Ally Bonner (00:00):

Alright, quick introductions before Sarah and I hop in today. Thank you again everyone for joining. We really appreciate you all spending a little time with us today. I am honored to be here with Sarah Piper, who oversees talent acquisition at the Font and Blue Las Vegas. I'm Ali Bonner. I'm one of our VPs of client success here at Paradox. So I've had the pleasure of working with Sarah for the last couple years as we've gone through the implementation and go live journey together. So we're here to talk about their story. It's a fun, amazing story, ups, downs, less rights, all the good stuff. So really excited to talk about some of the things we're doing together and how the font and Blue Las Vegas continues to innovate for the future. So if you can give everyone a Hello, Sarah?

Sara Piper (00:51):

Yes. Hello everybody. I am so excited to be here today. Thank you Allie and the paradox team for hosting this lovely webinar and I'm very excited to tell our story.

Ally Bonner (01:02):

Awesome. All right, I'm going to get a slide deck pulled up just so that you all have something to view in the background as we're going through. But like I said, we're here to chat about font and Blue Las Vegas and really how they staffed up their team in less than three months with a little help from Paradox and AI and our friend Morris, which we'll get into in just a little bit. Sarah, starting off, something I found so interesting when we started working together was that the font and Blue Miami had just this such a strong brand, such a strong presence in the market and font and Blue Las Vegas decided to build everything from the ground up. So can you talk about the approach behind that decision and how that really helped shape the hiring process for the font and Blue Las Vegas?

Sara Piper (01:51):

Yeah, absolutely. We were very lucky. So we started this entire journey knowing that there was a very rich legacy and strong brand recognition in Miami, and so we really had that going for us. We knew that the name Fountain Blue would sell itself. So as we started to approach building the company and of course starting to staff our property, our strategy was really rooted in honoring the essence of that Fountain Blue brand, but also tailoring it to fit the unique competitive market of Las Vegas. We knew that Las Vegas had a ton of candidates from a technical skillset, if you're looking for a dealer or a cook or a chef, Las Vegas is really a great place to look. That skillset runs very, very deep. But where we wanted to focus was making sure that the people with those skill sets also fit in with our culture.

(02:58):

We didn't want to be every other strip property. We wanted to have a very unique culture. We wanted candidates that aligned with our passion, with our commitment to guest service. And so we started by defining what our culture was going to be. We identified four culture values. Those culture values are innovate, cultivate, collaborate, and celebrate. And once we established those four culture values, then we could start to build everything else in the spirit of innovation. We said, you know what? Paradox is doing some pretty amazing things. They have AI as part of their a TS system and recruiting process. We got to look into this, we got to be on the forefront of this. It is AI is going to take over the world and we got to be ready. And so we did just that. We reached out to Paradox and we were like, let's partner. Let's figure out how to do this together. We've got a very big project ahead of us and I think together we can make it happen.

Ally Bonner (04:08):

Love it. Sarah, something you talked about through all of that was really the culture and how that helped lay the foundation for font and Blue, both from a brand perspective and how you're marketing to customers and also how you're hiring. So can you tell us what Font and Blue does to really maintain that strong culture going forward?

Sara Piper (04:29):

Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that we did was we wanted again to be on the forefront of innovation and so we decided that we were going to build out our AI Morris who you know very much about and we decided that Morris was going to kind of represent us from a communication standpoint initially identifying, or I should say starting that communication with our candidates. So we created, created Morris with the help of some partners, including Shaker and some people here on this team. And we really wanted to focus on how he was going to be creative but also provide a really warm and forward thinking approach to talent acquisition and in a way that would engage our candidates to truly understand and embody that culture.

Ally Bonner (05:31):

Awesome. Well if you all can see on the lower right hand side here on the screen, that's Morris. Can you talk a little bit about the journey, Sarah, for you all to identify Morris, how did you come up with Morris and really what all went into defining him as the AI that was supporting Font and Blue?

Sara Piper (05:52):

Yeah, so Morris is named after our original architect in Miami, Florida, Morris Lapidus, and we wanted to play homage or pay homage to Mr. Lapidus and all the great that he did in building and starting the brand Fountain Blue Miami. And so Morris is named after him and we call him our member experience architect. And I want to make one thing clear. A lot of people say, oh, he's your mascot. He's not our mascot, but he's our face. The

Ally Bonner (06:24):

Poodle is the mascot, right Sarah?

Sara Piper (06:26):

That is true. We have a whole poodle thing going on, but Morris really embodies our spirit. And so as we went in to start creating him, we designed him from head to toe, whether it was the way that his hair looked, the way that his suit was, that his glasses, his shoes, we even put a profile together. What is his favorite drink, what are his favorite sports team? Where did he go to school? What are his hobbies? And by doing that we were able to determine his voice. We wanted him to be very sophisticated to represent that luxury brand, but also playful and professional. So it took a lot of thought to develop him and to design him to what we wanted to be to ensure that candidates connected with him. We didn't want him to turn anybody off, we didn't want him to be unapproachable or intimidating. We wanted candidates to feel like he was a safe space. And so we truly put a lot of effort into designing him and coming up with his voice.

