As universities in the Triangle are finishing up or approaching graduation ceremonies, their graduating students are applying or have already applied to (collectively) thousands of jobs, most of which they’ll never hear back from.
Enter Epic Hire, a Raleigh-based B2B startup that aims to help streamline the job application and hiring process for college students and graduates.
Epic Hire Founder and CEO Watt Williams started his career as a recruiter at The Select Group after graduating from NC State in 2012. He then worked his way up to being the group’s regional vice president for the West Coast.
“I always felt like hiring was just so transactional,” said Williams. “I really wanted to build a better candidate experience, so when I started thinking about where the candidate experience was probably the worst, […] where the human is the least important thing, […] I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s probably college students.’”
Williams and the Epic Hire team—he has brought on Co-Founders Alex Fisher, Connor Belcic and Trevor Gladych—are looking to improve the candidate experience through their mobile app and website. The platform combines storytelling, relationship-building between recruiters and students and community engagement.
College students can tell their story to recruiters on Epic Hire through videos, photos, captions, resumes and work samples, among other things, making the candidate experience more personal than just a resume. Recruiters can interact with students and keep up with what they’re doing during college through Epic Hire.
Employers can also engage with and contact students based on their group, club, chapter or team participation and affiliation. (Williams played varsity soccer at NC State.) He hopes this will help college groups with community building and highlight the groups to employers.
“How do we try to flip the script on their current process of applying to thousands or hundreds of roles?” said Williams. “How do we have recruiters go to them? So for us, everything we’re building, the students are at the center.”
Finding traction
The candidates seem to be enjoying Epic Hire’s candidate-first approach. Epic Hire has 12,000-13,000 students representing over 200 universities on its platform after launching its beta last summer, according to Williams.
Large employers are seeing the startup’s value, too. Since launching its enterprise version last November, Epic Hire has brought on customers including Insight Global, Ally Bank and the Texas Rangers. Williams also noted that Epic Hire has between 75 and 100 college clubs participating in its ecosystem.
“The product seems to really resonate with students,” said Williams. “The current pains that have been validated from the students are like, ‘Yeah, we hate this, applying to all these roles is ridiculous.’”
Williams has the Epic Hire crew focused on landing a key anchor account in every industry that it’s supporting and building products within the product to further support clubs, teams, groups, chapters and other similar entities.
The key anchor account would be a well-known brand that would help draw in more students, and the increased functionality for groups would help keep students on Epic Hire.
Community building is a point of emphasis for Williams because he doesn’t want Epic Hire to just be something that people go to once or twice to find a job, but also serve as a connectivity tool for these groups.
Williams wants to help support clubs and other groups with things like event check-in before continuing to build more functionality for the groups.
Epic Hire is looking for additional funding to help with building out these new functionalities. The startup has been bootstrapped so far, but Williams said the startup is searching for a venture capital firm to be the lead investor in a financing round.
