Exclusive: Prelude Raises $1.2M Seed To Fix Broken Recruiting Process

San Francisco-based Prelude — formerly Interview Schedule — closed a $1.2 million seed round as the company looks to make scheduling job interviews a little easier.

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The round was led by Fuel Capital. Founded in 2017, the company has now raised $2.4 million to date.

Prelude currently helps more than 100 companies — like One Medical, Snowflake and Cloudflare — communicate and schedule interviews with job candidates. The platform attempts to end the “calendar Tetris” many recruiters must play everyday as they figure out the best times for what can be day-long interviews with dozens of people involved, said founder and CEO Will Laufer.

“The scheduling and recruitment process is broken in a lot of fundamental ways,” he said. “We are trying to give recruiters back a part of their day.”

Knowing the problem first hand

Laufer saw the problem of scheduling job interviews first hand when he was a hiring manager at edtech startup Clever.

“Over half our resources were spent just on scheduling and logistics,” he remembers.

In 2017, Laufer spun the Interview Schedule platform out of Clever — where it was built — and has been growing its customer base since. Prelude is now used by small startups to companies with 15,000 employees — all looking to simplify their hiring process, Laufer said.

The company decided to rebrand since it hopes to do more than just scheduling in the future, Laufer said. The company is looking to grow the platform to handle everything from the initial email outreach to a candidate to the actual hiring, he said. While the company offers no financial details, candidate volume on the platform more than tripled last year, Laufer added.

Although there are scheduling tools like Calendly on the market, and the human resource management space has exploded in recent years, with companies like iCIMS and Lever, Laufer said there is no tool in the market he sees that specifically targets the scheduling and logistics issues recruiters and candidates face.

Leah Solivan, a partner at Fuel, said hiring and scheduling is a problem all startups face, as she did as founder and former CEO at TaskRabbit.

“This is something I experienced,” said Solivan, adding a founder’s and CEO’s main jobs are to make sure a company does not run out of money and hires the best talent. “I think Prelude is tackling a huge component of hiring.”

Solivan said with the current job market and so many open positions, Prelude is in a prime position to take advantage of something every company is dealing with right now.

“This is a moment in time,” she said. “It’s exciting to see what Prelude is delivering.”

Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.