Ally Bonner (07:38):

Awesome. Sarah, I did notice in the chat someone asked what a TS platform you're using? They're using paradoxes actually. So we have a conversation, a TS, very AI focused in how we can help create more conversational apply processes with our clients. And so Fontin Blue really used this throughout everything they did when they were going through the recruitment process. So we'll dive into a lot more of that here in a minute. I do want to share a little story about me. I am a big Las Vegas fan, so some people on the call know that about me. I go to Las Vegas all the time. I actually met my fiance in Las Vegas, so it's my city. I've been to Font and Blue quite a few times and every time I'm there, Sarah, I think about how crazy it is that Morris has helped hire every single person that's working and member that's working at the font and blue. So from blackjack dealers to pastry chefs to Hostess Morris played a role in that. So you guys have such diverse roles that you were hiring for when we were going through the implementation, everyone at Paradox here said we're building a small city, and that's truly what it felt like we were helping you guys navigate this small city in order to hire so different roles. So can you talk about how you navigated hiring for those different roles and how really font and blue planned and executed hiring at the scale that you did?

Sara Piper (09:06):

Absolutely. And before I even dive deeper into it, I did want to say in the beginning we tried to think a lot about how to prepare for this. And so we decided, you know what? Let's break it down in terms of what we anticipate. And ultimately we anticipated about 80,000 applications. And keep in mind that's for 6,500 roles, 80,000 applications. So in and of itself we were overwhelmed by that number. How are we going to do it? How are we going to communicate with this many people without having to build a team of over a hundred people? Fun fact here we were blown away. We did not receive 80,000 applications. We actually received 300,000 applications, especially for the

Ally Bonner (10:00):

Team you had at the time,

Sara Piper (10:02):

A hundred percent. So with 80,000 being an overwhelming number, you can certainly imagine how it ended up being with 300,000, I mean I'm sure everybody on this call can relate to hire 6,500 people with 300,000 applications. The first thing in going through your mind is how do you comb through that many applications and that many resumes? How do you communicate with that many people? And trust me, we wondered the same thing. And by using Paradox, we were able to do it. We were able to communicate through Morris, through the AI functionality all hours of the night. So while we're all sleeping in bed, Morris is chatting and engaging with our applicants, they're able to ask him questions, what positions are available? What does your PTO policy look like? How can I learn more about your benefits program? All of that Morris did for us. And you know what Allie, 41% of the communication that Morris had with candidates occurred after working hours.

Ally Bonner (11:21):

I love it. We love to say Morris is our 24 7 experience architect manager. So working around the clock when everybody else, us humans need our sleep, our rest to have a meal or two. So that's just testament. I mean 41% of those communications taking place outside of normal business hours when the rest of your team is off is just truly incredible. Sarah, another thing you mentioned the candidate experience is critical. It's especially critical when you have a luxury brand, your customers, your candidates. So you had a lot of additional layers to why your candidate experience was so critical. Can you talk about how you guys had such a seamless candidate experience and how you really collected candidate feedback along the way to make sure that candidates felt it was as seamless as it

Sara Piper (12:13):

Was? Yeah, absolutely. If you don't mind, I'm going to separate the question and answer it in two different ways. The first thing I want to talk about is the candidate experience overall and how we were able to truly make it so that it was top of the line. First and foremost. I mentioned Morris speaking with the candidate 24 7, and so the candidates weren't waiting for somebody on a talent acquisition team to come into the office the next day. They weren't waiting over the weekend. They were able to get real time answers. They were able to apply in such an efficient manner. And so that first and foremost was a great way to initiate the positive candidate experience that we wanted to do. But we also utilized Maurice to ask each candidate a series of prescreening questions that we developed for every single job position that we were hiring for that were very, very unique.

(13:18):

And right then and up there, Morris was able to weed out any candidate that was not a good match for the role. And here at the Fountain Blue, you are going to hear us use the term fit and match. We refer to fit as cultural fit, do they meet our culture? And then we've referred to match as technical ability. And so we were able to knock off quite a few applicants right off the top just because they didn't pass those pre-screening questions. That took a lot of administrative burden off of our talent acquisition team. And we programmed Morris to know what those right answers would be so that he could just streamline that process that happened regardless of a TA person putting their hands in the system. And then we set up rejection notices on a 72 hour delay so that if they didn't pass those pre-screening questions, they were notified 72 hours later and not immediately because we certainly don't want them to think we didn't consider their resume right away. So we did that. The other thing is we were able to utilize Morris for scheduling efficiency. And how we did that was by inputting what our schedules, what we wanted the schedule to look like. Morris took it from there and said, Hey, listen, I understand your schedule, I understand your capacities. Trust me, I will schedule these candidates for interviews or cultural auditions or whatever it may be the way that best suits your business. And he certainly did. And so that really took a big administrative burden off as well. And then lastly, communication.

