Newsfilter article unlocker

Thank you. All right. Thanks, everyone, for being here. This presentation is on DHI Group. I'm Greg Skippers, the CFO at DHI. I, unfortunately, due to some scheduling conflicts, our CEO, Art Zaley, is not able to be here, but thanks, everyone. for being here. And as I go through this, if you do have questions, you don't have to pick up the mic, of course, but feel free to just stop me. It's a small group, as it turns out anyway, so happy to have Q&A along the way if you want to. All right, and with that, move through here. So this is standard legal forward-looking statement information. okay so dhi is listed on the new york stock exchange under the symbol dhx we're headquartered in denver and we operate under two brands clearance jobs and dice and they are platforms for employers to find and engage with top tech talent so dhi creates platforms that allow our clients who are recruiters and hiring managers to connect with tech candidates it's a two-sided marketplace that by definition serve the needs of both our clients and our candidates to succeed this may sound similar to linkedin or indeed but we have two key differentiators that make us a necessary tool for recruiters and hiring managers looking specifically for technology professionals. First, we have built in special search algorithms to find candidates based on their specific tech skills. And secondly, we've spent literally decades attracting the highest quality talent to our platforms. We have the profiles of over 9 million tech professionals on our platforms that represent two-thirds of the total skilled technologists in the United States. We largely make money by charging our clients for subscription contracts that allow them to access our platforms and over 90 percent of our revenue is recurring as a result of that. The U.S. has become a tech-oriented economy and has grown the tech workforce by approximately three percent each year over the past 25 years we have a very unique pool of candidates that cannot be found on other career sites based on our research roughly 20 to 30 percent of our candidates can be found on alternative career sites like career builder builder plus monster zip recruiter indeed and linkedin with an up-to-date profile when they're found on these other platforms the majority do not include a resume or even contact information ClearanceJobs is the dominant leader in its market for delivering access to technology professionals with a government security clearance. LinkedIn does not offer a solution to find cleared candidates, a LinkedIn profile has no field for government clearance, and government workers and military contractors are restricted from using the site because it is known to be a target of foreign spies. Tech professionals, as you know, are well compensated. The average salary for a tech worker in the US last year was roughly $127,000, whereas the average worker in US made around $50,000. As a company, you have basically two choices when hiring tech workers. You can use a recruiter or you do it internally through your HR team. If you use a Recruiter, you generally have to pay between 20% and 25% of the first year salary. The alternative is to pay Dice roughly $7,000 for our entry-level annual subscription or for CJ about $15,000 dollars for the equivalent subscription. You then find and engage the tech talent yourself. Even One Hire easily pays for itself compared to paying an external recruiting agency. We target companies that plan for multiple hires over the next year, driving an even more compelling ROI. The elevated interest rate environment back in 2022 clearly suppressed hiring demand. That after all was what the Federal Reserve's intent was to combat inflation during that time. For that reason, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and CompTIA Association forecast that over the next 10 years, the tech workforce will grow by at least 15%, a growth rate that is twice as fast as the overall employment growth rate the growth is coming from interests and skills that you would logically suspect largely those tied to ai projects many people question whether or not ai will reduce the need for coders independent studies from mckinsey and other consultants show otherwise moreover since the beginning of 2026 the number of new tech job postings per month has increased from 220,000 in January to almost 270,000 in May. The May figure is an increase of 29% year-over-year and two-thirds of US tech job postings currently require AI related skills, more than double the 29% we saw a year ago so we have very large TAMs for both platforms in the case of clearance jobs we have approximately 1,700 subscription customers today the government has publicly stated that there are over 12,000 contractors that hold a facility clearance allowing them to conduct business with cleared personnel we also know that there over 100 government agencies that we can directly contract with as well for dice we have approximately 3,800 subscription clients and no tens of thousands more fit our ideal customer profile there are also thousands of additional staffing and recruiting firms that we can target as well so how do we make money this is a quick summary of how we do make money and have strong visibility into our future revenue first and foremost clients pay for the opportunity to access each platform there is no charge for a candidate to register create a profile and start using the platform as I indicated earlier because we are largely a subscription-based service with one-year minimum contracts over 90% of our revenue is recurring