The Service Companies didn't have a hiring problem. It needed tech built for growth and scale.

The Service Companies’ hiring infrastructure wasn’t broken – the US managed service provider for the luxury resort, hotel and gaming industry had just outgrown it.

As Senior Vice-President of People, Amanda Sullivan, tells UNLEASH: “We were hiring at scale – a few hundred people a month across the country.” That’s a high volume considering The Service Companies employs 2,500 frontline and 100 corporate workers in the US.

“With the projections that we have for growth, our recruiting model just wasn’t sustainable.”

While growth has always been a priority for The Service Companies, over the past two years, the managed service provider has been “laser focused” on growth. “Our new business pipeline has exploded; we need to make sure that we have the processes in place to support once it really takes off.”

This meant exploring how a new platform could build a scalable hiring operation to meet those higher business demands. The Service Companies decided on Fountain as the solution.

A HR buying decision four years in the making

Sullivan first spoke with Fountain four years ago – she was impressed by the platform because “it was built with the frontline worker in mind.”

However, it was Fountain’s AI Recruiter product “that was the decision maker for me.”

“We wanted to make an applicant tracking system change for many years; it was just a matter of finding the right partner at the right time.” “We wanted to make an applicant tracking system change for many years; it was just a matter of finding the right partner at the right time.”

Once Sullivan learnt about Fountain’s voice-powered, 24/7 agentic AI recruiting solution, “it was a done deal.”

“There’s many text bot solutions out there, but to actually pick up the phone and have a conversation with an AI recruiter, in whatever language is most comfortable for the candidate, there’s not much out there. Especially options that can support the scale we need,” she explains.

The managed service provider was conscious “not just to make decisions based on a really interesting technology.” It was crucial that any chosen partner had “the infrastructure to support us” across 35 US states, all with different payroll and HR requirements.

“Fountain can operate at scale” and has “accountability and compliance” as a core part of its business model, notes Sullivan.

While Sullivan & her VP of People, Ale Sandoval, ultimately made the decision to choose Fountain, they worked hard to secure buy-in from other parts of the business.

This included working closely with Operations & Finance, and most importantly with the CEO and the Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Sullivan says: “The Service Companies’ CEO, Brian Coyne, was instrumental in supporting me along the way, and by the time we were ready to make the decision on Fountain, all the key players were on board.”

Buy-in was also needed from the recruiters themselves – that’s why once Fountain was chosen, but before it was implemented, Sullivan and Sandoval spent the next few months intentionally talking to them about the new tool.

“The most important thing we did was pre-emptively talk about Fountain before we implemented it.”

While the recruiters had questions – as you would expect, Sullivan notes – The Service Companies made sure the conversation always highlighted how AI was “there to augment and supplement, not to replace.”

Humans will always be involved in the process; “AI is not making the decision for you.” Instead, AI means recruiters can get away from manual, administrative work, and “really focus on the core of what they do, which is recruit.

“They can focus on strategic initiatives, like developing relationships with the people in their community to help better support recruitment.”

Two months in: The frictions, the metrics that matter, and what's already shifting

The Service Companies went live with Fountain in June 2026.

Sullivan is impressed so far; however, as with any technology implementation, the process has not been friction-free.

Friction aside, Sullivan says that her only regret is not getting the system “up and running much earlier.”

The Service Companies is routinely fielding emails from candidates struggling with “connectivity issues” around the AI platform. The employer anticipated candidate challenges, so intentionally made it “very easy for the candidate to reach out to us,” so that “we can help them navigate through the system.”

Over the next year, Sullivan is tracking numerous metrics of success for Fountain – namely faster time-to fill frontline positions, fewer candidate drop-offs and three percentage point lower no-start rates.

The Service Companies is also looking for improvements around recruiter productivity and the ability to hire more people without having to increase recruiter headcount.

The last point is a particularly important metric to Sullivan. Previously, “when we got new business, we would need to hire HR overhead to support that new business.”

“We no longer have to do this as we're taking the administrative burden off our existing [recruitment] team, enabling each team member to be more productive. We will be able to do more with the team that we have.”“We no longer have to do this as we're taking the administrative burden off our existing [recruitment] team, enabling each team member to be more productive. We will be able to do more with the team that we have.”

Because Fountain provides “great” visibility and analytics, The Service Companies can actively track those success metrics, and “get precise with how we address opportunities for improvement.”

For instance, having better visibility around the drop-offs and no-shows has enabled The Service Companies to already make targeted improvements, including simplified application and onboarding processes, as well as additional automated text and Whatsapp reminders.

Fountain’s analytics have also already shown the benefit of having a 24/7 recruitment engine. Many candidates are choosing to schedule interviews with Fountain AI Recruiter in the “off-business hours when recruiters wouldn’t be working.”

This is a “game changer,” according to Sullivan; pre-Fountain, “we would have missed that candidate, or at the very best, the candidate would’ve been delayed getting through our process.”

With frontline hiring, it is common for people to apply for multiple roles at once, “whoever is going to be able to hire them fastest is who they’re going to select.”