(15:09):

Candidates want communication. They want transparency. They want to know in the moment, do I move on with my life or do I actually have a shot here? And so Morris allowed us to continue real-time communication, not only from the application process, but also once your application is submitted and reviewed, what are the next steps? Where do I go from here? What should I wait to? Is there anything coming from an onboarding perspective? Throughout the entire process of the candidate journey, Morris was remaining in communication with all of our candidates.

Ally Bonner (15:47):

Really quick, Sarah, can you hop onto the second part of that question?

Sara Piper (15:51):

Yeah, sure.

Ally Bonner (15:53):

There was a question in the chat, which I think tied into what you just mentioned around interview scheduling. They asked how does a recruiting team maintain communication and coordinate interviews logistically? Wow. Which it's true. It's crazy, especially at the number that they saw being, I mean essentially a startup, you were in startup mode, you were a smaller team, a very lean team that had to support this. So I think something great to call out about Morris is not only does Morris help schedule that initial interview and really own all the hassle of the scheduling, but he can handle any of the reschedules or the cancellations,

Sara Piper (16:30):

Absolutely

Ally Bonner (16:30):

The user or candidate perspective. So there's no need for any human to intervene. Like Morris can handle all of that within a few seconds, which I think really helped your team when it came to interview schedule.

Sara Piper (16:42):

Absolutely. Once you inform Morris of what your schedule should look like, he takes it from there. So all you have to do as a human on a talent acquisition or a talent acquisition leader is say, I want to conduct interviews Monday through Friday, nine to noon in 20 minute time slots with a capacity of one candidate and three interviewers, or maybe it's five candidates and five interviewers or a panel or a group or a single or a virtual interview or a phone interview.

Ally Bonner (17:21):

You guys did it all.

Sara Piper (17:22):

We did it all. And Morris is smart enough to know I'm going to interact with this candidate and I'm going to determine a time and an interview location that is mutually beneficial for both parties. He handled it all for us.

Ally Bonner (17:38):

Amazing. So Sarah, one thing I wanted to ask you was making the process inclusive important and taken into consideration as the font and Blue was working through outlining the entire recruitment process?

Sara Piper (17:56):

I'm sorry, can you repeat that question all and just kind of clarify a little bit?

Ally Bonner (17:58):

Yeah, absolutely. Wanted to know if making the process the recruiting process inclusive was important to font and blue in something that was taken into consideration.

Sara Piper (18:08):

Yeah, absolutely. When you say inclusive, are you referring to members or applicants or are you referring to inclusive of hiring managers? And

Ally Bonner (18:22):

Definitely on the applicant side, because I think something that was really interesting throughout the process was from step one, you guys took into consideration languages and being able to communicate in English and Spanish.

Sara Piper (18:36):

Absolutely, yes. And thank you for clarifying. I just wanted to make sure I was fully understanding. Yes, that was actually extremely important to us. So here in Las Vegas, we have a very large Hispanic community. We do hire a lot of Spanish speakers and we also hire a lot of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers. And so that became very important to us. How are we communicating with those that may not have or utilize English as their first language? And so we learned that through Morris, if you type to Morris in your native language, he gets it. He's like, okay, I understand what you're doing. I'm going to reply back to you In that same language, and as the recruiter, let's say, I as the recruiter don't speak Spanish, I see it in my native language while the candidate sees it in their native language, which is really cool.

Ally Bonner (19:30):

Yeah, Morris is elegant, fun, multilingual, he's everything that we need.

Sara Piper (19:34):

He's everything. And Allie, I wanted to circle back on a question that you had asked about how we engage candidates upon the conclusion of the process. And I think you kind of alluded to surveys, and that is one thing that really excited me about Paradox and the use of Morris is the ability to go back and survey our candidates about their experience. As I mentioned, we had 300,000 applicants. Of that, 52% of them took a survey at the end of their application process. And of those 52% that took the survey, I think it was 93% of them expressed a satisfaction rating, meaning that they enjoyed the process, that they thought that it was efficient, that they felt engaged, and they also had the ability if they didn't feel engaged or if they didn't like the process to type freeform on what exactly they didn't like. So we've used that over a significant period of time to be able to determine how we make fixes and improve for the future. And right now as we are getting out of what we call volume hiring for opening and into day-to-day operations, we are leveraging that data constantly to be able to make better decisions.

