How Great Wolf Lodge Used Recruiting Automation to Overcome Key Pandemic Labor Challenges

When hospitality brands were forced to temporarily close because of state-imposed shelter-in-place policies, Great Wolf Lodge was impacted like most others. When it came time to reopen and rehire, the company face difficult recruiting challenges including screening applications, scheduling interviews, and ensuring candidates had 24/7 access to a friendly face who could answer their questions. While some recruiting activities slowed down, Rachel O’Connell, VP of talent for Great Wolf Lodge, and her team decided to “go all in” on relying on Emma, a conversational AI recruiting assistant from Paradox, the company had implemented back in 2018.

Not only has Emma taken hours of administrative work off the Great Wolf Lodge recruiting team’s plate, but she also created the kind of modern, “internet generation” experience that O’Connell knew would resonate with the type of people her team was recruiting. Since Emma’s implementation in 2018, Great Wolf Lodge has seen a 225 percent reduction in employee turnover and has increased applicant flows by 400 percent. But during the pandemic, it also helped the brand with social distancing, employee safety, and more by allowing it to screen and hire staff via a completely virtual platform. In fact, it was able to staff its newest Northern California location this way – a location with 700 staffing positions. To learn more about this, HT spoke in depth with O'Connell.

What complications with hiring/labor management was Great Wolf Lodge facing during the pandemic? How did the pandemic really bring these issues to light?

Staffing in the hospitality industry has never been easy, but the COVID-19 pandemic put a punctuation point on an already challenging aspect of the industry.  Great Wolf Lodge is all about bringing joy to families by creating a carefree escape for them to spend quality time together, and the experience is driven by being staffed with really great Pack Members who help bring the vacation to life.  Our caring approach to service is a key driver of the guest experience and dependent on our internal Pack.

Employment challenges in the hospitality and travel industry were further exacerbated as physical distancing guidance made many candidates apprehensive about working in a service-oriented, guest facing capacity for fear of contracting the virus.  Our Paw Pledge program around health and safety helped alleviate many concerns as we introduced new policies focused on personal protection, physical distancing, sanitization and overall wellness.  These measures and continued improved access to vaccines have helped in our recruiting efforts, but many candidates still cite that they are considering different types of roles until the pandemic is more firmly in our rearview mirror.

How did technology help improve and resolve these labor management/hiring issues?

In 2018, we implemented a recruiting solution called Paradox after initially seeking a text recruiting tool to help us better reach our applicant demographics through the way we knew they preferred to communicate.  Physically texting candidates on a phone had become too burdensome with our volume, but had proved to be the most effective communication channel in converting applicants to interviews.  Paradox was unique in the text recruiting space as it provided A.I. capabilities on top of being a text recruiting platform, and did so in a very natural, conversational and human-like way rather than other the "chat bots" on the market.  We leverage Paradox's technology (our AI assistant's name is Emma) to help us answer candidate questions, schedule various types of interviews, campaign to high volumes of candidates at a time and help us organize our hiring events.

As we began to reopen some of our lodges in the summer of 2020, we had a strong focus on maintaining as much social distancing as possible, both for our guests and our Pack Members, and this extended to the recruiting and hiring processes.  We were also trying to open a brand-new lodge in Northern California during this time.  While we'd only dabbled in virtual interviewing prior to the pandemic, we jumped in to 100% virtual interviewing last summer out of necessity.  Paradox had a connection to MS Teams, which is our internal video calling platform, so we began conducting all interviews for our frontline positions virtually.  As candidates apply through our applicant tracking system, a recruiter either campaigns to a group of applicants or handles them one by one to get Emma engaged in a text conversation with them to conduct an initial screen to ensure they meet the minimum qualifications for the role they have applied to.  We have Emma configured to screen for each of our frontline hourly positions, and if they pass the screening, she will schedule them directly on the hiring manager's Outlook calendar for a virtual interview using MS Teams, or schedule them to a virtual hiring event if one is planned.

In the beginning, we would face challenges with candidates who were a little uncomfortable using technology for a virtual interview, but we got better at working through those challenges with them.  We also leaned 100% into Paradox when it came to candidate scheduling - we'd been heading that direction before the pandemic, but COVID-19 forced us to rely on the technology 100% to communicate with candidates at scale and run virtual hiring events to get staffed.  Without this technology, we would have been forced into a very challenging situation in order to maintain social distancing at scale through the hiring process.

