Mashantucket — At 10:39 a.m. Saturday in the Foxwoods Resort Casino, the corridors of the gaming floor were quickly filling with a riverine flow of weekend gamblers eager to get started. But 40-year-old Rick Coutu of Plainfield was on his way out of the building.

As far as he was concerned, he'd already won.

He had a new job.

Coutu was one of about 150 folks who showed up Saturday at a job fair for the Shrine Asian Kitchen, Lounge & Nightclub, a two-story, 18,000-square-foot facility opening May 17 in the new MGM Grand at Foxwoods casino. It was the second Shrine job fair in as many Saturdays as the club seeks to fill approximately 200 positions — including management and sales positions, wait staff, bartenders and kitchen workers, dancers and security personnel.

As the economy weathers a difficult period, a job fair in almost any context is good news.

Coutu was hired as a part of the Shrine security force. A land surveyor by trade, he said hard times had caused him to attend the job fair. “Business has been slow, and you do what you have to do. This seems like a great opportunity,” said Coutu, who reports for training May 5 pending routine background and credit checks required of all new hires. He smiled. “I'm going to be keeping the peace, helping customers if they need it, and making sure nothing goes wrong.”

The job fair took place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in a suite of rooms in the resort's Grand Pequot Tower hotel, and though there wasn't a line queued up at the start, a steady stream of applicants moved through the application process over the course of the day. As the fair drew to a close, Randy Greenstein, director of marketing and promotions for Big Night Entertainment, the Boston outfit that owns Shrine, said they'd hired 36 new employees Saturday and that figure would probably exceed 40 when all the paperwork was completed.

“While we filled most of the top management positions a while back, we're still looking for a variety of people,” Greenstein said. “We're still looking for dining and nightclub managers as well as a director of sales, but at this point we're mainly hiring kitchen staff, dancers, servers and sales personnel.”

“Last Saturday, about 160 people showed up, and there was a line at 10 o'clock when we started,” said Christine Roane, Shrine's director of human resources. “We ended up hiring 45, and we've been pretty happy with the number of qualified candidates so far.” She said over 60 applicants applied online for Saturday's session.

Once on site, prospective employees filled out applications (if they hadn't already done so online), and took tests appropriate to the respective position they sought.

For some, that process was similar to taking any written exam recalled from schooldays. But career bartender Jason Thuotte, 33, laughed as he poured bottled liquid into a shot glass, part of a mixologist test to determine how accurately one can estimate a shot of liquor.

After testing, applicants were escorted to a second room where trained interviewers in fields ranging from dance and cooking to security and sales asked questions.

“I don't know how all the candidates feel, but we actually have fun with this,” Greenstein said.

He and Roane said they will continue the job fairs until all the required Shine positions are filled, though they weren't certain whether another fair would take place next Saturday. “I don't anticipate that we'll have a problem getting qualified people,” Roane said. “The economy's tough right now.”

By the time the entire MGM Grand at Foxwoods facility opens, also in May, approximately 2,000 workers will have been hired, and another 1,000 will be hired by leased venues on site, including high-end restaurants and shops. A Foxwoods spokesman said about 75 percent of the MGM work force had been hired by April 1.

The MGM job opportunities have been a boost to the region in general, as have construction jobs provided by massive expansion plans at Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun. According to new federal government statistics, the national unemployment rate climbed to 5.1 percent in March and employers cut 80,000 jobs nationwide last month — the most in five years.

The jobless rate for the Norwich and New London work forces stood at 5.2 percent in February, the most recent figures available. That figure, though, is not seasonally adjusted like the federal rate and would likely be a bit lower.

Still, the number of unemployed in the region grew by about 900 compared to February 2007.

At the same time, the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation, which owns the Foxwoods Resort Casino — a separate entity from the MGM Grand — recently offered a buyout package to some tribal government workers. According to tribal and casino spokespersons, Foxwoods and the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Gaming Authority were not involved in the buyout decision.

Roane said that while Foxwoods employees have applied for jobs at Shrine, she wasn't sure whether any of them were tribal members who had taken the buyout. “I know some are folks who have been laid off at other places, and others might still work at Foxwoods in a day shift capacity, for example, and would then work at night here,” Roane said.

Thuotte, who accepted a position at Shrine, said he had tended bar at the Hard Rock Café franchise inside Foxwoods and is currently working at the Stadium Sports Bar & Grill. But he thinks the opportunity presented by Shrine is too good to pass up.

“If you're a bartender, this is the place to be,” he said, describing attractive rumors that developed over time as Shrine was being built. “We all knew this was coming, and now that I've checked it out, it's going to be a dream job. I've enjoyed working at Stadium, and I don't want to burn any bridges, but (Shrine) is going to be great.”

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