Ally Bonner (21:09):

That's awesome, Sarah, especially because usually for surveys with email, we typically see about a 10% response rate. So seeing a 52% survey completion is extremely high against that benchmark. And the reason being is because Font and Blue was able to deliver that both SMS and or email really in whichever was the preferred candidate communication preference. So as the candidates were going through the application, they were able to say what method they preferred to communicate, be communicated with, and that's how Morris continued to communicate with them throughout the entire process. So amazing to see that high number of a survey completion.

Sara Piper (21:51):

Yeah, we were very happy with that.

Ally Bonner (21:53):

That's awesome. So Sarah, maybe backing up a little bit, going back to the beginning, a crazy time, if you can remember, you all had to hire around 6,500 members in under three months. You conducted more hiring events than I can count and probably more than any of our other clients. So can you walk us through a little bit about what a typical hiring workflow looked like?

Sara Piper (22:19):

Yeah, absolutely. And thank you for calling it hiring event here at the Fountain Blue. We do not talk about job fairs. We have talent recruitment hiring events, and I appreciate you utilizing that term as well. Wow, thinking back of all the hiring events we did, we knew that we were not going to be able to hire 6,500 people with individual interviews on a day-to-day basis. We knew that we had to have these mass hiring events. And when I tell you about these events, Allie, we went all out. We had entertainment, we had in some cases we had Butlers, in some cases we had celebrities show up. I don't know how we got so lucky, but we put a lot of effort, experience. I mean Las Vegas, what can I tell you? We put a lot of effort into our hiring events. And here's one thing that is so cool.

(23:24):

Paradox has an event planning module specific for hiring events. So previously I had used Indeed, they kind of have this event kind of functionality in their system, but it is nowhere near as intuitive as paradox module. And so we were able to leverage this module to reach out to the masses through the help of our recruitment marketing firms, shaker, get the word out that we were having these events, and boy did people show up. They were huge. And again, Morris was able to, we programmed Morris to be able to communicate with our candidates while keeping event hiring in mind, event hiring and day-to-day hiring or two very different things. So we were able to program mores to be relevant to that type of event.

Ally Bonner (24:27):

Awesome. So I think probably something most people don't realize that are on this webinar right now is that you were conducting both hiring events and interviews long before the font and Blue property was even open or even being built. So you were actually conducting these hiring events at an offsite talent center in Las Vegas. I still remember receiving the call from your team because you needed to have a last minute change of hiring events for the entire month of November because of Formula One coming in over Las Vegas. So can you talk about how the team navigated that unexpected change and how Morris really helped support you in that?

Sara Piper (25:09):

Absolutely, and to paint the picture for everybody on the call, we had a really amazing talent center on an off property close, not too far down the street from the construction zone. We had done a ton of work to set up this beautiful talent center, but it just so happened to be right around the corner from where the F1, the first year of F1 would be taking place. Place. And the city itself didn't really know what to expect. This was the very first year we knew it was going to be crazy, but we didn't know how crazy. And one week prior to November 1st, we were told the leasing company that owned our talent center had rented out our parking spaces to F1, and therefore we would have no parking for the entire month of November. And as you can imagine for a talent center, people are coming and driving there and there was really no way to get around the no parking issue.

(26:18):

So we had one week to decide what we were going to do. Were we going to stay and I don't know, offer Uber tickets or bus passes or were we going to move? And the only solution at the time was to move. And so we ended operation, I can't remember, it was in the middle of the week, maybe a Thursday. We were fully in full operation all day that day and then closed at five, packed up the talent center, moved overnight and opened the next morning at 9:00 AM and a whole new location. And that includes computers and badging systems and filing cabinets and paperwork and anything you can think of that you need as part of recruitment from a supply perspective, we worked through the night, but what was the most nerve wracking piece of all of this is how do we tell our 300,000 candidates, Hey, don't come to this location anymore, you got to go to a new location. And November was set to be our highest number of onboarding, our highest number of candidates that would be onboarding was set to be in November in preparation for our December 13th opening.

(27:51):

It's perfect timing, perfect timing. So we leveraged Boris, we worked with the Paradox team and said, listen, how are we going to get to all of these people? What are we going to say? How do we say it to keep the positivity and not seem like it's a negative? And that's where we leveraged Paradox and Morris and he was able to communicate with all applicants to say, Hey, listen, we moved. Don't show up at the old place. Show up at the new place. He sent reminders. He did it all in real time. And so when we opened up our doors that next day at 9:00 AM we had no issue.

Ally Bonner (28:26):

That's amazing.

Sara Piper (28:28):

Yeah.

Ally Bonner (28:28):

So throughout the whole process, were you or anyone at the font and Blue and your team afraid of using Maura since he's AI and worried that was going to really take away from the human touch of the recruitment experience?

