A Fun House Recruiting the entire s

A Fun House
Recruiting the entire staff for the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas in record time and at minimum cost may sound like mission impossible. But Arte Nathan came up trumps. Talk about long odds. Arte Nathan was Vice President of Human Resources for the launch of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Everything about Bellagio was larger than life. So too was the challenge that confronted Nathan: hire 9,600 workers in 24 weeks. Nathan and his HR team would have to screen 84,000 applicants in 12 weeks, interview 27,000 finalists in 10 weeks, and process 9,600 hires in 11 days. In the end, they nailed the deadline and here's how they did it.
This started out as an experiment. But in the end, the guinea pig survived. We saved Bellagio $1.9 million. Most HR people are afraid to let go of their hire-and-fire authority. But if you really want to sit at the big table, you've got to start thinking strategically and globally. And the only way to do that is to eliminate HR transactions from your life. You have to be willing to say,'I am in the wrong place in this process:You have to take yourself out of the system. If a manager wanted to hire you, he would click on CONDUCT BACKGROUND CHECK. Law-enforcement officials would then receive your application online and check your employment and education history. We rejected about eight per cent of our candidates at this stage for various reasons, such as lying on their applications. If you passed this and a drug test, the manager would then make the final decision. When you appoint somebody, you create three files: a personnel file, an equal employment opportunity commission file and a medical file. Why not have an electronic personnel file? In the process, we could eliminate the files that managers usually keep at their desks. So we developed one and transmitted everything from the application database to the new-hire database. Using the same technology for all of our personnel and payroll forms meant that we no longer had to collect, input, and file thousands of paper forms.
The only way to hire so many so fast was to move everything online. That meant we had to build an online job application and HR system. 1 told our managers that this technology would give them hire-and-fire responsibility, which they say they want, and complete authority, which they rarely get. And it would make them 100 per cent accountable for their decisions. Going online would take human resources out of the process.
Next came the interviews. Every day, 180 hiring managers, who we had specially trained, conducted 740 interviews of 30 minutes each. Applicants were asked a set of behavioral questions that we had developed, like (Tell me about a time when you were at the front desk, and a you couldn't guest was late. What did you do when you couldn't find the reservation?' Using a PC embedded in their desktop the managers evaluated the answers on a rating sheet and the scores were fed into the database.
In 14 months we had designed, built, and implemented the system. This is how it worked: to apply for a position, you set up an appointment. When you arrived, an HR staff person wearing a microphone confirmed your identity and notified staff, who greeted you by name and assigned you to a computer terminal. Once you completed the application, the computer would ask you to proceed to a checkout desk where a staff member would review it. In fact what our people were really doing was assessing your communication skills and your overall demeanor. At that point, we weeded out about 20 per cent of the applicants.