Today, I’m thrilled to share that Calendly has acquired the recruiting operations platform Prelude.

What makes this acquisition especially exciting is that it accelerates our vision to holistically solve external scheduling challenges for individuals and teams in companies of all sizes, from SMB to enterprise.

Why Calendly and Prelude are joining forces

Everyone involved in a company’s hiring process, including talent acquisition teams, hiring managers, and company leaders, has 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.

That’s where Prelude comes in. By helping companies efficiently schedule interviews across the recruiting lifecycle, from phone screens and hiring manager interviews to panel interviews, they’ve 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.

When Glassdoor began returning to growth after pandemic layoffs, for instance, they had to rebuild their recruiting function and chose to partner with Prelude to automate interview scheduling. As the team onboarded new recruiters, Prelude’s automation enabled growth by alleviating back-and-forth communication, providing a centralized, branded hub for candidates to find all the resources they need during their interview process, and facilitating more than 4,100 complex interviews.

And Samsara — a leader in the connected operations industry — reports that their recruiting team and hiring managers scheduled 1,840 complex panel interviews with Prelude, saving 600 hours in a year and cutting the time it takes to schedule complex panel interviews from 30 minutes to fewer than 10. Prelude also automated parts of the recruiting process to improve the candidate experience, such as providing information in a fun and engaging way through a customized candidate journey.

Meanwhile, 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.

What makes Prelude special

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.

What this means for Prelude and Calendly customers

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.

It’s what I set out to do when I first founded Calendly — to listen deeply to customers about how we could best serve them, and build solutions for real people who are just trying to do good work. It’s become a key pillar of how we operate, and I look forward to collaborating with Prelude through that same strong customer-focused lens.

Welcome to the Calendly team, Prelude!