Hard Rock Hotel bringing on 1,200 workers

By Amanda Finnegan

Published Tuesday, June 2, 2009 | 8:32 p.m.

Updated Wednesday, June 3, 2009 | 5:20 p.m.

The Hard Rock Hotel and Casino is hiring a total of 1,200 employees by the end of the year to accommodate the property's $750 million expansion project.

The property recently hired more than 400 employees and will be hiring 800 more in the coming months.

For the first phase of the expansion, positions for the North Tower, set to open this summer, will include housekeeping staff, front desk agents, room reservation agents and environmental service attendants, said Carrie Messina, vice president of human resourses at Hard Rock.

Positions in the South Tower, slated to open in late 2009, will include spa attendants and dealers to service the new spa and casino in the tower as well as standard hotel positions.

Messina said management positions are on the job roster but will be mostly filled by existing employees ready to be promoted.

Hard Rock hired 400-plus employees for the reopening of The Joint and the new steakhouse rare 120°. Messina said the next wave of hiring will be an additional 400 people hired between the end of June and July. The final 400 will be hired for the South Tower between October and November.

All positions hired for the new expansion will be full time and on-call positions, Messina said, and if an employee is hired for a temporary position, they will be told so. Messina said Hard Rock is being careful of hiring hundreds of people during a boom period only to lay them off months later when business slows.

“We’re very sensitive of that. That’s not how we want to treat our employees. You get a new job, you’re excited, we want you to stay here and continue on with it. We do a lot of creative and dual scheduling with our employees. Often is you’re working as an usher at The Joint, you’re working as a server at Mr. Lucky’s. We want to make sure that we keep everybody working,” Messina said.

A series of job fairs will be held this summer, starting with the first on June 22 and 23. The property set up a Twitter account of its own to post "Hot Jobs of the Day" throughout the hiring process.

Hard Rock's expansion project began in 2007 and will be completed in early 2010.

The project includes two new hotel towers -- which will bring Hard Rock's room total from 650 to 1,525 -- the newly opened Joint, 30,000 square feet of additional casino space, a new nightclub, spa, health club, an expanded pool and will add 75,000 additional square feet of meeting and convention space.