and a majority of our contracts include an auto renewal clause with an automatic price escalator we allow unlimited emails and texts on our platform which is another key competitive differentiator we encourage the recruiter and candidate to engage in conversations that's how they both win and a reason for them to come back to our platforms again all right moving on to the financial performance So, DHI bookings, they represent the value of our contracts that will be recognized as revenue within 12 months of the contract start date. Those bookings have declined at a 1% CAGR since 2021, while revenue has risen at a 2% CAGR over the same period. With over 90% of our bookings and revenue recurring, DHIs a very predictable revenue model with approximately 50 percent of each year's revenue already under contract at the start of each year dhi adjusted ebitda margin has expanded since 2021 to 27 percent in 2025. because of the more difficult market conditions in the last few years we have reduced costs through restructurings over over that time period which has reduced our operating costs by approximately 35 million dollars We target a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2026. Quarterly performance, although we're seeing signs of improvement, we have experienced challenging market conditions over the last few years, as I mentioned, in the HR tech space, with bookings and revenue declining on a year-over-year basis. so on revenue stability the subscription-based business creates predictable revenue with revenue generally being recognized radably over the annual contract term as services are delivered to the customers the slide here depicts how our committed contracts at the start of the year shown as backlog become revenue over the next year and then how our customers up for renewal during the year drive revenue as the year progresses. The remainder of our revenue comes from our new business efforts and transactional business which primarily includes short-term job postings, career events, and our talent sourcing products. Okay, cash flow. DHI produces strong operating cash flows with the low points for operating cash flow over the past five years at 21 million and the strong markets in 21 and 2022 driving operating cash flows to 29 million and up to 36 million dollars our capitalized development costs which are part of fixed asset purchases and our cash flow statement primarily represent the cost of our internal labor to build the products and features on the clearance jobs and dice sites with a lower internal head count resulting from the restructurings I mentioned previously, capitalized development costs declined to $7 million in 2025 compared to $12 million in 2024. So our free cash flow, which is operating cash flows, less capital expenditures is driven primarily by adjusted EBITDA and capitalized development costs shown here as CapEx. Over time, we're targeting free cash flow at 10% or more of our revenue liquidity. So despite our significant share repurchases over the last five years, uh, we've maintained low leverage with that at the end of March of $33 million. that results in less than one times EBITDA, which is our target. We generally maintain approximately $2 million of cash on hand and utilize our $70 million revolver, which was refinanced in early April to manage liquidity. related to buybacks since 2020 we've repurchased 20 million shares and have reduced shareholder dilution by approximately 4 million shares or almost 10 percent our current 10 million share buyback program runs through a q1 of next year so clearance jobs revenue has a five-year CAGR of 12% with the first quarter of 2026 being up 5% year-over-year adjusted EBITDA for clearance jobs is is very it's very profitable with the margin of approximately 40% and very low spend on capitalized development for dice revenue has a five-year kegger of a negative 4% it being the most impacted by the market conditions that began late 2022 with the interest rate hikes in the most recent quarter it was was down 17% Dice's adjusted EBITDA margin has increased in recent quarters due to the restructurings I mentioned, and the most recent quarter was at 28%. Dice capitalized development costs have also steadily decreased and were a million dollars in the first quarter. All right, so why buy Dice stock or DHI stock? We believe DHI is uniquely positioned at the intersection of two powerful and durable trends, increasing global defense spending for clearance jobs and the growing demand for highly specialized talent, technology talent, particularly in AI. Clearance jobs continues to demonstrate strong growth and expanding opportunity as government and contractor demand accelerates, while DICE is well positioned to benefit from the increasing demand for tech staffing. at the same time we're successfully extending our platforms into adjacent services creating new monetization opportunities and deepening our relationships with our customers importantly our highly recurring revenue model has a strong free cash flow giving us flexibility to invest for growth while continuing to return capital to shareholders so with that happy to take any questions Yeah, sure. So the question was, I think it's Dice in particular about how bookings generates into revenues. So for Dice, as I mentioned, Dice has had some pretty big headwinds since uh 2022 late 2022 and 23 24 and even into 25. um and so it's down uh quite a bit i think maybe 17 in the first quarter there um but uh you know we are seeing signs of stability and growth for instance the uh a company or a group called comptia they take