SourceForge sat down with Will Laufer, CEO of Prelude, to discuss the challenges facing recruiting teams in today’s intense talent market.
Our key takeaways?
“Prelude is unique in the space of recruiting software in building the only truly candidate-centric recruiting platform. Our focus is on making every touchpoint that candidates have with our customers as standout and special as possible.”
Could you talk a bit about the company’s history? How did it get started?
Prelude got started out of my and my co-founder Alex’s experience at Clever, an education technology startup which of course from a product perspective had nothing to do with what we work on here. From an experience perspective though it really inspired what we do today. Specifically, both Alex and I joined as individual contributors. I was the first sales representative and Alex was one of the first engineers.
I built out and managed the first sales team and Alex ended up managing three engineering teams. That shift from IC to manager really inspired us…both of us struggled with some of the new areas and responsibilities of being managers but the biggest challenge we faced was hiring. Our issue wasn’t just that we could hire some people that submitted resumes. Clever was a special place and a startup and every person we hired impacted the culture of the team so dramatically that it was obvious we needed to do a really great job of continuing to hire great people or we could do damage to Clever and its goals and mission.
To me, it felt like an impossible task to hire with both the quality and speed I felt I needed as a manager. That feeling of helpfulness despite spending so much time and energy on hiring led to the wheels spinning on why such an important, arguably the most important process of team and company building, felt so hard or borderline impossible. That’s why we started working on this problem space.
We started building our earliest version of Prelude for our recruiting team at Clever focusing on the most time-consuming and low leverage parts of their day. We wanted to speed up so they could spend more time on strategic challenges. We built something very simple and our team was so excited we immediately realized we were onto something. They introduced us to other recruiting teams who were wowed and impressed we could help streamline their process and deliver a better experience for candidates. It got us super excited about transforming the recruiting experience and that’s how we got started with Prelude.
Who is the market for Prelude?
The simplest way to describe the market for Prelude is companies that are hiring. Within that, the more hiring that a company is doing and the more specialized that hiring is the more likely they are to feel acute pain in trying to run that process, and the more likely Prelude is to be a crucial need in their tech stack.
How are the needs of our mid-market customers different from our enterprise customers?
Overall there are probably more similarities than differences. Mid-market customers tend to not yet be at a scale where they fully operationalize solutions to this challenge. They’re focused on making teams more efficient and effective. They’re trying to get to the point where hiring becomes a more structured and repeatable process.
Enterprises tend to already have a lot of structure and repeatability but at the management level, they’re looking for reporting and other ways of creating a better process at scale, whereas mid-market customers are more focused on the day-to-day actions and less on scale concerns.
How does Prelude stack up against our competitors?
Prelude is unique in the space of recruiting software in building the only truly candidate-centric recruiting platform. Our focus is on making every touchpoint that candidates have with our customers as standout and special as possible. That’s a unique viewpoint. Certain parts of that approach might have similarities with competitors: we think scheduling and logistics are really important and there are some other providers there.
We think candidate preparedness and engagement with the company in between interviews is another thing we solve with Prelude Engage. There may be some entrants that do some somewhat similar things. But we don’t see any other competitors in the space that are focused on providing the end-to-end candidate experience platform from the time a candidate applies to when they get hired.
How do we plan on staying ahead of the competition?
We are taking a different strategic approach than any other company that works in the recruiting space in my opinion. Our observation is that the vast majority of recruiting software out there focuses on the employers’ experience, the recruiter, or the recruiting manager perhaps.
We are solely focused on anything we can do to create a really unbelievable candidate experience. That strategic approach will lead us to continue building a very unique platform that candidates will come to expect when they interact with prospective employers.
What is our pricing model?
Prelude’s software platform is available for a subscription fee which is based on the number of users. For us, users are people working on recruiting which includes recruiters, recruiting coordinators, and so forth.
About Prelude:
Prelude’s candidate experience platform supercharges recruiting operations and simplifies the most manual parts of scheduling complex interviews. Lead with your brand and values in the most innovative candidate experience platform on the market. Integrate with existing systems and workflows to remove friction from recruiting logistics.
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