Client background

Equity Residential (Equity) is a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) focused on the acquisition, development and management of rental apartment properties located in urban and high density suburban markets. Headquartered in Chicago with over 2,700 employees who serve investments in 307 properties consisting of 79,482 apartment units, primarily located in Boston, New York, Washington, D.C., Seattle, San Francisco, Southern California and Denver.

The business challenge

Due to a competitive market and nature of the work, talent acquisition has been a high priority for Equity Residential. With high turnover in some segments of their business, its workforce was constantly changing. Equity was looking to consolidate and integrate their HR technology footprint to achieve a more seamless front end experience for candidates and managers, while also minimizing the required support on the back-end. They had already begun the journey to consolidate their HR technology footprint with the implementation of Oracle HCM Cloud (Core HR), so the timing was ideal to execute a transition from OTAC to Oracle Recruiting.

The Baker Tilly approach

Equity selected Oracle Recruiting to deploy into their existing HCM Cloud suite, for a new and improved Talent Acquisition solution. Baker Tilly used its Jump Start implementation methodology that allowed the project team to leverage the design of Equity’s existing Taleo Recruiting solution to enter the project kickoff session with a pre-configured Oracle Recruiting environment for review. This pre-configuration enabled Equity to focus on the value enhancement related aspects of the project such as the external career site and Oracle Digital Assistant. Throughout the Design and Build Phase, Baker Tilly used its playback concept to show Equity iterative progress of the new solution, so that in the Test Phase there were minimal surprises. Given Equity was already live on Oracle HCM Cloud, we relied on our knowledge transfer approach to educate their HRIT team and enable them to take ownership throughout the Deploy Phase and through the stabilization period. 

The business impact

Equity has achieved the following from the transition from Taleo to Oracle Recruiting:

• A new career website with a professional look and consistent feel for a better user and candidate experience allowing them to better source and recruit talent in a competitive industry
• Standardized recruitment processes across their different geographies, lending to streamlined processes internally for the talent acquisition team
• Increased confidence amongst leadership in sourcing, recruiting and hiring processes taking place across the organization
• The ability to eliminate additional vendor contracts and diminish total cost of ownership – including maintenance related costs associated with monitoring new hire integration between OTAC and HCM Cloud
• A swift implementation that was completed ahead of their heavy recruitment season

For more information on this topic, or to learn how Baker Tilly specialists can help, contact our team.