Introduction
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Prelude helps recruiting teams with complex interview scheduling needs automate and streamline the hiring process. Their modern and intuitive platform saves time for recruiters and interviewers while improving the candidate experience.
Ratings
Ease of Use
Best For
Key Differentiator
Price
Free Trial
PROS
- Prelude is incredibly time-saving. They have many customer stories to back this up. For example, Glassdoor cut down their interview scheduling time from 4-5 hours to an average of 11.5 minutes.
- The user interface is great. You wouldn’t have trouble navigating and understanding the software because of its ease of use.
- Prelude handles complex scheduling, which means there’s plenty of room for customization. You could add multiple interviewers to a booking, distribute interview load as per your desire, add interviewer attributes, and more.
CONS
- Prelude is a niche software built solely for scheduling candidate interviews. Teams looking for a more comprehensive scheduling tool will find it quite limiting.
- Integrations are limited, especially for ATS. If you want to request a custom integration, you would have to buy their most expensive plan.
- Prelude does not offer a free-trial. Although you can get a sense of the software during your demo, it’s not always the same as using the product yourself and for an extended period of time.
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GoodTime
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VidCruiter
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Paradox
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Cronofy
Cronofy
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Prelude is an interview scheduling software that aims to simplify the process of hiring. The platform comprises four key products that address scheduling, candidate engagement, interviewer training, and analytics.
Prelude acts as a mediator between recruiters and candidates. It automates scheduling so that you don’t have to go back-and-forth and manually schedule every candidate on your calendar. It has a very straightforward user interface, especially from the point of view of candidates. It comes with many templates and allows you to personalize candidate journeys to infuse your company’s brand at every step of the hiring process.
What’s great about Prelude is that apart from simplifying processes for candidates and recruiters, it also has many use cases for interviewers. It lets you build fair interview panels by accounting for interviewer attributes, load balancing, time zones, etc. You can also create training plans for new interviewers and integrate it into your scheduling process. In addition to all this, Prelude allows interviewers to manage their own preferences and availability.
Lastly, Prelude comes with an analytics tool to help you dig beneath the surface and make sense of your data. You can analyze scheduling load to plan headcount needs, pull load balancing reports to ensure even distribution of interviews, view reports on interview declines and reschedules, and much more.
If you need a scheduling tool that is not limited to just interview scheduling, you should look for alternate scheduling tools.
Over a hundred top companies use Prelude, some of which include Cloudflare, Policygenius, Samsara, Duolingo, One Medical, Klaviyo.
- Self-scheduling: Your candidates can schedule an interview on their own. You can set a custom time window for the same. Once the candidate has booked a time, both the interviewer and the recruiter will automatically get invites.
- Complex scheduling: This feature helps you manage complicated panel interviews. You can add time zones, add multiple interviewers, filter interviewers by attributes, decide the duration of each interview, set the order of interviews, and more. The best part about this feature is that you could create templates for different kinds of complex scheduling and choose from them later.
- Advanced reporting and analytics: Prelude’s analytics tool lets you uncover scheduling data on various metrics. You could track the number of interviews scheduled in a given timeframe, keep tabs on interviewer load, and view reports on issues ranging from rescheduling to interview declines.
- Interviewer training: Using features like shadowing and reverse shadowing, you can create training plans for new interviewers to learn from experienced interviewers, all while fully integrating these plans into your scheduling process.
- Load balancing: You can set daily and weekly load balancing limits for your interviewers so that Prelude can alert you and stop you from scheduling interviews for a particular interviewer.
- Personalization: You can customize the candidate experience and personalize it across spectrums. You could customize the interview invite copy, decide the time zone to be displayed, and add optional questions.
Prelude integrates with a variety of software including calendars, applicant tracking systems, video conferencing tools, and more. Some popular software Prelude integrates with are G Suite, Office 365, Lever, Greenhouse, Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and HackerRank.
You could also request for custom integrations. However, keep in mind that this is only available in their Enterprise Plan.
Prelude has three pricing plans:
- Starter Plan: It comes with automated interview scheduling, ATS and calendar integrations, intelligent conflict resolution, and confirmation templates.
- Growth Plan: This plan has all the offerings of the Starter Plan plus advanced reporting, intelligent interview recommendations, employer branding, and on-demand support.
- Enterprise Plan: This plan has all the offerings of the Growth Plan plus branded candidate experience, interview training, load balancing, implementation training, and a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
The exact pricing of each plan is disclosed only after you sign up for a live demo. The demo is free and you could schedule it by filling a small form on their website.
Prelude has customers from both small and large recruiting teams, ranging from 30 employees to over 15,000. So, it’s suitable for companies of all sizes that have complex scheduling needs and are in serious need of cutting down their interview scheduling time.
Implementation for Prelude would vary depending on the team size and integrations. You could ask the exact time it would take to implement Prelude during your demo. Typically, it takes between 2 and 4 weeks to implement an interview scheduling software.
Prelude has an online help center with step-by-step guides and commonly asked queries to help their customers serve themselves. There’s also an online library with resources like how-tos, customer case studies, and templates to set their customers up for success. If you choose to buy their enterprise plan, you get a dedicated Customer Success Manager.
Prelude provides live assistance via chat to troubleshoot an issue, share feedback, and find out about new updates. In case further support is needed, you can reach out to them via email.
Prelude was founded by Alexander Soto and Will Laufer, who used to work together at Clever, an edtech startup. The idea of Prelude came to light when both the founders faced problems growing their erstwhile teams and realized that the recruiting team at Clever was spending over 50% of their time and energy on figuring out mutually suitable times and manually scheduling every interview.
They built Prelude to improve the hiring process by focusing on removing friction and increasing transparency. Prelude was formerly known as Interview Schedule but they rebranded their name in hopes of expanding and going beyond interview scheduling in the future.
Company HQ
San Francisco, California
Number of Employees
30+
Year Founded
2017
Amount Raised
$2.4 million over two rounds of funding, the latest of which took place on June 28, 2021.
FAQ
Can I use Prelude for booking an appointment for my clients?
No. Prelude is only for interview scheduling and is used by recruiters.
Is Prelude free?
No, Prelude does not have a free plan. It also does not offer a free trial.
