ZipRecruiter, Inc. (ZIP) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. I understand that we're live. Good afternoon, everybody. I'm Josh Chan, Business Services Analyst here at UBS. We're pleased today to have ZipRecruiter join us. They are an online marketplace that matches employers with job seekers. With us from the company today is Tim Yarbrough, CFO. If anybody has any questions, feel free to raise your hand. I will also pick up any questions from this iPad here. But Tim, great to have you here again.

Great to be here.

Thanks for joining us.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

I guess to level set the audience here, could you give us a brief background about ZipRecruiter and highlight some recent developments and then we can go into different topics from here.

Yes, absolutely. Like you said, ZipRecruiter is an online jobs marketplace that brings both job seekers and employers together. And we do that through technology using the best matching in the industry to form better matches between the two. ZipRecruiter was built out of the frustration of the process of finding a job and the process of finding good quality candidates. So in the earlier days, we call it version 1.0 era, ZipRecruiter made it possible for an employer to post their job in just one place and then distribute it all across the Internet and then aggregate all of those applications that flowed in into a single place where you can review your applications and rate them and respond accordingly. So what that did was create a whole lot of applications for employers to sift through. So thus began version 2 of ZipRecruiter, where we migrated away from quantity and towards quality. And so now ZipRecruiter provides smarter matching so that rather than just supplying many, many applications to sift through, employers can have a light shine on the right ones so that they can figure out who they should respond to and engage with. And likewise, with job seekers, rather than just showing them lots of jobs, we show them the right jobs. And we're able to do that because over the years, we've aggregated this massive data asset, which is just billions of interactions between job seekers and jobs that has driven -- that allows our AI algorithms to drive better matches over time.

Great. Could you talk about some of the features that you've introduced recently into the platform, what traction that they're having with job seekers and employers?

Yes, absolutely. There have been a couple of new features that we've rolled out over the last 12 months or so. One of them is ZipIntro. And you can think of this as speed dating for jobs. So in as little as a few hours, an employer can post the job and then begin speaking to live qualified candidates. And these candidates are drive by our -- informed by our AI algorithms. So when an employer posts a job and they say they want to have a ZipIntro session, we scour the marketplace and invite them to queue up at a certain time and then employers and job seekers can have introductory conversations. It's been a wild success. 90% of job seekers who engage in them said they would do it again happily. And enterprises, in particular, on the employer side, really enjoy this product. So the number of Zip intro sessions was up 90% in Q3 versus the prior quarter, and that's building on the success of 80% in the prior quarter as well. So I think we're really on to something big there. Another big product that we relaunched was our resume database. So resume database is a proactive sourcing tool that employers will use to search for candidates for specific jobs. And so they can type in exactly what they're looking for. We redeployed this tool and made it much more user-friendly. We now uses natural language matching as well in modern technology so that we informed -- so it drives much better matches over time. And SMBs, in particular, really like this product, the number of unlocks or the number of resumes that were reviewed has been steadily increasing as well. So in last quarter, that number was up 12% quarter-over-quarter, and that's building on the progress of 9% to 10% of the prior quarter as well. And then lastly, we made an acquisition last summer of Breakroom and -- a U.K. company, and that's been going very well right now. So we have over 10,000 employee -- employer pages that have been created that's fueled by over 1 million ratings from the currently employed folks that are looking at giving more information about their current employers.

Sure. So as you develop these new capabilities, how do you think about either monetization or viewing them as sort of an improvement in your platform in terms of what you offer to your customers? How do you think about that?

Yes. Our natural bias as a company is to find product market fit first, create lots of value and then look at extracting value. So when it comes to ZipIntro as an example, right now, it's free. So we're learning a lot from our employers that are using it right now. We're learning a lot from job seekers, and we're tweaking the product accordingly. Monetization can come later. And so that-- Breakroom is another example where we're in the process of building a corpus of products and monetization is in its earlier stages.

Okay. How do you navigate that kind of hurdle to something going from free to being monetized? From a customer perspective?

It will be -- I think it will be just fine because the amount of value that we're creating with ZipIntro in particular, it warrants a price premium. And with the feedback that we're receiving so far, the repeat customers that we're seeing, I think it will be well received.

Okay. Great. So when you look across sort of your competitors, how do your capabilities compare to competitors? How do you kind of differentiate yourself versus other marketplaces?

