A woman in a long pink dress and open-toed sandals walked through the door of Harrah’s Gulf Coast Hotel and Casino’s human-resources office and approached Caleb Crabtree, the hotel’s HR coordinator, at his desk to submit a job application. His desk sat at the very front of the lobby of the facility’s HR department, so Crabtree was accustomed to being the first person anyone walking in saw and spoke to.
Something still struck him as odd, however. His office was located on the second floor in an employees only section on the east side of the complex behind the main casino building, at the end of a long and winding hallway that also went past the building’s security office, meaning the woman had gone far out of her way for the sake of simply submitting a job application.
Since putting a face to a name can increase one’s odds of being hired, Crabtree waved off the oddity and asked the woman about her experience and reasons for applying as he led her to a computer in the corner of the office to begin processing her application. The woman was from a few states over, she said, and while she didn’t have experience in the job she was applying for, she had once been a schoolteacher and said she would be good at working with people at a front desk. As he walked her through the process on the computer, Crabtree joked that working with kids could be a lot like working with the intoxicated and that it could be a good skill set for a casino.
Partway through, Crabtree flagged down a coworker named Cynthia, who walked over and asked the woman for her name and driver’s license to send to the office’s hiring manager. Immediately, sweat began to bead on the woman’s forehead as she nervously glanced between Crabtree and Cynthia and asked whether the two really needed to see her ID.
After Crabtree confirmed, the mystery woman asked Crabtree to “wait one minute” as she shoved her chair back and hastily stood up. She walked back to Crabtree’s desk and picked up the purse she had left there, but rather than reach into it for a wallet she slung it over her shoulder and asked a different worker in the office, “How do I get out of here?”
Confused, Cynthia asked the woman what was wrong, but no sooner had the words left her mouth than the woman slung the office door open hard and set off down the hallway she came from at a brisk pace. Crabtree broke into a run as he followed her out and down the hall to the security office, where he found the woman asking a security guard where the building exit was.
Crabtree asked if he could at least walk her out of the building and was mildly surprised when she agreed. The two descended a staircase into the hotel’s lobby, the woman refusing to make eye contact all the while. The moment Crabtree opened the lobby door, the woman rushed past and broke into an all out run past the front desk and out the main door, never once looking back.
In the days following the confusing encounter, Crabtree and Cynthia both attempted to look into their runaway applicant—the name she had given and the mention of her working as a schoolteacher their only clues. An entire week of searching for schoolteachers by the name she had given in nearby states turned up nothing, however.
“The only thing I could conclude was that our mystery woman must have been living in hiding and using an alias,” Crabtree says. “I never saw that lady again, and to this day I have no idea who she was, where she really came from or why she was trying to apply for work at a casino with no identification.”
Dealing with inscrutable job applicants is merely one of many hats Crabtree has to wear as the human-resources coordinator at Harrah’s, a job he has held since 2021.
‘The Worst Humanity Had to Offer’
Crabtree was born in Biloxi, Miss., and graduated from Vancleave High School before going on to Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College. After graduating with an associate degree in 2014, Crabtree moved to Hattiesburg to complete a bachelor’s degree at the University of Southern Mississippi. While in Hattiesburg, he began working for that city’s location of Academy Sports + Outdoors. He continued working for Academy after finishing his B.S. in psychology in 2017, but he transferred to the Gulfport branch in 2018 after a friend moved there and asked him to move in to help pay rent.
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, Academy remained open and retained its employees as it was deemed “essential” for providing survival-related materials such as emergency food and camping gear, Crabtree says. During his time as a door greeter in the pandemic, Crabtree says he regularly saw “the worse humanity had to offer.”
“When COVID hit, the rules changed everywhere,” Crabtree says. “People were angry, only so many people were allowed in at a time, and overall that kind of retail environment really started wearing on me. I realized I just didn’t want to make a career out of this.”
Crabtree left Academy and attempted to join the United States Air Force, but while attempting to run at boot camp he discovered he had developed bad knees as a result of stress fractures, leading to his dismissal. Crabtree returned to Gulfport with no other alternatives, forcing him to return to Academy until 2021. That year, a friend named Jewel Coleman who worked at Harrah’s offered to help Crabtree get a position in the human-resources department, which he accepted.
‘New Opportunities’
Harrah’s initially assigned Crabtree to manage the HR department’s paperwork, which proved to be a monumental task due to the lingering effects of the pandemic. The hotel and casino’s HR office had actually been closed for several years when Crabtree arrived, leaving a massive backlog of files that he needed to sort out before the office could resume normal operations. Crabtree made tackling the backlog his mission for the entire first year of his employment, reasoning that it would be a perfect opportunity to prove himself.
“In a way, the very thing that got me out of Academy ultimately let me prove to my bosses that I had the skills to do what I do now,” Crabtree says. “The pandemic years left a lot of bad in their wake but also ultimately helped a lot of people and businesses see their faults and what they could work on. A lot of new opportunities opened up out of a time of crisis.”
As HR coordinator, Crabtree manages everything from paperwork, nametags, swipe badges and employee insurance questions to making sure that Harrah’s gaming license remains up to date so that the casino can remain operational. He is also responsible for maintaining payroll, housekeeping credits, taxes, paystubs, employee insurance and 401K plans, as well as office meetings for various other departments and even Employee of the Month nominations.
“Honestly, I find myself doing a little bit of everything in this line of work,” Crabtree says. “I know that sometimes people might think that an HR office seems boring, but I’m actually never short on projects that need doing.”
Crabtree recounted a recent incident in which an employee working in the hotel’s pool—which employs bartenders, pool attendants and pool servers—approached him asking what his job description was. As all such positions are unionized, employees must follow specific rules on what they can or can’t do based on their job description, and people can file a grievance with the HR department if they believe they are working outside their job description.
The employee was a bartender who believed he was doing work meant for pool attendants, which he claimed was cutting into his bottom line as bartenders receive tips for their work while attendants do not. The man’s complaint led Crabtree to investigate how many pool attendants the hotel had, which he suspected to be the cause of the bartender having to work outside of his normal schedule. Crabtree gathered all the managers responsible for the pool to discuss the bartender’s duties.
“After everyone talked it out, the department heads realized the bartender was right,” Crabtree says. “A single employee’s seemingly minor grievance ultimately motivated the department to hire more attendees and servers to alleviate his extra workload, which proved to be beneficial to everyone at the hotel in the end.”
‘Moving Forward Without Knowing It’
Crabtree and his girlfriend, Amy Le, currently live with Crabtree’s parents in Ocean Springs, Miss. The property spans 10 acres of land, and the couple is saving up to purchase a mobile home that they will place near the main house so that they can have a place of their own while still keeping everyone together.
The two have both played the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons as a hobby since their college days and are part of two different groups that meet once a week to play. One group meets in Gulfport at the home of one of Crabtree’s friends, while the other meets in Slidell, where Amy Le is from, at the home of one of her friends from the city.
“I actually met Amy through a dating app around the time I started working for Harrah’s,” Crabtree says. “It helps to remind me of how I got here, not making it in the Air Force and having to go back into retail for a time before I found the job for me.”
“Even if it feels like you’re failing at life and moving backwards, if you slow down and look around you might find that you’re actually moving forward without knowing it,” he adds. “The only time you fail is when you stop entirely.”
For more information on Harrah’s Gulf Coast Hotel and Casino, call 800-946-2946 or visit caesars.com/harrahs-gulf-coast.
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