Sara Piper (28:43):

So I think anytime you are considering ai, that's probably one of the top questions that you're asking yourself is, is this the right decision? Are we taking away the human impact? Are we removing that human touch and actually making this process more frustrating? And ultimately the answer was not at all. So what Morris helped us do was stay organized. We still had in-person cultural auditions and in-person interviews, and we still had face-to-face candidate interactions and none of that changed. The only thing that changed was he was able to help us organize the top candidates and essentially if a candidate didn't qualify for the role, he helped us make sure that we weren't wasting our time. And I know that can be kind of harsh when you're thinking about talent acquisition. Nobody truly is wasting your time, but when you have 300,000 applications come in, you really do have to be smart in the way in which you organize human interaction with those candidates. So no, it ended up being great. The people that we wanted to truly engage with face-to-face, we were able to.

Ally Bonner (29:59):

That's awesome. We always say at Paradox, your 24 7 recruiting assistant takes away from the bs, which is the boring stuff. So that's the burden. Exactly. And so we were able to really help lift that off the font and blues team and have Morris really handle those administrative burden tasks and frees up your people to spend more time with people, which is the whole point of recruiting.

Sara Piper (30:25):

Absolutely. And to kind of go back from the beginning of this, when we talked about our culture, just as much as we wanted our candidates to be a culture fit for us, we also wanted to show our candidates that we truly valued compassion and friendliness and transparency and communication. And so Morris was able to, it really worked both ways. Morris was able to make sure that that happened both ways.

Ally Bonner (30:53):

Awesome. Well, I have one last question for you, Sarah, and then we can move on to some q and a with everyone who's here at the webinar font and Blue Las Vegas has achieved so much in such a short amount of time. It's crazy. It's been a year since the property has been open. So now you're really transitioning from that additional onboarding of opening the property to what normal everyday hiring is going to look like moving forward. So how does the font and Blue Las Vegas team plan to really innovate and evolve your hiring strategy to just maintain those staffing levels that you have now?

Sara Piper (31:28):

Yeah, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, we now we are done with volume hiring. We got through the 6,500 people in a matter of three months and then through normal attrition we are continuing to hire and as business builds, we're adding more head count to our compendiums. And so we are shifting from volume hiring into day-to-day operations, day-to-day hiring operations. And so one of the things that we recently did was we changed the way in which we built our candidate journeys. Our candidate journeys before again were to help us get through masses amounts of applications. And now that we aren't seeing the same amount of applications as we did pre-opening, we want the candidate journey to look a little bit different. We also want to put some of the responsibility back on the hiring managers. So in the beginning, our talent acquisition team took a lot of that burden and now we want to push some of that back to hiring managers.

(32:33):

So we're utilizing the system so that managers can get in and do a lot of the that we were previously doing. The other piece too is contextual ai. Right now we've programmed Morris with our standard questions and answers. I believe it's about 400 questions that Morris has the ability to respond to. But what we would really like to see as we start to move forward is Morris learning from conversations and figuring out his own way to respond. And that's I called contextual ai and Paradox has that ability. And so I'm really excited in 2025 to partner with Paradox to really launch this contextual AI piece.

Ally Bonner (33:18):

Awesome. Two quick things I'll say to that Sarah, and then we'll open it up for q and a around the hiring manager, the transition from recruitment team, owning the interviews to now hiring manager. We support clients that have both, but you were one of the first to go through that transition from the recruitment team owning the interviews to hiring managers. And I will say that's something that we can support. So there's many clients where they keep it just all recruitment team owning interviews, and then many other clients where it's the hiring managers. So paradox, whether you're on our conversational a TS or we're integrated with your a TS, we really are able to handle either experience or even both experiences if you need both. And then the Contextual Care and AI piece. Sarah, I love that you brought that up. Morris is continuing to get smarter each and every day, but the contextual AI is able to really make it more conversational. And that's the goal here at Paradox and what we're really looking to achieve with our clients is how we can have more engaging conversations with our candidates, have more informed candidates coming into the first interview. So really excited to work on that project with you and the rest of the team this year.

Sara Piper (34:30):

Thank you so much, Allie. You guys have been so great to work with. People are reaching out to me all the time to talk about this, to talk about AI relative to talent acquisition, to talk about how we're doing it. I am really enjoying talking to people about this because it's so new and people are just so curious about how it works. So I welcome any and all questions. I'm available and hope I can be of assistance to anybody considering the system.

Ally Bonner (35:07):

Awesome, thank you, Sarah. I will say this team at the font and Blue Las Vegas has really just embraced all that paradox has to offer. And it's awesome to see clients when they do that because you can really see that time to hire go down the candidates being more engaged and having that high satisfaction rate. So thank you. So I'm going to pop right into the questions in the chat if that works.

