Client background

As a premier Oracle PartnerNetwork Member, Baker Tilly regularly helps organizations make their move to the cloud. Over the last several years, Baker Tilly has continued to assist Equity Residential, a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) with approximately 307 properties nationwide on their Oracle Cloud journey.

Equity Residential had previously transitioned to Oracle HCM Cloud in 2016, to Oracle Recruiting Cloud in May 2020, and also were using Oracle Integration Cloud and Oracle Analytics Cloud. Baker Tilly and Equity Residential had also worked together to deploy Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA) to support candidates during the recruiting lifecycle.

With the prevalence of Adaptive Intelligence in today’s modern society, the next step for the Equity Residential organization was for their team to implement Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Human Capital Management (AI) to further support candidates, employees, and recruiting staff.

The business challenge

The Equity Residential team faced a relatively simple choice in deciding to deploy Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Human Capital Management (AI). After being live with both Oracle Recruiting and the Oracle Digital Assistant capabilities for some time, the idea of being able to better support job seekers while also providing recruitment access to the right resources to make informed hiring decisions was very attractive. 

Using guiding principles, the Equity Residential team began activating the AI capabilities within their development environments, led by Rius. The team utilized a three-pronged approach focused on external candidate experience features, candidate management features, and dynamic skills features for the rollout.

Grouping functionality into phases allowed Equity Residential to focus on each unique user experience and ensure thorough research and testing was completed to reduce risk with the rollout, before moving onto exploring additional capabilities.

Strategy and solution

As a part of the Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Human Capital Management offering, Oracle offers extensive capabilities to support not only job seekers looking for an opportunity with an organization, but also support for current employees and HR leaders.

After assessing the available Oracle Adaptive Intelligence features, the Equity Residential team implemented the following capabilities:

• Time to hire: This allows recruiting users to view the estimated time to hire when creating requisitions. This allows organizations to understand the potential timeline for bringing in new talent, but can also be used throughout the hiring process to determine how factors like location may have an impact on sourcing efforts.
• Similar jobs: This helps external candidates navigating the career site quickly locate open job postings that best align to their interests. After reviewing a job description, other similar jobs dynamically appear for the candidate to consider.
• Dynamic skill recommendations: Also intended to improve the candidate experience, this feature allows candidates to select from a list of recommended skills while applying based on their resume, education, and work history.
• Recommended jobs: After applying, this feature helps candidate understand what other open roles they may be a potential fit for, based on the applications they have previously submitted.
• Best candidates: Meant to support hiring departments, this feature suggests the best potential candidates for a requisition from employees and external candidates. Prospective candidates can quickly be matched to open roles.
• Similar candidates: Also targeted for recruiting users, as candidate profiles are reviewed, recruiters are able to see a short list of candidates with similar backgrounds to ‘good fit’ candidates, to helping streamline sourcing for open roles.
• Dynamic skills / Skills Center: Lastly, the Skills Center allows employees to view their skills and use AI to help identify learning courses and career development opportunities to bridge potential skill gaps and take control of their personal career progression. Employees can also request endorsements, driven by AI, to gather feedback about their skills from others.

The outcomes: How did it go?

When the Equity Residential team went live with Oracle Adaptive Intelligence, it was ultimately very successful. They were able to implement a wide array of use cases to provide quick wins for employees, recruiting team members, and even external candidates. If done again, Kevin noted that the Equity Residential team would consider leveraging a wider group of employees on the core project team to gather additional perspectives on new HR policies and programs, and also have additional ‘change champions’ to help articulate the benefits that AI can help bring.

On the Similar and Recommended Jobs features, Rius noted both have been hugely popular with candidates and require no additional maintenance for the Equity Residential team to administer. Candidates for corporate roles often use these features to passively find other opportunities they may want to apply to and both make it easier for candidates to easily navigate the career site.

Related, the Equity Residential team has also found immediate value with the Time to Hire feature. When trying to backfill for a few recent corporate staff resignations, the Oracle AI engine was able to predict the time to fill within two days for one role, and within 3-4 days for another role. Based on this success, the Equity team has now incorporated reviewing the planned estimates for new requisitions into manager training, and having those managers communicate time to fill estimates early with their departments. This allows staff to begin to plan well in advance for employee transitions and for future onboarding needs of new staff.

Next steps

Moving forward, the Equity Residential team will continue to monitor the usage of all adaptive intelligence features and will also continue to promote its engagement among employees and recruitment.

As the next step in their Oracle Cloud journey, Equity Residential has engaged Baker Tilly and is implementing Oracle Learning and Oracle HR Help Desk, which will both have additional opportunities for the collective team to explore AI capabilities like Oracle Grow.

Recently, Oracle has announced plans to include Generative AI across the Oracle Cloud product suite, which Equity Residential intends to take immediate advantage of. The first feature on the Equity team’s list is the ability to generate job descriptions for managers creating requisitions. Many corporate roles across the organization today lack formal job descriptions that managers are able to leverage, which ultimately slows down the hiring process. With Generative AI, managers will have a starting point for job descriptions to review and tailor to meet their needs.

Equity Residential, like Baker Tilly, has always prided itself on being proactive with technology, and the use of adaptive intelligence – both externally and internally – is another example of proactively using technology to better support their business needs. The initial implementation of AI gave Equity Residential the opportunity to empower and engage employees across all lines of business, and also serve as a complement to recruitment to more effectively source for open roles.

To learn more about how your organization can get started with Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Apps for Human Capital Management, contact our team today.