Scaling High-Volume Hotel Hiring with AI

The Customer

Atrium Hospitality operates 73 hotels across the United States with just under 10,000 employees. At any given moment, the company is recruiting for 325 to 350 open positions, drawing roughly 10,000 applicants a month. The corporate talent acquisition team behind that volume is just three people, supported by property-level HR generalists who handle high-volume hourly hiring at each hotel.

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Bryan Drackett, Vice President of Talent Acquisition and HR Technology, owns the recruiting cycle for executive-committee-level roles across the hotels and the corporate office, along with advancing Atrium's use of Workday and AI. As Bryan Drackett, Vice President of Talent Acquisition and HR Technology, shared:

"We get about 10,000 applicants a month across all those jobs. We unfortunately only interview three percent of that. There's a big missing chunk of candidates that we don't ever talk to."

The Challenge

When a senior recruiter went on maternity leave, Atrium faced a familiar choice. Two years earlier, the same gap had been filled with a temp, which meant teaching an outsider the company's process, its systems, and the nuances of hospitality roles. The deeper problem, though, was structural: a three-person team screening for hundreds of roles simply could not reach most applicants, and the screens they did run were costly.

"We were having to do 30-minute calls with a candidate that, five minutes in, we knew wasn't going to be a fit for the company."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

Limited recruiter schedules also meant strong candidates whose resumes did not shine on paper never got a conversation at all. And earlier tests of AI interviewing platforms had left the team wary of low conversion rates and poor AI conversational ability. As Bryan Drackett shared:

"That's one of the reasons I chose Alex, because I did like the feel of the AI and the interaction that it was giving."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

The Solution

Rather than hiring another temp and getting them up to speed, Atrium used the leave as a pilot window for Alex, focusing on executive-committee-level hotel roles.

"We don't have to teach anybody anything. We can just basically program it to do what we want it to do, give it some knowledge about us, and let it do its thing and assist us in the first step of the interview."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

Implementation ran through Workday, Atrium's system of record: recruiters switch statuses and send interview invites from Workday, and completed interview reports flow back automatically. Bryan called the result eye-opening, letting recruiters focus first on top candidates instead of the other 15 in the queue. The conversational feel of Alex sealed the choice.

"That's one of the reasons I chose Alex, because I did like the feel of the AI and the interaction that it was giving."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

Candidates agreed, telling him the experience "wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be," smooth and interactive rather than robotic.

The Results

In roughly two and a half months, Alex completed 161 first-round interviews, with more than 15 hires. That is a volume he says simply does not compute into a three-person team's calendars.

Nearly a quarter of those interviews happened after hours, between 5 pm and 9 am Eastern, when no recruiter would have been available. Compared to the temp route, Bryan estimates $6,000 to $10,000 saved over the pilot, before ramp-up and training costs that never had to be paid, since Alex was "operational day one."

The less expected win was what Bryan calls time shifting rather than time saving. Thirty-minute screens of poor fits disappeared, and that time moved to candidate follow-ups, next-step guidance, and better support for hiring managers. Recruiters once wrote interview summaries by hand; now managers get Alex's trait-based analysis, tailored to Atrium's leadership traits and each role's needs, plus a link to watch the interview itself.

"The hiring managers feel that they've got more of a decision process over which candidates are actually going forward, versus being told by the recruiter, these are the candidates you need to talk to."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

Candidates who would never have advanced on paper are now matching well in interviews, which is the heart of Bryan's advice to other talent leaders: try it.

"I'm a strong believer that this is the future of where recruiting is going. You can allow people to be more than just what's on paper, and in today's world, especially with AI, that paper can be easily created to match your job description. Allowing somebody to really express themselves verbally and answer the questions you want answered will help you in making the better decision on who the actual candidates are that you want to focus on. I would highly recommend it."
Bryan Drackett, VP Talent Acquisition and HR Techonology, Atrium Hospitality

Metrics Summary Table

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