Tope Awotona’s Calendly ventures into recruitment scheduling with acquisition of Prelude

Scheduling company, Calendly announced today the acquisition of Prelude, a recruiting operations platform, for an undisclosed sum of money. The scheduling company, which is valued at $30 billion dollars has finally made its first acquisition.

This acquisition of Prelude is in line with Calendly’s mission to offer a seamless scheduling solution for all market segments including the recruitment industry, modernise the planning process for recruitment and offer businesses a comprehensive solution to external challenges.

According to the announcement post, the scheduling company has been used to schedule millions of interviews and meetings related to recruiting.

With the help of Prelude, this merger will allow businesses of all sizes to streamline the coordination of every interview scenario as companies share the same future vision of offering a well-defined integrated solution for recruiting teams.

Commenting on the acquisition in the blog, Tope Awotona, Founder of Calendly said,

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.

Tope Awotona, CEO and Founder of Calendly

Read Also: Calendly founder, Tope Awotona, is 1 of 2 black tech billionaires in the U.S

Calendly purchase: What does this mean for Prelude?

The vision of Prelude has always been to solve “Calendar Tetris” and supercharge recruiting coordination.

Since its inception, the company has raised $2.4 million in seed funding and assisted over 100 startups. However, according to the company announcement, this acquisition marks the beginning of a new chapter for them.

Will Laufer, Founder and CEO of Prelude, commented on the acquisition and the new phase. He said,

Here’s to the next chapter of Prelude, joining forces with Calendly to delight candidates and make coordination a breeze. We are honored to work with you now and into the future.

Will Laufer, Founder and CEO of Prelude

But what about the customers?

Before now, 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.

According to the Prelude, this acquisition will make them as a company become an integral part of Calendly. They will also work in tandem with the scheduling automation platform, as both companies are passionate about creating simple and delightful solutions to frustrating and complex problems.

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.

The announcement adds that 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.

Prelude would continue to exist and grow with the help of the scheduling team. Prelude’s name, services and products will remain unchanged, and any future changes will be communicated to customers in advance.

However, in the future, both companies will be merged into a single entity to provide our customers with a unified experience — a single scheduling platform for multiple departments within the organisation.