bureau of labor statistics data and uh and then they put out their publications but they show new tech job postings you know up significantly may was around 270 000 as i noted we consider that an early indicator of growth in that business and so we expect dice to get back by the end of the year to roughly flat on bookings and then to the point of the question as well those bookings will generate into revenue approximately six months later so there is a lag from when the bookings hit to when that turns into revenue So I hope, thank you. sure so the question is is we've taken a lot of costs out of the business and is their opportunity to take any more, particularly with AI. It's interesting because we've been using forms of AI for many years. Our search algorithm, which is based for many of the other sites like LinkedIn, is based on keyword searches and things. Ours is built on skills, like 100,000 skills or something along those lines. So it's very specific, not to titles or keywords, but to actual skills. So as it relates to cost, yeah, the cost we took out in 2025, we're focused on first restructuring the business, which we did in January of 2025. So we could show the profitability profiles for Dyson clearance jobs separately. And then we did one mid-year, and that was really the culmination of a lot of technology effort on the dice side so it was really focused on dice and then we uh some of the support teams went along with it but the dice website was completely rewritten so the underlying code base was completely new and as a result of that effort we were able to cut our tech team roughly in half that was a big driver and then also uh we're at the beginning stages of a self-service platform we could take customers under a certain annual revenue threshold or annual subscription value threshold and we pushed them to a self-service model as opposed to going through the sales team and so we did the same thing on the sales team and ultimately cut about 90 people which was about 25 of our headcount at that time so as related to future opportunities to cut costs we do feel like right now we have a pretty good cost structure in place we're pretty comfortable with it there's always opportunity to do that if the market demands it but you know we would not anticipate that in you know the near future for sure based on particularly what we're seeing with the tech job demand out there especially with ai skills other questions okay well thank you very much appreciate it we do have one maybe that's a great question so the question was is our staffing companies out there let's say a deco or Robert half or somebody like that are they competitors or they are customers and they are they are 100% our customers so about 80% of Dice's customer base is staffing and recruiting and consulting companies that was really based on that profile what we call commercial accounts so that's just normal businesses that have an HR department and they have tech needs within their internal tech environment that's about the other 20% so so yeah they are definitely our customers and they use us to find you know their their consultants their revenue producing individuals and so that is a huge piece of the dice business clearance jobs those primarily with government contractors so all the big names you would think of in the in the government security kind of defense contractor space Yeah, so the question is, why wouldn't somebody just replicate what Dice has or what Clearance Jobs has? So I'll start with Dice. So DICE has been around for 35 years and so that, you know, they've accumulated upwards of 9 million profiles and you just can't reproduce that, in an efficient way. And so that is, the search algorithm is the real asset for DICE. And as it relates to clearance jobs, clearance jobs is based on trust, right? just as you would think with the government security clearance there's a lot of trust if somebody goes out there and they put their personal information in including their level of security clearance and so there has to be a lot of trust across that platform and you just can't reproduce that there have been some attempts and there is one company that is maybe a twentieth of our size that is out there but they primarily focus on career events like live in-person events and their databases a fraction of ours thank you for the question any others yes sir what is our primary mechanism for growing and is it candidates or are you just talking more generally bookings and revenue candidates and profiles okay it's it is marketing it is you know getting in front of the the the right people and we have so we have it roughly two-thirds of the technologists in the US already on the site so then the the trick is making them active because not all are active of course you know not everybody's looking for a job so you know it's digital marketing just as you would expect keeping in front these people the content on the sites to make it a place that you know that they'll want to come and and visit on a regular basis so that you get more kind of click throughs and exposure on the site those are the primary models and and quite frankly some of it is economy driven so when there's a lot of demand for tech professionals by corporations out there naturally you know more candidates are going to be surfing around to see what opportunities are there in 2023 when you only heard of layoffs and nobody was hiring you know you didn't get nearly as much traffic because everybody was keeping their head down just trying to make sure they kept the job they had so i hope thank you okay thank you very much