How Pacific Hospitality Group Gave Hiring Managers 8 Hours a Week Back for Guests
By Read Egger
“Every property ran its own version of hiring. Some had People & Culture leading it, others had hiring managers running it between shifts. Pre-screening was always the bottleneck. Between the volume of applicants and our limited bandwidth, candidates got stuck there.”
Erica
Pacific Hospitality Group
7,779
7,779
Candidates Screened
4,225
4,225
Qualified Screens
100
100 +
Hires Made
2,179
2,179 hrs
Manager Hours Saved
< 1
< 1 hr
Time to First Touch
2
2 weeks
For a Full Portfolio Rollout
Company Overview
A Luxury Hospitality Group Hiring at Scale Across Four States
Pacific Hospitality Group develops, owns, and operates 11 luxury hotels and resorts across California, Texas, Arizona, and Hawaii, including The Meritage Collection, AC Hotels by Marriott, DoubleTree by Hilton, and Hyatt Place. At any given time, the portfolio runs 130 to 180 open roles across housekeeping, banquets, F&B, front desk, kitchen, stewarding, spa, and salaried leadership. Every property ran hiring on its own, with no centralized automation and no portfolio-wide visibility.
The Problem
Email Doesn’t Work When Hourly Candidates Apply at 10 PM
Hospitality hiring runs on speed. Hourly candidates often apply to 3+ jobs at a time, which means the company that engages them first typically has the best chance of filling the role. If no one reaches out for a couple of days or a week, the candidate has already moved on. PHG’s pre-Achilles process couldn’t keep up, and the team faced a daily choice during busy stretches: prioritize recruiting and risk a drop in guest experience, or focus on the property and let the hiring backlog grow.
Speed: Time to first contact varies widely in hospitality, but at PHG it was at least a couple of days. That gap can be the difference between a hire and a missed candidate in the world of hiring today.
Hiring manager burden: Department leaders were spending six to eight hours per week on recruiting tasks. Nearly a full day each week pulled away from running their property.
No consistency: Every property ran its own version of the process. Their Home Office had limited portfolio visibility into recruiting performance, which made it hard to identify bottlenecks or compare what was working across the portfolio.
The Implementation
From One Property to 11 in Two Weeks
PHG launched AchillesHR at Paséa Hotel & Spa in October 2025. Two weeks later, every other property in the portfolio was live. The Achilles team ran trainings at every property, held daily office hours, and flew out in person to train two of the resort teams. Whenever a question came up, the response landed in minutes, not days. By late December, salaried leadership roles were brought into Achilles at PHG’s Home Office.
The Solution
Seven Manual Hiring Steps Compressed to Three
Before Achilles, PHG’s hiring process ran through seven sequential steps: candidate applies, hiring manager or GM reviews, hiring manager reaches out, schedules phone screen, conducts phone screen, on-site with hiring manager, meets People & Culture team. This cadence, which is common at most hospitality operations, took two to three weeks total. Achilles compresses everything before the on-site to a single step. The moment a candidate applies through Dayforce, Sam, the Achilles AI recruiter, engages within minutes via text, in English or Spanish, at any hour. Sam conducts a structured phone screen built around the role, four to seven minutes for hourly positions like Room Attendant and Line Cook, twelve to twenty minutes for salaried leadership like Executive Chef and Director of F&B. Over the deployment, Sam screened more than 100 unique role types. From there, the candidate flow is just three steps: on-site interview, People & Culture team meeting, and offer.
Salaried candidates run through the Home Office, with an AcuMax assessment sent automatically after Sam’s screen. Hourly candidates run through the property. Same platform, two workflows. On the day of the in-person, Sam supports the candidate with arrival instructions that cover parking, entry, and check-in. Spanish-speaking applicants now have a much more accessible hiring process.
The Results
Portfolio Scale. Hourly and Salaried. One Process Across 11 Properties + Home Office.
100+ hires sourced through the Achilles screen, hourly and salaried
Real hires made across all 11 properties and Home Office. Frontline roles to Director level. One platform, the full spectrum.
2,179 hiring manager hours returned across the portfolio in 6 months
PHG eliminated back-to-back 30-minute pre-screening calls and absorbed the new volume with zero added headcount.
1.9 days average time to completed salaried screen at the corporate level
Director-level candidates went from weeks of email back-and-forth to a completed phone screen plus AcuMax assessment in under two days. At Ko’a Kea Resort, every candidate who reached the Executive Chef screen completed it. 100 percent.
“Our managers don’t even log into Dayforce anymore. They use the Achilles portal for all things recruiting. It gave hiring managers the ability to automate most of their hiring process and focus on running their properties.”
P&C Team Member
Pacific Hospitality Group
“What used to take hours is now done almost instantly.”
It’s hard to imagine how we managed before.
-Erica, Pacific Hospitality Group
No manual work until the in-person interview
See how Achilles can handle all your screening and scheduling automatically.