Insights Amplified: Paul King, Caesar's Entertainment Transcript

Welcome to Insights: Amplified a monthly podcast featuring interviews with the movers and innovators in talent acquisition, staffing, and corporate human resources. Insights: Amplified is a production of Riviera Advisors, helping organizations improve, enhance, and optimize their corporate recruiting and staffing capabilities through sophisticated levels of expertise in tactical and strategic global talent acquisition; and by TotalPicture Radio - the voice of career and leadership acceleration.

This is Jeremy Eskenazi, Managing Principal of Riviera Advisors. On this edition of INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED, we welcome Paul King, Corporate Director of Talent at Caesars Entertainment. Prior to joining Caesars, Paul was executive recruiter at Oracle Corporation. He ran his own executive search firm, and was Client Partner with Korn/Ferry International.

Now, why did we want to interview Paul? Well, many leaders in HR and talent acquisition are facing strong headwinds today due to the economy, but the gaming industry, as we all know, has been especially hard-hit. Just look at Las Vegas, which has gone from "having the lowest unemployment in the nation at 4 per cent to the highest," according to a recent article in the Financial Times. Quoting Brian Burton, president of Three Square, the Nevada-based non-profit food bank. "We are number one in foreclosures, number one in bankruptcies, number one in unemployment and unemployment in some parts of Las Vegas is running at more than 20%."

With over 70,000 employees, Caesars Entertainment Corporation is the world's largest casino entertainment company. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada more than 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new resorts, expansions and acquisitions, and now owns or manages casino resorts on four continents. The company's resorts operate primarily under the Harrah's, Caesars and Horseshoe brand names; Caesars also owns the London Clubs International family of casinos and the World Series of Poker.

Well, I'm looking forward to hearing Paul's insights.

Now, here's Peter Clayton.

Peter: Thanks, Jeremy. With over 70,000 employees, Caesars Entertainment Corporation is the world's largest casino entertainment company. Since its beginning in Reno, Nevada more than 70 years ago, Caesars has grown through development of new resorts, expansions and acquisitions, and now owns or manages casino resorts on four continents. The company's resorts operate primarily under the Harrah's, Caesars and Horseshoe brand names; Caesars also owns the London Clubs International family of casinos and the World Series of Poker. Paul, thank you for joining us today on INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED. Listening to Jeremy's introduction, the gaming industry, especially in Las Vegas where you're based, is certainly not the fun and games it once was. What's it like leading a talent organization in Las Vegas today?

Paul: Hi Peter, thanks for having me on the program. Vegas has definitely gone through some tough times. It finds itself in a bit of a difficult time still, but leading a talent organization, Vegas today, it's still exciting and it's a - this gaming and hospitality space is a very, very complex business, really fast-paced, very demanding and although we find that unemployment is high in Las Vegas, we still feel that there is a war for talent going on. We kind of live still in those days where it's not always easy to attract that top talent to Vegas and it can be difficult with all the negative news about the city and the high unemployment and difficulties in the real estate market, but the net/net is Vegas is still a great place to be. It's a great city to live in. We're still attracting great talent and it's a place will thrive again. We've still got customers coming to Vegas and having a great time and that's really what we're here for. That's what Caesar's Entertainment is all about is providing that experience for our customers and Vegas is a unique experience, and that's what we provide and we don't lose sight of that.

It's still fun and games here.

Peter: That's great to hear and from what I understand you're primarily responsible for corporate university college and senior level recruiting and you've been in this role since 2009. What are some of the unique challenges you're facing today?

Paul: I have been here since late 2009, and I think the challenges remain the same that they have been since that time, is attracting - finding that talent to come Vegas. That is a unique challenge. We deal over that head on and we go after the best people in the marketplace.

I think one of the challenges that I face with this role is trying to set enterprise-wide recruiting strategy which entails really at the property level and retail, although my direct team does not staff at the property level. We still set a lot of the recruiting strategy and the tools that we use to recruit at the property level, yet still keeping an eye on the professional level staff that's here in Vegas. So it's dealing in both of those worlds that creates a lot of the complexity and interesting components to this role.

