Hiring at scale is a high-wire act — especially in hospitality, where every role shapes the guest experience. It requires a delicate balance between efficiency and humanity, between speed and precision, between filling roles and building a culture. There are trade-offs, rapid decisions, and equally rapid adaptations as circumstances evolve.
When Fontainebleau Las Vegas was announced, its hiring strategy was a key pillar of its future success. In the process, it went beyond staffing a luxury resort, and it redefined how the Strip searches for talent. When it comes to Las Vegas, there’s always a story. This one is about attracting and hiring upwards of 6,500 Members (the collective term for Fontainebleau Las Vegas employees) in less than three months, and fulfilling the hiring needs of a $3.7 billion resort.
Starting from scratch on the Strip.
Las Vegas is a city of second chances, and Fontainebleau Las Vegas’s road to opening is proof of that.
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.
This is how they did it.
"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. Unlike some other resort openings, Fontainebleau Las Vegas wasn’t inheriting employees from a previous iteration. Adding to that, Fontainebleau had no brand presence in Las Vegas or the broader gaming community.
What Fontainebleau did have, however, was a very singular legacy.
We were the first two HR hires. There was no system, no infrastructure — just a vision.
The Fontainebleau name is synonymous with Miami luxury, dating back to the original Fontainebleau Miami Beach, a historic hotel that opened in 1954. The Miami Beach property built its reputation on opulence, celebrity clientele, and a sleek, modernist design; hosting everyone from Frank Sinatra and Elvis Presley to the Kardashians. It became a symbol of high-end hospitality — bespoke and white glove in ways that typically only small, boutique hotels are.
This presented a unique opportunity for Fontainebleau Las Vegas. Unlike industry titans that with decades cultivating loyal gaming audiences, Fontainebleau was an outsider in the Las Vegas market. While its very specific Miami aesthetic evoked luxury, nightlife, and exclusivity, the brand had no built-in gaming identity or established loyalty among high-rollers and casino regulars.
Building a casino brand from scratch in a market dominated by industry heavyweights meant Fontainebleau Las Vegas had to do more than just hire dealers, pit bosses, and hosts — it had to prove itself as a legitimate player in the gaming and hospitality industry. It needed to attract experienced talent who knew how to run a Las Vegas resort, excite high-value guests to take a chance on a new brand, and establish credibility in a city where brand recognition drives customer loyalty.
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. Would players take a chance on a new casino?
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."
Virtuoso, whose background includes leadership roles at MGM Resorts International, Caesars Entertainment, recognized that this was an opportunity to reinvent hiring at scale from scratch. But they weren’t just racing the clock. Fontainebleau’s history meant they also had to entice thousands of candidates to take a chance on this new endeavor.
The benefit ripple effect.
One of their most significant moves was a strategy that focused on meeting their prospective talents’ needs. Equipped with data and a plan, they targeted a population, many of whom were working-age parents who worked odd and overnight shifts. The resort introduced weekly pay, childcare benefits, paid parental leave, and family-forming support — perks that set Fontainebleau Las Vegas apart in the Strip’s competitive gaming market.
Along with filling these open positions, Fontainebleau Las Vegas was also pushing the industry to refocus its approach to employee well-being by bringing it to the forefront of their recruitment strategy. Virtuoso added that structuring innovative benefits packages was a major achievement, and one that its impact across the Strip they are particularly proud of.
As part of the value proposition to potential members, they offered a number of benefits for parents and prospective parents. Benefits like:
- 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.
Importantly, these were seen as serious investments and must haves to attract the right talent.
"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.
Building trust before selling rooms.
Historically, casino openings start with brand marketing first, followed by hiring. Fontainebleau’s team flipped that model.
"We were hiring before we even marketed hotel rooms," Virtuoso said. "That meant we had to build trust while we built a brand."
Here’s the thing: People respond well to transparency. Fontainebleau made candidate communication a priority, ensuring applicants knew where they stood in the process. They also leaned heavily into candidate care and watched the data to keep on course. Their metrics back them up:
- 300,000+ applications processed efficiently
- 50%+ of candidates completed satisfaction surveys
- 93% candidate satisfaction rate
"We weren’t just filling positions. We were proving that this project was real," Piper said.
For those who’ve long advocated for the power of positive employer branding on corporate communication: Fontainebleau Las Vegas’s hiring momentum became part of its brand story, signaling that this time, the doors would open. As Kim Virtuoso puts it:
"While HR isn’t traditionally seen as a revenue-generating function, it can drive business transformation through better hiring and employee experience."
We were hiring before we even marketed hotel rooms. That meant we had to build trust while we built a brand.
Success and its many challenges.
When you’re in a competitive talent market, every little edge matters. And that is twice as important when you’re a brand new property. The challenges the team faced were very real. They had to build sustainable, long-term applicant volume while simultaneously creating the systems to support it. At the same time, they needed the right team to manage hiring at scale—at its peak, the talent acquisition team became the largest in the HR organization, structured with a mix of permanent hires and contractors to handle peak hiring periods.
Beyond people, they had to implement the right tools—technology that could streamline hiring without losing the human element. Every system needed to work at scale, in real-time, and be flexible enough to adjust as hiring demands evolved.
When Virtuoso and Piper sat down to plan the resort’s hiring, they did the smart thing and worked the math backwards to build their hiring funnels. For every new hire, how many applicants do we need in order for one to make it to hire? Based on that, they came up with a big number: 80,000 applicants. They put marketing into gear, empowered the team, and started to tell the brand’s hiring story.
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”). The implementation was live within six months. The switch wasn’t simply about managing volume — it allowed them to reshape how to engage with candidates.
"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.
And that volume scaled. The TA team’s success rates were well beyond 80,000 applications — they drove that number well beyond that goal, hitting 300,000. Much of that was due to smart communication, storytelling, and then the tools to handle success. 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."
Beyond answering questions, Morris 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.
"We used Morris to vet candidates who didn’t meet basic requirements, freeing our recruiters to focus on connecting with top talent who were both a culture fit and technical match," Virtuoso explained.
Automation that enables people.
Pushing hard on technology support, from communications to assessments to scheduling has benefits. But it's the people who have to adapt when things go sideways. That philosophy was put to the test when the brand marketing and automation were so effective, the team found themselves at a hiring event with 250 people lined up outside. But, Morris kept things moving — candidates received real-time updates, reducing confusion and frustration. Fontainebleau Las Vegas’s ability to blend automation with on-the-ground responsiveness turned an unpredictable moment into a proof point for their hiring approach.
Then came the “Halloween miracle.” On October 31, just before their busiest hiring month, Formula One took over Fontainebleau’s talent center parking lot — moving them overnight and on the eve of a major career fair. This became a massive, immediate challenge for the People team and their recruitment marketing agency. Thousands of registrants had been directed to an address that was no longer relevant. Ads had been pushed out across multiple channels. Adding to this, they were scrambling to find an alternate location for the volume.
"We had to find every place our address was listed — our website, event pages, emails — and change it immediately," Piper said. "Paradox became the critical communication tool, ensuring thousands of applicants knew where to go.”
A blueprint for the future,
When Fontainebleau Las Vegas opened on schedule in December 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. The Strip is always evolving, and Fontainebleau Las Vegas played a key role in that shift.
For an industry built on spectacle, Fontainebleau Las Vegas showed that the real driver was a strategic investment in people.
