Mashantucket — With its top executive attributing a surge in business to last month’s opening of an on-site shopping mall, Foxwoods Resort Casino announced Monday that it will conduct a job fair today in a bid to fill 200 nongaming positions.

Qualified candidates will be hired immediately, the casino said. The fair will take place from 2 to 6 p.m. in the casino's Grand Pequot Ballroom.

"Number one, we have had an upturn in business," Felix Rappaport, Foxwoods’ president and chief executive officer, said in a phone interview. "Tanger has been a huge success. It’s only been open a brief time, but we’ve seen some nice impact throughout the week and on weekends."

The Tanger Outlets at Foxwoods, an enclosed, 80-store mall linking Foxwoods’ Grand Pequot and Fox towers, opened May 21.

Foxwoods’ announcement indicated jobs are available in such departments as hotel operations, culinary, food and beverage, accounting, security and salon and spa services. Among the positions listed on the casino’s website are front-desk agents, cooks, sous chef, bartenders, lounge hosts and massage therapists.

In addition, some poker and blackjack dealers are being sought even though those job categories experienced layoffs in June 2014 and this past January.

"Some of our operations have run a bit lean," Rappaport said. "We’ve been in reduction mode for some time."

Nevertheless, he said the casino’s pledge to interview and hire "on the spot" at today’s fair was less about an urgent need to fill positions than "trying to cut down on bureaucracy."

"What I would say is that other than for the weather conditions, we had pretty good March, April, May business volumes," Rappaport said. "June can be a bit of a shoulder month, but we certainly have had good volumes since Tanger opened. It’s had an impact on Grand Pequot Tower — the casino and food and beverage. It’s been a case of one element stimulating others.

"We’ve been thrilled as we walked about the last couple of weekends."

Rappaport said he believes the full impact of the mall’s presence has yet to be felt, given that it has not been fully marketed. For example, he said, not all of the mall advertising planned along Interstate 95 is yet in place.

Foxwoods’ latest quarterly report, for the three months that ended March 30, showed that while its gross gaming revenues declined 9.8 percent over the same period the previous year, its gross nongaming revenues were up 7.4 percent.

During the quarter, nongaming revenues represented 21 percent of Foxwoods’ total revenues, up from 18.3 percent, year-over-year. Rappaport has said that Foxwoods, in the face of growing competition, will continue to diversify its offerings in a bid to become less "gaming-centric." Casinos on the Las Vegas Strip, where Rappaport spent more than 20 years before arriving at Foxwoods, now derive 60 percent of their total revenue from nongaming amenities.

In March, more than 2,500 job-seekers showed up at a job fair Foxwoods hosted for the Tanger mall's management, which had some 900 full- and part-time jobs to fill.

b.hallenbeck@theday.com

Twitter: @bjhallenbeck