Scheduling automation platform, Calendly, has acquired the recruiting operations company, Prelude.
Calendly says the acquisition will accelerate its vision to holistically solve external scheduling challenges for individuals and teams in companies of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise.
Announcing the acquisition in a statement made available to Nairametrics, Calendly notes that everyone involved in a company’s hiring process, including talent acquisition teams, hiring managers, and company leaders, have specific meeting-related needs that call for comprehensive scheduling automation solutions — for example, group interviews that require multiple stakeholders across different time zones and specialties to find time together, or the dozens of brief screening calls that help move candidates through each interview stage.
It adds that Prelude comes in this way helping companies efficiently schedule interviews across the recruiting lifecycle, from phone screens and hiring manager interviews to panel interviews. Through this, Calendly says Prelude has been able to increase speed to hire, improve quality of hire, and create a delightful candidate experience for 100+ companies, including Cloudflare, Duolingo, and Glassdoor.
What they are saying
Commenting on the acquisition, the founder and CEO of Calendly, Nigerian-born Tope Awotona, said: “As the market leader in scheduling automation, Calendly already sees millions of interviews and recruiting-related meetings scheduled via Calendly every month. Together, Calendly and Prelude will enable organizations of all sizes to streamline the coordination of every interview scenario.”
“More comprehensive recruiting scheduling is just one piece of the puzzle that Calendly solves. We’ll commonly see a few individuals in an organization begin to use Calendly for specific and sometimes more complex use cases (such as shortening time to hire), then much more usage of the product begins to spread throughout the organization as various teams recognize the value of automating scheduling.
Organizations that implement Calendly throughout multiple departments within the organization — e.g., sales, customer success, marketing, and recruiting — realize the greatest value, since they can scale quicker by benefitting from a single scheduling platform with the ability to standardize it across teams,” he added.
On what makes the acquisition special, Awotona said: “Pursuing this acquisition was an easy decision. Prelude has demonstrated a unique understanding of the talent acquisition industry and the needs of today’s hiring teams. Prelude’s panel scheduling solution helps recruiting teams instantly find and schedule the best options, even for highly complex, multi-part interviews.
“Prelude and Calendly’s shared vision for the future is to provide one integrated solution for recruiting teams. In the near term, the Prelude name and products will continue as they are. Any future changes will be communicated to customers in advance. In the long term, we’ll merge Prelude into Calendly to provide a unified experience for our customers — a single scheduling platform for multiple departments within the organization.”