The honest framing
HireVue is the category leader in enterprise AI hiring. Their customer list is large public companies, government agencies, and global staffing firms with thousands of monthly hires. If you're hiring at that scale, they've earned their spot.
For everyone else — the staffing agency placing 30 candidates a month, the senior-living facility hiring CNAs and cooks, the regional manufacturer running high-volume warehouse hiring — HireVue's price tag and implementation cycle are mismatched to the problem. Most agencies and SMB employers end up shopping for a HireVue alternative for one of three reasons: price, simplicity, or candidate experience.
Where Prelim is genuinely different
Text, not video. This is the biggest call. Async video interviewing assumes candidates have a quiet, well-lit room with a webcam and broadband — which is true for white-collar candidates and not true for the workforce we serve. Senior living CNAs, warehouse pickers, CDL drivers, and line cooks fill out interviews on their phones during lunch breaks. Text-based async screening interviews get a 60-80% completion rate where async video sits closer to 30-40%.
No scheduling, no implementation. Paste the job description, AI generates a question set in 30 seconds, share the link. Candidates start interviews immediately. There's no implementation call, no contract negotiation, no integration project. You can run your first scored interview before lunch.
Price that fits a commission-based math. Prelim is $49/month with unlimited jobs and interviews on the Pro plan. A commission-only recruiter making placements at $3,000-8,000 each can run the entire month's tooling cost on a single placement. The same recruiter can't justify $35,000/year of overhead against a placement book that doesn't always materialize.
Where HireVue is genuinely better
ATS integration depth. HireVue connects natively to Workday, SAP SuccessFactors, iCIMS, Greenhouse, and most of the enterprise ATS landscape. Prelim is a standalone tool — you'll handle the handoff to your ATS manually (export a CSV, paste a shortlist).
Compliance tooling. If your legal team or HR ops team requires audit logs, structured EEOC reporting, OFCCP-compliant workflows, or formal adverse-impact analysis built into the tool, HireVue has invested heavily in this. Prelim provides consistent structured questions and consistent scoring, which is the substance of what compliance asks for, but not the same audit-trail tooling.
Live video. HireVue supports both one-way async video and live two-way video. Prelim does neither — it's text-only.
Competency framework infrastructure. Enterprise HR teams build complex multi-stakeholder competency models with weighted rubrics and structured panel reviews. HireVue encodes this. Prelim is intentionally simpler.
Which one fits you
If you're hiring at scale of 500+/month and have an enterprise procurement process: talk to HireVue.
If you're a staffing agency, direct employer with 1-100 hires/month, or any team where the recruiting budget is a real constraint: try Prelim's free tier — it'll take you 10 minutes to know whether it works for your hiring pattern. We also have vertical guides for senior living and screening templates for most common roles.