Peter: As you mentioned, you are still hiring. As a matter of fact, you told me before we started recording that you hired over 14,000 people last year and I know one of the things that you've been doing is a unique internship with college and university students. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Paul: Yeah, absolutely. Especially on the MBA level, we have a very active program. It's a program that's been in place for over 20 years and something that has developed some of our top leaders here at Caesar's. It's our president's associate program. We go out and we target some of the top universities across the country and bring them in to what we feel is a pretty unique, really kind of operationally focused rotation program, and we do this for both summer interns and after the MBAs graduate, we'll have them back to participate in the full-time president's associate program. It's unique in that we compete for students coming out of some of the best programs across the country and we're competing against some of the top consulting firms and some of the top Wall Street banks for this typically very, very analytically focused talent, but we offer a little bit different approach.

It's much more operational in nature, folks who are intrigued and curious about our business. They usually do the best in this program, but it's been a winner. We can continue to attract great talent and we get to leverage our brand in doing so, it's a great programs, continues to for us and we're in the process actually now of sort of revamping a similar type program for the undergraduate college levels that would tie into mapping because across Caesar's, we have 38 properties and they follow all across the United States, really trying to develop and leverage relationships with local universities that could start bringing in undergraduate talent into our business at that level and then also on top of that, putting a filter of diversity recruiting on top of that of that, so going to some of the historically black colleges and trying to pull in a diverse slate of talent into the business and then start to grow our own talent internally.

Peter: I think that's really interesting and prior to joining Caesar's, you worked at Oracle. You were a recruiter at Oracle. I think a lot of people listening to this show probably don't realize but your chairman and CEO, Gary Loveman has completely revolutionized your industry through technological innovations. I would guess that there is more similarity between your role at Oracle and your role at Caesar's than meets the eye, am I correct?

Paul: There is, there actually is and you touched on Gary Loveman. Gary is an exceptionally smart man and he has very, very high standards when it comes to hiring. He's uncompromising. He looks for the absolutely best and the brightest minds and that's very similar to the way Oracle was as well. I ran executive recruiting for their commercial side of the business at Oracle and Larry Ellison is the same way. Both companies set a very, very high bar and recruit great people and so to walk down the halls at Caesar's and walk down the halls at Oracle, the similarity is you come across some of the greatest minds I think in business today.

Peter: Tell us a little bit about your resources, Paul; your staff and your budget, how have they been impacted over the last few years?

Paul: I guess the theme would be, it's all about doing more with less and it's probably not a whole lot different than other talent acquisition organizations that are out there today. Everyone is budget challenged and strapped for resources, whether it's technology resources or people resources, so we do what we can and we just have to work smarter and leverage the tools that we do have kind of across the board both here at corporate at properties. Recruiting staffs have been trimmed somewhat over probably the past five years, even before I arrived. Bottom line is we need to work smarter, we need to leverage the tools that we have. We need to leverage resources that we didn't think of as resources in the past and technology continues to evolve for the talent acquisition space. Some of it is becoming more affordable and we need to tap into those resources to find the best people.

Peter: What kind of technology do you use to track candidates and employees and is this something that you were looking to upgrade?

Paul: I would always say yes to the upgrade. It depends back on - it goes back to the budget question, right?

Peter: Right.

Peter: Today, we do use an applicant tracking system. We use Hodes iQ. I think fundamentally, it does what we need it to do. It allows us to open requisitions, to post jobs, to track candidates, to go out identify candidates, allow them to apply, track them through the interview and hire process and then onboard them, so it does that well and it's a great tool, but that's great for active candidates.

For passive candidates, we still go out and find a lot of passive talent to bring them to Caesar's and bring them into this industry. For that, we use a different tool. We use Salesforce.com to track those folks and be able to stay in touch with them and obviously that's a gold standard in CRM system, so we leverage that technology and allows us to - especially when we're out interviewing on college campuses, we identify young talent, get them into that system and we're able to stay in touch with them over time.

Peter: Are you using the social networks out there, the Twitters and Facebooks of the world to try to engage with passive candidates or are you on LinkedIn?

Paul: We do. We use all those tools that you mentioned. I'm a huge proponent of LinkedIn. I've been using it for years and years now and it's been successful for me personally as a recruiter and then also for the team. We also use tools like ZoomInfo and Twitter. Facebook to some extent as far as kind of looking into profiles of candidates, if they've got a Facebook page, that information is out there. You got to leverage that and learn as much as you can about folks that you're bringing into your business, so we do. We use all those tools.