Sara Piper (35:30):

That works. But I do want to add one real quick thing. I don't want to miss this. It's so important. I know that we have some people on the call today from our own Fountain Blue team and I truly want to celebrate them. And this is not something that I did or that Paradox did on its own. This is something that we had a very large dedicated team, completely committed and motivated to get this done, and you would be shocked at the amount of hard work and just unbelievable attitudes that this team had. So I just want to call out. While Paradox certainly helped us, our team was amazing as well.

Ally Bonner (36:17):

Yeah, that's awesome. Sarah. I'm seeing claps and hearts flying across the screen right now on Zoom, I will say I remember you guys doing hiring events a week straight and all weekend long for multiple weeks in a row. So

Sara Piper (36:30):

This, we didn't have days off for about three months

Ally Bonner (36:33):

When we say 24 7, they also were kind of doing that too, just sleeping at night sometimes. I mean it was insane. So shout out to everybody there has been just absolutely incredible to work with and a partnership that Paradox values so much.

(36:48):

So let's start hopping into the questions. We actually have quite a few Sarah in the chat. Happy. Yeah, let's do it. I think both of you, they might be for both of us. Both of us might have different insights to share. So the first one is what happens if the interviewer's calendars aren't updated? I can take this one, Sarah. So as she mentioned, yes please, you have those open interview times that you configure within Morris or whoever your AI is. So let's say you set that up from nine to noon, Monday through Friday, Morris or whoever your AI is able to integrate into Outlook or Gmail, and we can actually cross reference those calendars. So Morris will be able to see, okay, if you're available from nine to noon on Monday, but you have a meeting from nine to 10, Morris will not offer up times to the candidate during that time period.

(37:39):

That's correct. So he's constantly checking, making sure, so there's no issues of getting anything overbooked. I will say change management when it comes to calendar hygiene is a big part of what we do and what we help partner with our clients on. Just making sure that they have those open interview times set up and that they're managing it. But the calendar invite goes onto your Outlook or Gmail calendar. You can accept it as any other invite. I'm a hiring manager actually here at Paradox, and it is so seamless and easy. I just see it pop up on my calendar except and know exactly when and where I need to be for that interview. Next question directed at you, Sarah. How long did it take to configure

Sara Piper (38:22):

Morris? Oh gosh, I got to think back. This was, man, we were working a thousand miles a minute.

Ally Bonner (38:34):

Definitely in three months.

Sara Piper (38:37):

Yes. Lemme tell you what we did first before we even started to configure Morris, we had to determine who he was. And so I actually wrote some things down I want to share with you guys. First of all, Morris is 42 years old. He has a BA from NYU, he did a summer abroad in London. He really enjoys hiking. His favorite drink is an old fashioned, and that's how detailed we got. Once we figured that out, we worked with Shaker Recruitment marketing, who you guys, I cannot tell you enough amazing things about Shaker recruitment marketing, and they helped us, us design him. I think we went through, I don't know, 20 different iterations of what Morris looked like. And every time it was like, oh, change his hair a little bit or let's see, let's add a bow tie to his glasses, or he doesn't look approachable.

(39:48):

Let's change the direction he's looking. I mean, it was details that we truly cared about as we created this image of Maurice. So that was step one. Then we went into the technical piece of it. I will tell you, figuring out what we thought Morris would be asked and how we would answer it probably took the most time because we did not want just a standard answer. So we didn't want Morris to say, Hey, thanks for checking in or thanks for logging on. What do you want to apply for today? We wanted Morris's voice to represent who we were, and so we put so much thought into every word that he used, how he used it, whether or not he used an exclamation mark or a period, whether or not how he would sign off. Is it just thank you, bye. Or is it, I really appreciate it, or I really enjoyed talking to you today. If there's anything else you need, just let me know. I'm here for you. That I think the creative part of it definitely took the most time. And then with the help of Paradox, they helped with all the technical pieces of it, but from a creative standpoint, yeah, I don't know that I know an exact, I don't remember, I don't know if Shaker or anybody on the call remembers, but I know it took a few weeks,

Ally Bonner (41:24):

Which really on the paradox side, when we talk about net new implementations, it really depends on what you're looking to implement with us. In the font and blues case, it was conversational at S, so it was everything. So there's a lot that goes into considering it. What are the jobs going to look like? What are the screening questions going to look like? How do we want to set up interview scheduling, job search, candidate care, but we also have the ability to integrate into ATSs Paradox understands buying an at s can be a big undertaking and there can also be a lot of opinions that play into making that decision. So we can work both with or without the at s, so standalone. So there's a lot of flexibility and options. And we also have a lot of clients who do phase approaches. So they might decide to launch something within the first couple months and then continue to add more products onto it as time goes on.