Yes. strictly within the online space, online marketplaces, there's really three larger players, LinkedIn, Indeed and ZipRecruiter and then a very long tail of other players in the space. And so in the longer tail, generally speaking, it's been losing share over time, I think, to the first three that I mentioned. Our approach is fundamentally different in that instead of focusing on social media or being a verticalized search engine, we focus on providing individualized matches and driving actual connections that's, again, tailored to the individual job seekers' preferences and behaviors as well as what the employers are looking for.

Okay. And then beyond the online competitive set, there's also a whole slate of off-line recruitment market out there. I guess, how do you view that part of the market? Is it kind of considered addressable from your perspective?

Absolutely, over time. Yes. So that's one thing I think people don't fully appreciate. This is an area of the world where software has not yet eaten the world. So of the overall TAM in recruitment, is roughly $300 billion in the U.S. alone. And the online portion that I spoke of is only 5% and faster growing, which is intuitive, but still very small. So I think over time, those of us in the online space will eventually continue to gain share against that larger backdrop.

Okay. And then from an employer and job seeker perspective, what makes each of them choose ZipRecruiter as opposed to some other solution? What do you get right in their eyes?

Yes. It's different from employers and job seekers. I think employers ultimately want to make a good hire as fast as possible. And that involves eliminating a lot of toil from the process. So everything from creating the initial job description through talking to actual candidates, we're working at streamlining that approach. So for example, every employer hates creating a job description, and they're notoriously not so great at that. So we help fix that with preset job templates that they can apply to their job and tweak accordingly. All the way through ZipIntro, like I mentioned before, we accelerate the time that it takes from a job to get posted to an employer to actually get the talk to real life candidates. So we're trying to streamline that process and actually have them talk to face-to-face with candidates that are highly qualified. On the job seeker side, I think what is needed is a more individualized approach to solving otherwise painful process of looking for work. Nobody has ever said that they really like looking for a job. And I can't say that we've totally solved that yet, but that's our mission to make it much more enjoyable and individualized. And so we use the wisdom of the crowds to inform the matches that job seekers get. So we build pattern recognition with the individual job seeker based on what they tell us they like and then also what they apply for, but then also use the same learnings that we've derived from other job seekers that are similarly situated and also extrapolate those results to that same job seeker as well so they get better matches over time.

Could you talk about how you bring the job seeker to your platform to begin with, I guess, like is that more of a branding, sales and marketing approach? How do you do that?

Yes, there's a bunch of different channels. But I think over time, we have earned 80% aided brand awareness on both sides of our marketplace. And so we get a lot of our job seeker traffic organically. But there have been other areas as well. LLMs have become much more of a -- the way that job seekers are looking at finding work. And so we're experiencing a significant amount of growth from LLM-based traffic as well. It's up 140% last quarter on a quarter-over-quarter basis, and that's faster than the 60% or so in the prior quarter. So job seekers come to us from multiple channels. Again, more and more of that is becoming organic traffic.

Okay. Maybe switching to AI. Clearly, that's been your DNA since day 1. So as AI proliferates across the broader landscape, how is that impacting, if at all, the market that you're participating in?

Yes. So AI has been more and more of the topic of discussion and for good reason. I think what we've learned from talking with employers is that the level of interest is very high. The level of experimentation is high as well. But as far as true functional adoption, still in -- very much in the early stages. And so we have not seen any disruptive effects from AI in the job market overall to date. Now when you zoom out, we're actually very optimistic about the impact of AI on the labor market overall. It has been true for all time that any large technological innovation eventually gives rise to many more jobs than it displaces in the short term. And so we're excited about it. We think it's going to be -- it's going to mean good things for the labor market overall.

All right. In terms of your own AI capabilities, I guess, how do you benchmark your own AI versus what's out there in the competitive set? How do you make sure that your algorithm, I guess, stays the best one.

Yes. It's something that we've constantly been chipping away and the enhancements that we make are iterative and are cumulative. So we have a significant data asset that I referred to before, which is getting bigger and bigger as our marketplace continues to expand. And we make enhancements in our algorithms to make sure that we're driving better matches. And so we keep track of our progress in a couple of different ways, but our job seekers reward us by telling us that we have the #1 rated app in the app stores. And when we look at the number of applicants or the number of employers that receive five or more applicants within the first 24 hours of job posting, that number is up 24% on a year-over-year basis. So SMBs, in particular, but employers overall are receiving a much higher quality of product.

