Borgata Case Study Industrial Orgnizational Psychology

Organizational Psychology Mod 2 Critical Thinking As former Director of Marketing for Monster. com, I am very familiar with the benefits and pitfalls of high-volume/high-quality recruiting. If I were conducting the extensive recruitment that the Borgata required, I would have done exactly the same thing and relied on outside expertise and technology to attain recruitment goals.

As John Schadler of Hotel and Motel Management states: “Instead of the traditional recruitment effort (the standard black and while, all-text ad in Sunday’s classified section), hotels and resorts are using colorful full-page ads in lifestyle magazines, witty dialogue in radio advertising and dramatic visuals on outdoor billboards to attract the “best of the best”. This is no doubt a large investment.

But when a company is looking to find the highest quality people to bring their brand to life and deliver its promise on a daily basis, the investment is nothing short of critical” (Shadler, J. 2004). The Borgata Casino and Spa in Atlantic City was a typical example of an entity requiring a tremendous volume of high-quality personnel in a very short time frame. Casinos are extremely competitive businesses with a very fickle customer base. In order to obtain customer loyalty, casinos must rely on providing every customer with the very best experience by upstaging their competition to retain and gain market share.

While some businesses might have tried for a “soft-opening” in order to get expected “kinks” out of the system, the Borgata could not afford to do this as the first impression of each customer was key to their success.

Casino openings generate tremendous amounts of “buzz”, meaning that customers who check out the casinos share their opinions of the facility with many other people- all potential customers. This word-of-mouth endorsement is the most valuable form of marketing for a new casino and the least expensive.

The Borgata was entering the well-saturated existing market of Atlantic City, and faced the tremendous hurdle of getting everything right, from the employees to the facilities, right from the very beginning, in order to create that all-important positive first-impression that could determine whether the facility was successful or whether they faced an uphill struggle to compete. The Borgata wisely chose to use an integrated-solutions marketing and recruitment technology company to assist them.

Just prior to my being hired by Monster. com, Monster had experienced a uge problem with a similar recruiting effort for the Transportation Security Administration and we were still dealing with the aftermath.

Rather than select Monster. com for help, Borgata chose a company that offered similar services named PeopleSoft and achieved satisfactory results (Business Wire, 2003. ) Many factors go into the recruiting and screening of a large volume of applicants, particularly within a short time frame. While electronic media has certainly altered the landscape of recruiting, it would not be efficient to broadcast across millions in order to obtain suitable candidates.

Obviously it is most cost and time-effective to mine from applicants that already fit specific target demographics such as physical proximity to workplace, background and skills, etc. PeopleSoft at that time was a software-driven company, but Monster.

com as the largest database company in the world, had not only the software but also the capacity to specifically target the most appropriate demographics in order to enhance the quality of the recruitment by mining from their own databases.

Many people do not realize that Monster. com runs major social networking databases that are categorized according to interest, race, age demographic and other criteria. Users give a great deal of personal information out in order to use these sites and companies like Monster are then able to collect mine and store that information. For instance, NASA realized it did not have enough scientists with solid math and engineering backgrounds to staff space programs for the future.

They turned to us at Monster and we were able to determine that children tended to lose interest in math and science during the 6th grade.

We also determined how to best motivate and inspire them to continue study in math and science and incentivize those studies with scholarships, summer camps and college incentives. In similar fashion, companies like Monster and PeopleSoft are able to mine appropriate populations before they even begin the recruiting process by using their proprietary databases.

By initiating advertising and marketing strategies most favored by the defined populations targeted, companies such as PeopleSoft and Monster. com are able to design integrated campaigns across a full spectrum of electronic and traditional media. All marketing is designed to lead candidates to apply via web or come in person to employment fairs for the client. Electronic marketing pre-screens applicants through the use of software spiders and keyword analyzers to refine the candidate pool and eams of trained representatives are able to further refine candidates at the in-person real-time recruitment fairs.

With technical teams able to screen candidates almost as quickly as they apply, employment software is able to analyze all the data and determine the best candidates for prescribed positions. Software spiders, electronic testing and other methods pre-screen applicants and are remarkably sophisticated. Using specialized software, it is possible to mine only the best candidates from a pool of any size categorize them and contact them for interviews or personal meetings.

Typically candidates are routed to huge interview fairs where many trained hiring officers are able to complete the hiring process including background screenings on the spot with the pre-qualified candidates. Offers can be made immediately, training can begin and the job is usually complete. This is the typical hiring package offered by major recruiting organizations like Monster and PeopleSoft.

The cost for such services are quite high, but still offer great value to clients. With our aggressive deadline to fully staff Borgata with the best talent in the Atlantic City gaming industry, we knew we would have never been ready in time for the grand opening with a manual hiring process in place,” said Cassie Fireman, vice president of Talent, Borgata Hotel Casino and Spa. “In less than six months after deploying PeopleSoft’s Recruiting Solutions, we were able to streamline our hiring process, locate the right people with the right attitude and be prepared to provide our first guests with an unforgettable experience.

Additionally, our cost per hire was substantially less than the industry average, resulting in savings that more than paid for our entire PeopleSoft recruitment investment” (Business Wire, 2003). Recruiting software, techniques, tests and databases are much more refined, now than when Borgata did their initial hiring in 2003, but even then, it was possible to attract, screen and hire masses of qualified employees using companies such as Monster.

com and PeopleSoft.

The one aspect most likely to cause problems is with employee screening. As I mentioned before, Monster. com had been hired to employ thousands upon thousands of Transportation Security Authority personnel immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist incident.

Time was of the essence in this regard and unfortunately, the time did not enable adequate background screening checks resulting in hundreds of TSA security employees discovered to be felons, violent registered sex offenders and/or other unsavory types.

Since then, these issues have been resolved for the most part although thorough electronic and manual background checks are still the optimal method and comprehensive background checks take time. I would have handled the practical aspects of receiving and screening thirty thousand applicants just as Borgata did, by hiring a proven integrated recruiting solution company to manage the initial marketing, the enterprise software, and the recruiting and by then focusing on the training and branding of all of these employees from the inception of the recruitment process.

The Borgata situation has attracted a great deal of attention for their policy of firing employees who gain too much weight but their experience in mass hiring of outstanding employees using a recruiting company was a positive example of how electronic software application can be applied to large scale processes as well as games on our smartphones. I, too, would hire a company like PeopleSoft or Monster.

com to manage mass hiring and would expect to see the same cost savings that Borgata experienced from doing so.