(42:19):

So really flexible when it comes to how we want that to be implemented and really up to the client side on how fast you're willing to move. So in font and blue's case, they were on it all the time with us and we were able to move very, very quickly to launch so many different things in such a short amount of time. Next question. I think this one will be for me, Sarah. If a candidate asks a question that Morris is not able to answer, how is that feedback loop addressed? So let me just clarify really quick because the next question is Morris a proprietary name for the module. So Morris is font and Blue's AI assistant. Our flagship assistant is Olivia. So we have some clients that just keep it as Olivia, but a lot of clients go through that activity that Sarah was just talking about and really personifying the brand and making sure that their AI assistant really fits the branding of their organization.

(43:16):

We've had some clients that did a company-wide contest for the name and the type of personality for their AI assistant. And like in Sarah's case, they pulled history from Font and Blue, which is just super cool. So totally up to the client on how they want to configure and personify their AI assistant if their AI assistant or Morris in this case is not able to answer a question. We have an AI training team that's constantly looking at the confidence level in which the AI assistants are able to answer the questions, and as Morris goes on, he'll become smarter through more conversations, more times of that question being asked. So there's ongoing AI training that we have a team here that helps support. And then to another point, Sarah brought up the contextual care piece that is another layer to it that can make your AI assistant even smarter, so able to pull in additional context within the question. An example of this is sometimes a candidate will ask three questions in one bullet. Right now, Morris would find whatever answer is the best fit to all of that future Morris, when he has contextual care to support him, he'll actually able to answer all three of those questions. So like I said, it just makes for a lot more of a conversational experience and really helps enhance the overall candidate experience. Next question's for you, Sarah. What size was your team to hire? This many people don't include Morris.

Sara Piper (44:50):

Okay. I will not include more, but he was part of the team. So we started with five, we call them talent acquisition partners, they recruiters, and each of them had had support from talent acquisition specialists. And so we started with a team of, I want to say 20 temporary talent acquisition specialists. And the reason why I say temporary is because we don't need that many for operations. So we started with, we wanted to make it clear that our team was built to help us get the door open, and then once we're open and we can scale back the team, we helped them find other jobs or they continued to stay on with our team. But we started out with 20, I think we ended up going to 25, but then we also had temp staff from a staffing agency that were there to help us with logistics, so helping with line control, helping with opening the door, directing traffic. But the 20 specialists that we had had a higher skillset in terms of recruitment and we were able to keep most of them on. We now have a team of three recruiters and six specialists, so we've gone down significantly, but we definitely needed a larger team for opening,

Ally Bonner (46:32):

Which is still a very lean team for the amount of applications.

Sara Piper (46:35):

Still very lean. I think we peak, yes, I think between the staffing, the temporary specialists and the temps from the staffing agency, we peaked somewhere between 50 and 55.

Ally Bonner (46:50):

Awesome. There's a couple different questions around, does Paradox have to be the A TS or can it be paired with a different A TS touched on it a little bit, but I'll go a little bit more in depth. Yes, we can be the conversational a TS like in font and blue's case, or we can integrate with any ATS out there. Again, we recognize that there might be a lot of opinions, decisions behind ATSs, and you may be in a long contract and spent a lot of money. You can still have this same experience where we overlay your A TS and your Morris or your Olivia would be able to take over that conversational piece and then integrate right back into your A TS. So we have clients on both sides of the spectrum. The next question is we are a 200 person company. We hire a few hundred janitorial people per year, both growth and churn related. Are we too small for Paradox? No year, not too small. So we have clients all across the board that we support and we have different levels to our conversational A TS depending on your needs. So absolutely don't hesitate to reach out to us. We would be more than happy to demo and share a little bit more. Okay. Can you give us an idea on the amount of marketing spend that might've been allotted to drive these 300 K applications?

Sara Piper (48:15):

It was a lot. I don't know that I can share the total budget, but I can tell you that it was significant and we've dropped down dramatically. And I don't know if anybody from Shaker is on the call because they did most of the work for us. We did have a large budget, and I keep in mind that when you're opening a casino of this size and a city of this size, people want to know what you're doing. They want to see what you're doing. And we wanted the good press. So in many cases if we hadn't had advertised, we still would've had a lot of candidates just from the name itself, but we really wanted our name out there and we wanted people to know what we were doing. And the other thing too is Las Vegas has a huge union pool, I should say most companies here are unionized. And we were concerned that some of these union employees weren't going to jump over to our company without us having been unionized yet. They would lose their seniority, they would lose their pay, and we were really worried about that. And so we did a lot of advertisement to those union positions to help them understand why they would want to come over to us, why should they come over to us? And with the help of Shaker, we did some geo-fencing tools and techniques that helped us reach that market of people at the very right time. I don't want to give away too many of our techniques, but we definitely thought a lot about what we wanted to say, how we wanted to say it, and who we were going after.

