As the largest family of indoor water parks in North America, Great Wolf Lodge has built an entire business around a simple mission: bringing families together with joyful experiences. Ultimately, the success of that mission comes down to the people they hire to staff their 20+ locations. Beyond the water slides, pools, and play areas, it’s the “Pack Members” on staff that make a stay at Great Wolf Lodge special.
Which makes hiring the right people pivotal for the long-term success of this hospitality chain.
The problem: A costly, slow, and ineffective hiring process.
To run their organization, Great Wolf has to hire a variety of skillsets, from traditional hotel workers (housekeeping, guest services, food and beverage) to aquatic staff (lifeguards). That amounts to hundreds of people across the country every year, and Great Wolf was struggling to keep up. With hiring managers tasked with manually screening and scheduling candidates for interviews, the hiring process moved slowly, causing a low number of qualified candidates—and the ones that did apply often dropped off.
“We could not get candidates to respond to our voicemails,” said Great Wolf Chief Human Resources Officer Rachel O’Connell. “The volume became really cumbersome to deal with.”
When staffing for frontline hospitality positions, speed is everything. Candidates for these roles are often applying to double digit jobs at once, and the company that responds to them the fastest is the one that is going to secure their services. Great Wolf’s strategy of person-to-person communication initially made more sense for a high-touch hospitality business. But at scale, it resulted in a slow process that couldn’t capture enough people to staff their locations. This didn’t just negatively affect the candidate and guest experience; it hurt Great Wolf’s bottom line.
Lack of speed is a frustration point. When you are hiring frontline hourly positions, time is everything. You could be a great option for them, but if you are not the fastest in the game, you lose out on quality candidates.
Chief Human Resources Officer
The solution: An AI-automated hiring process.
After initially partnering with Paradox on a text-to-apply and scheduling solution, Great Wolf realized that to achieve the change they needed, they had to fix the root of the problem: their ATS. So Great Wolf implemented Workday Paradox Conversational ATS, an end-to-end hiring platform powered by AI.
Sure, it still serves as a system of record, but it also proactively gets hiring work done while requiring very little effort in return. Tap a button to toggle open a role and AI does the rest: screening candidates, coordinating interviews, and answering questions, all via text.
“We’ve realized that texting candidates really works,” said O’Connell.
And it works particularly well for Great Wolf’s specific candidate pool: teenagers. Since the entire hiring process happens on their phone, everything comes natural for Great Wolf’s younger target candidates. The front end is invisible, the back end is robust for hiring managers, and it’s all powered by an AI agent named Emma.
Meet Emma, Great Wolf Lodge’s AI agent.
When candidates want to apply for an open role, they either scan a QR code to begin a text conversation with Emma or interact with Emma via career site widget. Emma then screens candidates for minimum qualifications through a few short messages. If a candidate is deemed qualified, Emma sends them open interview times based on hiring manager availability. Should someone need to reschedule the interview, they just shoot Emma a text and she’ll handle that automatically as well. Once interviewed, Emma sends candidates formal applications, and automates offer letters and onboarding, too.
The best part? Emma is active 24/7, so whenever a candidate is ready to apply, respond or ask a question, Emma meets them where they are. With the ability to apply at any time of day, candidate volume has boomed—Great Wolf Lodge increased their scheduled interviews by 423% in one year. And with more candidates comes better talent and happier guests.
From an overall staffing perspective, Paradox has really enabled our business to better thrive.
Chief Human Resources Officer
AI automation that brings results.
Beyond just bringing in more candidates, Great Wolf has been able to leverage AI to accelerate their hiring process. Since implementing Workday Paradox Conversational ATS, they’ve reduced their overall time-to-hire frontline roles from over 31 days to under nine. And with increased hiring efficiency—both in volume and speed—Great Wolf has decreased their recruitment marketing budget by $700,000 annually.
Managers reap the benefits of AI too, since they can use their time to do what they do best: connecting with people. Sure, using AI to humanize hiring admittedly seems like a paradox. But in practice, automation has created a more personable process.
“The concept of not talking directly to candidates felt foreign at first,” said O’Connell. “But as soon as our team saw that Emma was actually enhancing the candidate experience, they started to believe this was the way we should recruit.”