The Baha Mar Casino and Hotel in Nassau, Bahamas, will have no shortage of employees for its planned first-phase opening April 21. The new owner of the massive and long-beleaguered .5 billion resort project in Nassau’s Cable Beach area reports that a few weeks since it called for applications, it has received more than 11,000 applicants.
The resort sat 97 percent complete for two years after its original developer, billionaire Sarkis Izmirlian, halted construction over a dispute with the Chinese state-owned contractor over work quality and missed deadlines. The government of the Bahamas eventually seized ownership of the project and put it up for sale. Last December, Hong Kong-listed Chow Tai Fook Enterprises Limited bought the project and announced the April opening. A call for applicants went out in January as the final construction push began.
The new owner plans to have hired around 1,500 employees for the result by the time of the April opening of the first phase. Kristy Cowper, vice president of human resources for Baha Mar, told the Bahamas Tribune that the applicant total recently hit 11,500, with the initial positions to be filled for its golf course, casino and hotel before moving on to other areas.
“We are progressing in spots that we need to and are making strides in areas that have treated us well in the past,” Cowper told the Tribune. “Every single day we are working our channels to ensure that the persons we are bringing on board are persons capable and able. We had a large percentage of former employees that were well-versed in what we intended to do here and while we are, for lack of a better phrase, a ‘new company,’ the goals still remain the same about how we look at future employees.”
Cowper told the newspaper the company is pursuing the “best and most necessary talent,” including many who originally were hired under Izmirlian but were laid off after the project went idle.
“We reached out to those former employees; it was done so with the view that they were not only aware of efforts, but more so, that they were already trained to some level and excited to be a part of what we are building here,” Cowper told the newspaper. “In many instances, these persons had completed three to five levels of interviews, signed contracts and were ready to go. It was necessary to reach out to those persons because of affiliation, but that was only the first step in one-half of our efforts. We gave the same attention to going out there and finding new applicants.”
