Naples Grande offering incentives to hire much-needed staff

A luxury beach resort is in need of a workforce boost.

Naples Grande Beach Resort in North Naples is hiring dozens of employees in all fields to keep up with the increasing demand. The hotel is hiring on the spot and even offering cash incentives.

Few people are applying for the positions at this time, but the crowds are returning to the Naples area.

“We’ve been very blessed to have a really good occupancy level, basically since Presidents’ Day weekend in February,” said Melinda Hutchins, the director of sales and marketing at Naples Grande. “We’ve got about 40 open positions here at the hotel, across all various departments.”

Departments range from housekeeping, maintenance and customer service.

The job openings got Gavin Chism’s attention.

“I really enjoy helping people, giving them what they need, and just getting that overall smile from someone is really enjoyable,” Chism said.

A particular line from the resort’s Facebook page caught Chism’s attention. Naples Grande posted that it has $500 sign-on bonuses, but the $500 wasn’t enough to fill the 40 jobs available.

We saw Chism and one other person show up while we were at the job fair, so Naples Grande will try something else.

“The cost of living is very high here, so an initiative that our human resources team and our general manager came up with was really to partner with the enterprise commuter program, and we’re bringing folks from towns like Immokalee into Naples to be able to have employment for those folks,” Hutchins said.

Naples Grande said by the time the job fair wrapped up, close to 40 people showed up. As for Chism, he got hired on the spot to a be host at the resort restaurant.