One of the things that we've been trying to do and maybe it's not technologically savvy, but we recruit a lot of top talent here and top talent usually knows and networks with top talents, so they all have their social networks. So it's a matter of tapping into those networks. So when we go to do a search, if we've hired a very, very talented person, we want to know who they know, so we reach back to them and leverage those social networks and that's been successful for us.

Peter: You're leveraging your current employees to help you find your new employees.

Paul: Absolutely. If we feel confident that we've recruited one of the best minds out there, we know that that's who they network with. They're typically going to socialize and network or have gone to MBA programs with other great minds that we can tap into.

Peter: We'll return to our interview with Paul after this short break.

This is Jeremy Eskenazi, Managing Principal of Riviera Advisors. We've just published a new opinion piece for our blog, "Insights from the Riviera" called "It Really Is All About Relationships" - and we would really appreciate hearing your insights - and perspectives regarding the topic of professional relationships in business. Here's mine: Business - not just recruiting and staffing - is all about relationships.

In the article, I share several personal stories of my relationships with recruiters, and the "golden rule" I try and live by. In my opinion, Recruiting is not "rocket science". But, the relationship management part of what we do, well that is hard!

Once you've finished listening to the interview with Paul, I hope you visit our blog, RivieraAdvisors.com/blog. And, once again, please share your feedback and ideas with our growing community of HR and recruiting practitioners.

Thanks!

Peter: Paul, how about things like job boards or third party recruiters and staffing agencies for those hard-to-fill or high-volume positions, are you using those types of resources?

Paul: We have not really used job boards. We've essentially eliminated the use of traditional job boards. Our career site, we're lucky, I think we've got a fantastic brand in the marketplace, so we do drive a lot of traffic just on our own career site. What we have done though is leverage the technology from I guess job consolidators, if that's what you call them - companies like Indeed and Simply Hired to get our openings that we post more broadly distributed. We kind of see those as almost like a forced multiplier where we don't have to post our positions on every single job board anymore. We get them out on our career site, they come in and sweep those and all of a sudden, they're launched and almost go viral across the net and that drives a lot of traffic.

I grew up Peter in the retained search business, so I still have a preference for finding that passive candidate and doing a lot of research and doing original research to identify who would be the best fit for each particular role, especially here in professional jobs at corporate. We do, like I said, use LinkedIn and ZoomInfo for those types of research projects. We'll also use professional research firms. It's my preference to use a professional research firm as opposed to a retained search firm. Although I came out of the retained search business, I think you end up getting more bang for your buck because if I can generate a list of a couple hundred passive candidates and be able to reach out to those people, whether they're interested today or I can get them into my salesforce.com database, they might be a candidate in the future.

Peter: You know, here on the East Coast where I'm based, Hurricane Irene is still in the news; we're still having flooding and those kinds of problems, and I know that your operations in Atlantic City were impacted by the hurricane? Did this effect your department at all and was there anything you can tell us that you learned from the experience of having those kinds of challenges with your staffing?

Paul: Sure. Irene did not - well, it certainly had an impact on the property. The property did close for a couple of days. Actually, we have four properties in Atlantic City. They closed for a couple of days. I wouldn't say the talent acquisition team felt a huge impact, but I think just it's been a tough year from a weather standpoint for Caesar's. We've had a number of closures especially up and down the Mississippi where we have quite a few properties. There's been some flooding issues and so I think we learned some lessons during those times and the lesson wasn't so much around a recruiting aspect. It's that if you bring in great people into your company, they're going to really become part of the company family and to see and hear about the extents that our employees went to, to literally help save a couple of our properties from flooding was a wonderful story and Gary Loveman talks about it now constantly, is that we've got great people and it's like a family. When you get those types of people on board, they will go to the ends of the earth to do stuff for your company and in this case, they kept us up and running in some cases and kept us from flooding in other. That was really the lesson that we learned from some of these crazy weather issues that we face this year.

Peter: That's great that you're able to leverage those kinds of stories and really develop that sense of family.

Paul: Yeah, it really is great.

Peter: Paul, what's a "day in the life" of Paul King like these days?

Paul: Can I sum that up in a word for you?

Peter: Sure.

Paul: That would just be busy. Extremely busy. It's fun. I love what I do. Every day is a little bit different here. My day is usually a combination of having some sort of focus on long-term strategy but also dealing with the day-to-day tactical execution, so I still myself manage a portfolio of searches, so that keeps me very engaged with the marketplace, keeps me engaged with the internal customers, manage those internal customers for other recruiting issues, manage a team, manage our vendors, focus on overall recruiting operational efficiencies, try and keep an eye on that long-term strategy, what's going to be that next technology or tool that helps us evolve to the next stage and gets us better at what we do and gets us more efficient and you know, just long term doing a better job here for Caesar's.

