PINE BLUFF -- Saracen Casino Resort officials continued to be pleasantly surprised, they said, at the interest shown by Jefferson County residents in the casino that's currently under construction.
A job fair last week drew close to 1,000 people who applied for about 125 positions that will be available at the Saracen Casino Annex, a convenience store and gambling hall that will contain 300 slot machines and is scheduled to open Oct. 1.
The job fair officially opened at 9 a.m. on Monday. By 10 a.m., several hundred people were standing in a line that snaked through the Pine Bluff Convention Center's lobby toward the double doors of the conference room where applicants were filling out forms, getting fingerprinted, submitting to drug screening, and other preliminaries necessary to be considered for employment with the annex.
Brad Stone, human-resources manager for Downstream Development Authority of the Quapaw Nation, said the excitement among those applying for jobs at the annex was palpable.
He produced two jobs lists: one extensive list of all the jobs that will need to be filled at Saracen Casino Resort before it is completed in mid-2020, and a smaller list of jobs he is trying to fill in the smaller annex.
He guided applicants to the right list, depending on the type of job they were seeking.
"I went through every one of them," Stone said, "and nobody left."
One of those standing in line, 26-year-old Charles Alsup of Pine Bluff, said he sees the coming casino as an opportunity to make some extra money.
"There were several positions I saw that caught my interest," Alsup said. "I need a second job."
Stone said it was difficult to plan for the job fair because it was hard to know just how many people might show up.
But he said that, moving forward, knowing the amount of interest now, planning should be easier. About 25 team members from Downstream Development Authority, most of them department heads, attended the job fair to guide people through the application process.
"We prepped for about 600," Stone said, "knowing that we need to hire and fill about 125, and this is the turnout so this is large."
One of the team members, hiring manager Madeline Carpino , was posted at the entrance to the conference room, greeting people as they arrived and getting them headed to the proper table, according to their job interests.
She said the interest shown in Pine Bluff since the announcement of the casino has been consistently high. She said 15 jobs were posted recently for the casino with an online source and applications poured in.
"We posted the jobs and within four days we had 1,100 applications," Carpino said. "It was amazing."
Stone said jobs at the annex include food and beverage servers, security workers, cashiers, slot machine technicians, and information-technology personnel.
Once hiring begins for the main casino resort, there will be more job fairs until the facility is fully staffed, Stone said,.
"We're looking at the casino to have over 1,100 employees -- more than 200 job titles in things like finance, food and beverage, slots, table games," he said, adding that table games weren't mentioned because the annex will have slot machines.
"We won't have poker, blackjack, craps, things like that," he said. "But with the casino, we will. We'll have 300 hotel rooms, five different restaurants, sports betting, over 2,000 slot machines. It'll be big."
John Berrey, chairman of the Quapaw Nation, said he has been pleased as well with the interest shown in the casino.
"We had a good turnout," Berrey said. "We processed about 950 people, we filled about 130 spots and we made offers to approximately 140 people."
State Desk on 08/18/2019