Okay. And then in terms of the pace of AI improving within your business, could you talk about what you can do with AI now that you couldn't have done like a year or two ago?

Yes. So a lot of the progress in AI lately has been specifically with LLMs. And so there are some pain points that we've been able to solve for employers and job seekers. I referred to one of them before, but the process of creating a job description is made much more -- it's made much easier because now we can have pre-populated job templates that employers can use. And likewise, on the job seeker side, nobody likes creating a resume. And so we can help folks do that fairly quickly using LLMs. And even products like ZipIntro has made all that much more smarter because of advancements in AI. So now we can deliver a higher velocity of higher-quality candidates faster to employers so that they can be well situated for good productive conversations through our ZipIntro product.

So kind of same question, but looking forward, I guess, in the next 1 to 2 years, what kind of capabilities could come up that you can't do today?

It's very hard to predict where the AI technology is going to go. And so it's very hard to make that call. But one thing I do know is that any technology like AI needs data to work with. And that, again, is one of our most defensive moats around our business, the asset that we've built up over the years. And so any future developments of AI will be in service of driving better matches faster.

Okay. That makes sense. Any questions from the audience? Okay. Maybe switching to the macro environment. So the macro environment for employment has been challenged for the last several years. You did see year-over-year growth in paid employers for the first time in Q3. How would you frame where we are from a macro perspective relative to the environment that we're in?

Yes. It's been -- we're after 30 months of declines in the labor market. In 2025, things have been relatively stable with some softness that we and others in the space observed in Q3. So if we zoom out, I would still consider 2025 kind of a down year, but certainly less so than the prior two. But really, to your point, despite that, we've been performing really well. So revenue has been growing sequentially from Q1 to Q3. Our paid employer numbers have been growing steadily from Q4 to Q3. And so -- and when you look at our enterprise business, in particular, the revenue growth was a strong 12% quarter-over-quarter increase, and that's again despite the relatively cloudy macro that we're in.

Okay. And you are guiding to a return to revenue growth in Q4, but it wasn't by a lot. So I guess, could you talk about the conviction level behind the guidance? What you're seeing from like a monthly build perspective to lead you to that kind of conclusion?

Yes. So guiding to Q4 growth has been a pretty consistent message of ours really all year long. So even back in our February call, we described the very scenario that we're guiding to now is a likely scenario, and our conviction in that has only increased. And again, that's despite the relatively chilly macro that we've been observing, especially towards the tail end of Q3. So our conviction is the same as our philosophy with our guidance has never changed. So we have the same level of conviction that we've always had with our guidance philosophy. And I think it's informed by a couple of things. One would be a sequential step down going from Q3 to Q4, which is fairly typical. SMBs, in particular, tend to slow down their hiring as we go into the holiday seasons. And then secondly, again, the macro has been a little chilly. And so that informs the sequential step down, but still putting us in a place of growing on a year-over-year basis in Q4.

Okay. And what kind of environment do we need to get to sustain this year-over-year growth through 2026?

Yes, good question. So to be super clear, in 2025, where the macro has been relatively unkind, we have stabilized revenue. And it's in that environment that we are growing on a year-over-year basis at the midpoint of our guidance in Q4. So 2026, there's a wide range of scenarios that we're prepared for. We are fond of saying that we do not have a crystal ball, but we are prepared for all occasions. So to the extent that we see some kind of more -- a strong economic recovery, we will take advantage of that, invest into it, and we will benefit from a revenue perspective, even if that means that adjusted EBITDA margins come down in the shorter term because we're doing that with confidence that there's a significant return at the end of that investment. And conversely, to the extent that we see the macro soften further, we would again respond in kind. We have a significant amount of flexibility, specifically in our sales and marketing. And so we can dial back our investment accordingly and protect margins if need be.

Okay. There's some discussion from a job market perspective that it's kind of frozen where companies are not hiring, but also not firing. So it really cools down the velocity of the whole market that you kind of need. So is that how you see the market? Why or why not? I guess, about the frozen market type of narrative?