Peter: Given the multiple challenges you've faced over the past couple of years, what advice could you share with your peers who are facing budget cuts and staff reductions?

Paul: That's a good question. I would say I guess going back to a "day in the life" of what I do, you got to love what you do, so as long as you continue to have that passion for recruiting, that works a lot of things out, but you got to leverage the technology to gain efficiencies and there are so many great technological tools out there that talent acquisition teams can leverage today and they don't all come at a huge price, so it's making sure that if you do have a tool like a LinkedIn that your team knows how to utilize it to its fullest capacity or that you take it beyond just what's on the screen and you actually reach out to some of the top talent in your organization, connect with them on LinkedIn, leverage their networks, get them to mention on their profiles that they're looking for a particular type of talent or a particular type of role at your company, so leverage the technology that you have.

I would say you've got to stay close with your customer and really continue to understand their business needs. Everybody, including your customer, is doing more with less.

We kind of went through a process here recently where we did a couple of surveys and some continuous improvement, Kaizen sessions with our internal customers, and one of the things that I thought was interesting coming out of those was that they really didn't understand what recruiting did or what they do or what we do, and so we've kind of gone through a process of trying to demystify what talent acquisition does for Caesar's and I think it's opened their eyes to, "Wow, we didn't realize that you put so much effort into finding us people and bringing us people so that we could interview," and so we just try to demystify that and it's brought some stronger partnerships with our hiring managers.

Peter: I think that's a great idea because you're so right; I mean most people who aren't in the recruiting profession have no idea how this whole thing really happens, right?

Paul: It's very true and I think historically, recruiters have tried to keep it in a black box kind of a mystery and I think today is a great opportunity to unwind that black box to really share with your customers what you do and there's an appreciation for it.

Peter: Any other advice you'd like to share?

Paul: I would say leverage your brand. If you're with a company that's got a great brand and I feel that ours does, Caesar's is a great brand, do that and whatever is unique to that brand, try and leverage it.

One of the things that we do here in MBA recruiting is we've got, in my opinion, one of the best recruiting events across the country. We put on annually on Martin Luther King holiday weekend an MBA Poker Championship. We get to leverage, bring in people into Vegas and everybody loves to come to Vegas... we get to leverage the phenomenon of poker and one of our brands, the World Series of Poker, and we bring MBA students together to - we put on a weekend of poker tournaments and networking events and they get to have a great time in Vegas. We get to network with them to learn what type of talents in the marketplace and we've leveraged it. It's become one of our best recruiting events to tap into this talent.

That's just an example of how we do it.

Peter: That's fantastic and you bring up something else, Paul, I think is so important today, a number of your customers at your properties are also candidates. I mean you really have to approach recruiting with that mindset, right?

Paul: Absolutely and we try to and that's part of our over strategy for the candidate experience, is always keeping in mind that, "Look, our candidates are also our customers," so whether we're talking to them and they eventually get the job and it's a big win for everybody or nine times out of ten, that doesn't happen, right?

Peter: Right.

Paul: So those nine that are not offered the position, they still have to feel like they were treated well and hopefully treated so well that either they develop into a customer or they come back and continue to be a customer.

Peter: Paul, I really appreciate your time today here on INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED.

Paul: My pleasure. Thank you Peter.

We've been speaking with Paul King, the Corporate Director of Talent at Caesar's Entertainment based in Las Vegas. Paul is primarily responsible for corporate, university college and senior level recruiting.

Thank you for tuning-in to the latest INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED, a production of Riviera Advisors and TotalPicture Radio. You can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, just do a keyword search for INSIGHTS: AMPLIFIED. Also, subscribe to the Insights from the Riviera blog at rivieraadvisors.com/blog.

To learn more about Riviera Advisors real world experience in leading and managing global corporate internal recruiting and staffing functions, please call toll free 800-635-9063 or visit rivieraadvisors.com.

Riviera Advisors is a member of the ASHER Talent Alliance, a global alliance of talent acquisition providers working together to benefit the unique and individual needs of their clients. To learn more about ASHER, visit AsherTalent.com.