What were the results from implementing this technology?

There were three significant impacts of the technology during the pandemic that have more permanently shifted the way we recruit and staff. 

First...

While our Northern California lodge grand opening was targeted originally for June 2020, it got pushed later and later into 2020 and ultimately put on hold until summer of 2021.  However, until we finally pushed it to 2021 we proceeded toward opening in Fall 2020 and we successfully staffed the entire lodge (~700 positions) all virtually through hiring events using the Paradox platform.  This was a fundamental shift in the way we staffed new lodges, and while not without any pain along the way, has evolved the way we will approach future new lodge openings.  Previously, we deployed a small task force of recruiters who would go on a 60-90 day assignment to staff a new property, and Emma stepped in to fill the most cumbersome and time consuming portions of that process.  When we had to go through the process of staffing the new lodge all over again to open in 2021, we stuck with our "pandemic process" of leveraging Paradox to campaign at scale to applicants to schedule them to our events and conducting virtual interviews for a majority of the departments we needed to staff.  In the future, this will not only mean increased efficiencies in the way we open and staff a new property, but will also reduce pre-opening costs.

Second...

Our approach to leveraging the Events portion of Paradox prior to the pandemic was less organized and intentional.  We had to get more surgical in the way we leveraged events and have relied heavily on our lodges monthly or bi-weekly hiring events throughout the pandemic to get and stay staffed.  For our properties, the shift has been in having a convenient tool to leverage if you need it for hiring events, to simply an operational rhythm and "the way" within our HR teams.  We've also amped up our recruitment marketing efforts along this journey, and Emma's capability to allow us to use text short codes in our advertising to allow candidates to more easily schedule themselves to our hiring events has been a game changer.

Third...

The campaign functionality in Paradox has really come to light as a valuable tool for us.  We've all had to do more with less during this time, and our HR teams were stretched like never before.  Now, they had increased staffing challenges, the challenges of our Pack serving our guests in a very different environment, and the complications screening and working through large levels of Pack leave.  As part of our Paw Pledge Program, we implemented a very strict COVID leave policy - any number of symptoms from a cough to a headache can put someone out on leave with the HR teams were managing all of this.  Communicating with applicants at scale was something we had to quickly adopt.  We leverage this tool as it takes away a lot of the "time stealers" from our HR teams in not only the back and forth in screening and scheduling candidates, but having to do so on a 1:1 basis.  We also leverage the campaign feature sometimes for our internal staff since they already know and are familiar with Emma as a "member" of our HR team.

Would you recommend this type of technology to other hotel operators? Why?

While not all hotel operators have properties as large as Great Wolf Lodge or even a dedicated HR team at each site, I do believe Paradox can provide lift and remove time stealers from most hotel operations.  In our case, Emma works around the clock - she's never "off" and can respond to candidates any time of day when it's most convenient for them.  She also handles all of the back-and-forth communication in scheduling candidates and can handle quite a bit of pre-screening.  These are efficiency gains in any hotel operation no matter how you are structured or how small you may be.  In hospitality, service is always a primary focus, and Emma is more human-like than really any other A.I. I have seen on the market.  There's a risk in deploying A.I. in our space because you do not want to compromise the quality of the applicant interaction since it's a reflection on your approach to service.  We feel we've found a good balance with Paradox in this regard.

Did implementing this technology require executives at Great Wolf to change the way they thought about the hiring process?

We implemented the technology in 2018, and there was certainly skepticism, particularly from hiring managers who've worked in the industry for a while.  These were typical change management challenges from fear of change to concern about the candidate experience. Initially, we saw varying levels of adoption from hiring managers across properties ranging from full adoption to partial or minimal adoption.  The pandemic forced everyone to reconsider the way they've always done things in all aspects of life and business and made our teams lagging in adoption catch up very quickly to our early adopters.  We are now much more fully aligned behind leveraging the technology in a consistent manner across our network.  In hindsight, seeing the efficiency and staffing gains we've experienced through COVID-19 by more fully leveraging Paradox, we should have pushed harder on an enterprise-wide shift at the point of implementation.