While the glitz and glamour of Encore often steal the show, the bottom line reason for the resort landing in Everett was to create new jobs in a new industry, and Encore President Bob DeSalvio reported last week they are near full employment.
With a promise of nearly 5,000 jobs at full employment, Encore is about ready to deliver that very soon, President Bob DeSalvio said.
There are 4,982 people now actively employed at the resort, with 220 employees in the process of being brought on board (with most of them in the gaming area).
At this point, he reported that there are only 64 open positions remaining.
DeSalvio said they are preparing to add more dealers to the gaming floor, which will help with providing more of a mix of table games.
“We’re getting prepared so that when we introduce more tables games, we’ll have appropriate staffing,” he said. “We’re trying to provide more games that customers might be looking for. By having more dealers, we’ll be able to have more low level games that some customers are looking for.”
As it related to diversity hiring during the construction phase, Encore reported to the Massachusetts Gaming Commission (MGC) its nearly final numbers for hiring.
The resort has been lauded by the MGC as one of the most diverse large projects in the state, and the numbers shown last week certainly proved the point.
For the construction workforce, they had a minority hiring goal of 15.4 percent, and ended up hiring 25.7 percent minorities during construction. Likewise, the goal for female on the construction team was 6.9 percent and they exceeded that difficult goal with 7.2 percent hired.
As far as contracts awarded during construction, they reported far exceeding that goal, and showed a total of $263 million awarded to minority, women or veteran businesses.
Their overall goal was 11.4 percent, and they awarded 18.4 percent.
“The percentages are not the story,” DeSalvio said. “The story is the number. The number if large. It’s $263 million worth of work. That’s a lot of money. We feel really good about exceeding that goal in the construction phase.”