Baker Tilly facilitates Equity Residential’s journey to Oracle Digital Assistant

As an Oracle partner, Baker Tilly regularly helps organizations make their transition to the cloud. We recently assisted Equity Residential – a real estate investment trust with approximately 300 buildings nationwide – with their move to Oracle. More specifically, we partnered with Equity to facilitate their implementation of the Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA).

Courtney Mecikalski, a consulting manager for Baker Tilly, recently co-hosted a webinar with Rosie Stroh and Mark Johnson of Equity Residential to discuss some of the key aspects of Equity’s implementation of the ODA.

The Equity team began the project with plenty of Oracle familiarity, as they 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.

Planning and implementation

Equity faced a relatively simple choice in deciding to deploy the ODA. The idea of being able to communicate with job seekers while allowing the recruiting team to focus on ‘value add’ activities was very attractive.

From Equity’s perspective, ODA creates a clear, interactive experience. It allows candidates to engage with their career site, to receive answers to key questions in areas like benefits or employee programs and to find out how they are progressing during the hiring process.

A naturally collaborative company, Equity made sure to include employees across a variety of teams throughout its organization as part of the planning and transition process. Team members from recruiting and HR were included, of course, but the ODA project team also featured representatives across talent development, diversity and inclusion, and IT.

Equity included a broad cross-section of team members not simply for the internal perspective, but also to view the user experience from the perspective of a candidate across a variety of different types of roles.  

As a part of the initiative, Baker Tilly and Equity Residential made it a collective priority to take a step back and examine what a candidate is looking for while interacting with the career site. From a recruiting perspective, what topics are candidates interested in learning about? What topics are they asking the recruiting team? What topics come up occasionally, and which ones come up repeatedly?

As the team considered the answers to these questions, the focus for the digital assistant began to center around the following perspective: