality.
When Virtuoso and Piper sat down to plan the resort’s hiring, they worked the math backwards to build their hiring funnels. For every new hire, they calculated how many applicants they would need? Based on that, they came up with a big number: 80,000 applicants.
Traditional hiring models and systems didn’t seem capable of holding up under that kind of pressure. With limited time to go before opening, they decided to leverage Paradox’s conversational hiring platform and implement an AI assistant (which Fontainebleau dubbed “Morris”).
“We launched Paradox with Morris to create a seamless, human-centered candidate experience while ensuring we could hire at the scale and volume we anticipated,” Virtuoso said.
The TA team’s success rates went well beyond the goal 80,000 applications — reaching the heights of 300,000. By leveraging automation and AI smartly, they were able to scale initial candidate screenings and scheduling, allowing human recruiters to focus on personalized interactions with top-tier candidates.
“Forty-one percent of our candidates interacted with our system after business hours,” Piper noted. “Paradox gave us the ability to respond instantly, anytime, without needing an army of recruiters online 24/7.”
Morris also took on the heavy lifting of screening and scheduling. Fontainebleau Las Vegas designed custom pre-screening questions for every role and built out automated interview scorecards, allowing the system to help sort and prioritize applicants efficiently. Morris also handled communications for hiring events and ensured that thousands of candidates were informed on critical information.
The implementation of AI automation resulted in volume, sure — but also created a high-quality experience that candidate reacted positively to:
- 300,000+ applications processed efficiently
- 50%+ of candidates completed satisfaction surveys
- 93% candidate satisfaction rate
A blueprint for the future.
When Fontainebleau Las Vegas opened in December of 2023, its impact was already spreading across the Strip. New benefits, hiring processes, and approaches that the resort’s People and Talent Acquisition teams had pioneered were standouts in a competitive industry.
Fontainebleau Las Vegas’s People team aimed at reshaping expectations in an industry where tradition often outweighs change. By building a hiring strategy that centered on real benefits and real trust, they set a new bar for what it means to compete for talent in Las Vegas.
“What Fontainebleau’s People team accomplished wasn’t just a hiring feat — it was proof that when you bet on people, people bet on you,” Virtuoso said.
The lasting impact of Fontainebleau Las Vegas’s hiring approach is still unfolding. The resort proved that when a company invests in its employees — not just in wages, but in benefits that matter — it creates a ripple effect that extends far beyond a single property. For an industry built on spectacle, Fontainebleau Las Vegas showed that the real driver was a strategic investment in people.
Josh Zywien
