Casino Connection Atlantic City

The Right Place at the Right Time

Beth Deighan, Founder, Casino Careers Online

by Dave Bontempo

Beth Deighan recalls the day adversity became prosperity. The 17–year casino veteran, squeezed out of her casino administration job because of a merger, was posting a resume on monster.com. Then came the revelation. “I realized there was no job board for people in our profession,” she says. The moment changed her life. Deighan found a job by inventing a supermarket for casinos, casino employees and recruiters. The result is Casino Careers Online, gaming’s answer to monster.com. CCO, which celebrated its 10th birthday in June, has 87,000 resumes on file and more than 500 client companies. It reaches the world’s outposts, from Malaysia to Hong Kong, Barcelona to Guatemala, Russia to Canada. Companies pay to post their openings. Prospective employees use it for free. Industry research firm Weddle’s has listed the company in its top 350 employment websites for four straight years. Based in Northfield, Casino Careers Online has served more than 100,000 people worldwide, and also has an executive search division. “The best feeling you can get is to go to work and at the end of the day in some way you helped somebody,” Deighan says. “Every day, what we do has an impact on someone’s life.” The Buffalo native and Glassboro State graduate had been a gaming industry coach, working at Golden Nugget, Tropicana, the Taj Mahal and the Hilton. As an entrepreneur, she needed to help job seekers tap into the market. It was a logical career extension. Or was it? “I asked associates if they would be interested in placing opportunities on my job board. Virginia McDowell (then VP of corporate marketing at Argosy) said, ‘Go for it.’ Other people thought it was questionable, because relationships are built on personal trust, which is harder to see on a job board.” Ultimately, Deighan took McDowell’s advice. She contacted one of her former Glassboro professors, Frank Grazian, who had recently sold a successful business. He agreed to invest. The timing was perfect. Casino Careers Online blended with the explosive rise of riverboat and Native American gaming. Clients poured in. Relationships grew. The company’s powerful reach led to some extraordinary developments, especially in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. “People who had been displaced from their homes (primarily in Louisiana and Mississippi) contacted our website when they could not even contact their company,” Deighan says. “We would have people say they were now in Texas and needed a job. We helped them. We did a lot of phone work. They knew if they called us, somebody would always pick up the phone. The notes of thanks that came in to us after that were heartwarming.” Besides job listings, the Casino Careers website offers interview tips and stresses how applicants might separate themselves from the pack. Deighan enjoys offering job-seeking pointers. It matches the instructional role she played in gaming. “My favorite thing was opening the Trop,” she says. “They were owned by Ramada and believed in training at all levels of the organization. They spent a lot of money on team-building. For executives, we helped impart supervisory and communication skills with intense training. We took people away from their work environment to Mt. Airy Resort or to Hershey (Pennsylvania). Everything you’d see in a Fortune 500 company, we did there. “We worked on their time-management, decision-making abilities, performance appraisals. They were placed into different teams and pitted against each other in case studies. It was four days of management ‘fun and games.’ It showed how they communicated with others, what their management style was, how it doesn’t have to be my-department-versus-your-department. “They developed an incredible camaraderie, which remains today. Now if something comes up in their company, they can talk about it as friends first.” Then they can improvise. Like Beth Deighan did.

Where Are They Now? RSS 2.0 Feed
Where Are They Now? Podcast Feed