Most GMs don’t wake up thinking about last night’s rate or where occupancy landed. They wake up thinking about one thing: who’s actually going to show up today?
A housekeeper quits Tuesday. The job posts Wednesday. By the time anyone calls her back, she’s down the street folding towels for somebody else.
Read Egger thinks the industry has been blaming the wrong thing. Not the labor market. Not the pay. The process.
He came up in frontline hiring — oil and gas, manufacturing, construction, then years at Traba building labor supply in new markets and personally interviewing the people nobody else was calling back. What he kept finding wasn’t a shortage of candidates. It was a master forklift operator who’d been at the same job eight years and hadn’t updated his resume because he’d never needed to, working off an Android phone, applying through a career site that wanted him to attach a document he didn’t have. It was a hiring manager who needed someone today and got back to the scheduling request nine days later, by which point the candidate was gone.
In 2024 he co-founded Achilles HR with Ben Shagel and Owen Mahoney to close that gap. Their AI recruiter, Sam, texts an applicant within minutes of them clicking apply — at 7pm, at 11pm, whenever — runs a dynamic phone screen built around the property’s own questions, scores it, and drops a vetted interview onto the hiring manager’s calendar.
Bryan takes him through the parts owners actually care about. What HR does versus what a recruiter does, and why having the first doesn’t give you the second. Who’s really running your phone screens — usually an F&B manager or a banquets manager with a 2,000-person event on the floor. Why your frontline job posting reads like you’re hiring a director of engineering when the candidate just wants to know the schedule, the pay, and what they’ll be doing. The 30 to 40% markup you’re handing a staffing agency that could have been a raise. What to do about candidates whose first language isn’t English and who’ve never been able to finish your application. And the gold mine most properties don’t know they’re sitting on — one customer couldn’t fill an AV tech role, searched their own pile of past applicants, found someone with an associate’s degree in audiovisual technology who had applied to be a housekeeper, and hired them two days later.
Then they play Two Truths and a Lie: Frontline Hiring Edition, and Read’s reasoning on the ones he gets wrong is better than most people’s reasoning on the ones they get right — including a firsthand case against earned wage access that cuts directly against the marketing.