Ally Bonner (50:18):

Awesome. Next question. How far in advance were you making offers to candidates before the hotel opens?

Sara Piper (50:25):

Great question. That was very nerve wracking. We were very worried that we were, if we made an offer too soon that we would lose candidates just through normal drop off. We did a pretty good job of keeping all offers within six weeks of the start date. And that was very difficult because what that meant was we actually had a war room, literal term, war room where we had people on the team after operations were over after the talent center had closed, we would migrate to this war room and spend hours and hours sending offers. And so in order to kind of condense it into that six week timeframe, it required us to do quite a lot of late nights. And we would go to the war room and we would send offers. And some nights we'd be there till two in the morning doing it. But that's what we had to do in order to make sure that we weren't offering too far out.

Ally Bonner (51:34):

Awesome. This next question is great. We actually didn't touch on this at all. Does Morris help with retention or managing employees?

Sara Piper (51:45):

So Morris does, Morris and Allie can kind talk a little bit more about the enhancements that are coming, but so we are working with Paradox right now to bring Morris in-house. They have an employee assist program where members have questions, they log on to their intranet and Morris pops up just like it would with the a TS system and says, how can I help you? And the employee says, Hey, what are my PTO hours or where can I find what's on in the cafeteria this week? Or where can I find more information about benefits or who do I contact if I'm having an issue with my manager? And Paradox has the ability to set up an AI structure like Morris to be able to do that. So we are working with them now to do it. We are also leveraging Paradox to send out mass updates to policies and procedures that require signatures. And so they'll get a text message from Morris that says, Hey Sarah, we just launched a new attendance policy. Please log in and sign at your earliest convenience. And they can do it at their fingertips, right on their phone through text messaging. So very excited about that. It really takes a lot of the burden off of the HR team.

Ally Bonner (53:09):

Awesome. Yeah, so we had a lot of clients that shared with us. We have this great candidate experience and they're used to having this 24 7 AI recruiter that they can talk to and then they get hired and then they're not getting that same level of communication. So that has come up from a lot of our clients, which is why we are now supporting with some of our clients through that ongoing process as employees. So that was a great question. Next one's going back to marketing, Sarah, what channels were used to publish jds and openings, indeed, network, zip, anything else besides the corporate website?

Sara Piper (53:46):

Okay, so this is a bit of a question. I see Jay Morris on here, I'm sure he's going to pipe in and help me here. Shaker did a lot of that for us. So we posted our positions on our website and we also had 20 LinkedIn seats or 20 LinkedIn positions that we could post as well. And it was on our website, but on positions that we wanted to leverage Shaker to help us with getting out there, we called it programmatic campaigns. Shaker would then assist by posting on Indeed some more specific specialized job boards as well. And speaking of some of our food and beverage outlets, we really needed to get the right type of chefs and cooks. And so we leveraged some websites specific to culinary. And gosh, what else? And I'm going to have to leverage Jay here. Jay says, shaker program, programmatic was huge boost for all roles, but we also included niche sites out of home advertising. So you would be surprised how little job boards we actually used. And when it came time to that we weren't, maybe we weren't getting the candidates we were looking for and we leveraged Shaker, then they kind of went out on our behalf and posted on niche sites.

Ally Bonner (55:25):

Awesome. The other thing Jay mentioned a little bit earlier was Shaker was actually able to stay under budget and are concentrated

Sara Piper (55:33):

For They were, yes.

Ally Bonner (55:34):

So all via the channels that Sarah described, reached the right audience and received an enormous amount of organic applies. So that's incredible. Shaker's been an amazing partner to you all as well as many of our other clients, so couldn't recommend them enough. Alright, we have one last question, which is perfect for the timing. I think this will be for me for the calendar piece. If the company is not using Outlook or Gmail, we are using a platform called larc. Is there a native calendar our managers can use? Yes, there is absolutely a native calendar that's built right into what we call the Paradox, CEM. So the candidate experience manager that can be accessed on a laptop, a web browser, or via an application. We've even had clients where we've done shortcuts to our web browsers on tablets. So for example, we have a client that we support that they use Zebra devices in their locations.

(56:26):

So we actually have been able to implement them on different devices as well. So we absolutely have that. And I will say the other thing about Paradox is if the integration doesn't exist today, we're always willing to at least investigate and see. So we would be more than happy to take a look at the ability to integrate within LARC because we're always looking at expanding our integration capabilities. Well, thank you all so much. Perfect amount of questions. Took us right up to time. It was such a pleasure to spend an hour with you all today. Sarah, A pleasure to spend time with you as always. Couldn't have asked for anyone I would've rather do this with. So thank you everyone and appreciate the time.

Sara Piper (57:08):

Thank you so much.

Ally Bonner (57:09):

Thanks Sarah. Bye everyone.

Sara Piper (57:11):

Bye.

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