Royal Caribbean International (RCI) has opened a recruitment centre at The Pointe downtown to carry out ongoing recruitment for its ships and its private island Coco Cay, the company’s Chief Product Innovation Officer Jay Schneider told Guardian Business yesterday on the sidelines of a Tourism Development Corporation tech symposium aboard cruise ship Oasis of the Seas. 

The company is recruiting for Coco Cay this weekend as it moves toward the opening of Hideaway Beach on the private island destination.

“We opened a recruiting centre in The Pointe, Margaritaville. The intent is to use that as a recruiting centre less for Paradise Island, but more for Coco Cay and our ships,” said Schneider.

“We were going to open it before the pandemic. The pandemic slowed us down.

He added: “We are constantly hiring as part of our contracts… for the entire islands. And, you know, I’m not kidding, the hope would be they could all come from The Bahamas,” said Schneider.

“We don’t get that success because [Coco Cay] is a harder destination from an employment perspective.”

He explained that the reason the recruiting centre is not for the proposed Royal Beach Club on Paradise Island is that RCI plans to hire Bahamian companies to run the various operations on the island and expects that they will do their hiring.

Schneider told this paper last month that RCI will even partner with businesses that may not yet be able to scale to meet the needs of its Royal Beach Club project but can provide the bespoke service with the operation needs.

Schneider said RCI does not want to hire its employees to operate the beach club but wants local companies to grow and scale to meet operations needs.

He said services like laundry services, maintenance, security, environmental monitoring and waste management are all up for grabs by Bahamian businesses.

RCI is looking for a Bahamian to manage the beach club as president. Schneider told this paper yesterday that recruitment for that position has garnered many responses and “a lot of great candidates”.