That's exactly how I describe it. So what we've seen is that both hiring and quits, which are both metrics that the BLS publishes are at near decade lows. And so I think what folks are seeing is that with the increased amount of uncertainty in the market, the currently employed are less likely to leave their current jobs. And by the way, that quits rate, that is the most significant driver of hiring overall in the U.S. It's not net new job creation. And so we have a lot of folks that are kind of hugging their jobs or frozen to them. And similarly, on the employer side, employers are less likely to make longer-term decisions such as increasing in hiring when you have a lot of uncertainty on the macro environment. So it's exactly how we would characterize it.

Okay. And then from a revenue per paid employer perspective, there's a little bit of pressure recently on that metric. What does it take from a macro perspective to get that to return to growth?

Yes. So there's no doubt that the macro weighs on that metric in particular. If you have overall hiring coming down in the U.S. as it has been over the last couple of years, that's going to show up in revenue per paid employer absolutely. But we still are very confident in that number growing steadily over time. There's a couple of things driving that. One, there's a significant difference between the price point for those of us in the online space compared to those in the offline space. And to the extent that the market continues to shift more towards the -- into the offline world and offline gobbles up that market share, I think we'll have room to increase prices over time. Secondly, enterprise is a very promising growth driver in our business. And right now, our enterprise revenue is roughly 25% or so of total, and we think the market is more like 50-50. So as we get more and more market share on enterprise, that will be a boon to the revenue per paid employer as well. Also, one thing we've observed consistently over time is that as employers mature with us, as their tenure extends, they tend to spend up over time. So the paid employer growth that we've experienced in 2025, in particular, has been a little bit of a drag on our revenue per paid employer. But as that cohort matures over time, that will again move that number up. So zooming way out, revenue per employer is something that has reliably trended up and to the right. And we think the macro has certainly weighed on it over the last couple of years, but that trend will -- that long-standing trend will again revert to its normal course.

You mentioned enterprise. So I guess any new initiatives to drive more enterprise traction? And then maybe I'll throw in international too, to the extent that, that is an opportunity like...

Yes. So again, we're really encouraged by enterprise growth. So enterprise grew by 12% in Q3. And so we feel very good that we're taking market share there. And I think what we're seeing is the seeds that we've been selling over the years really starting to bear some fruit. So we've often talked about the number of ATS integrations that we've rolled out and have been improving upon over the years. And -- so that's one thing. The second is that we've been improving the campaign automation that drives bid performance on the performance products, and that's been -- that take rate has been growing nicely. And all of that is resulting in better outcomes for employers, and that means that they're allocating more spend to us over time. On the international front, so the vast, vast majority of our revenue is U.S.-based and international remains a growth lever for us in the future. We know the playbook on how to build marketplace liquidity. And so we can certainly do that again. Many of our employers have jobs that they're hiring for internationally as well. So that's not the issue. Really, what we see is a massive TAM here in the U.S., and we're much more focused on success within the U.S. alone, leaving international expansion for later on down the road.

Okay. That makes sense. Shifting over to margins. You're guiding for Q4 to have margins that are relatively similar to last year, but you did spend most of this year having steeper margin decline. So I guess what's causing the cadence to start improving in Q4?

Yes. So like I mentioned before, we have a lot of flexibility in our sales and marketing motion. And we make these decisions based on the data that we see. So as we were coming through Q4 '24 into Q1 '25, we saw relative strength from an employer perspective, and we wanted to lean into that. And so that's where we made the strategic decision to tolerate lower margins during that -- during the first half of 2025 and even going into Q3. Now given the relative softness that I mentioned in Q3, the step-up in adjusted EBITDA margins is really more indicative of a typical seasonal pattern where going into Q4, like I said before, seasonally, SMBs, in particular, tend to wind down their hiring. And so we'll dial back our sales and marketing motion accordingly, and that will result in higher margins.

Okay. On that sales and marketing flexibility, how would you describe the current level of spend versus normalized, if you want to -- if there is even such a thing?

Yes. We don't make our decisions kind of on a top-down basis, but we do it on a bottoms-up basis, and I'll explain what I mean by that. So we look at our own data. We look at the returns that we're getting on a short-term basis and then extrapolate over a multiyear basis given the number of years that we've been at this. We know how our employer cohorts behave over time. And so we're making decisions based on the returns that we're seeing in the moment. And then to the extent that, like I said before, if things materially improve, we're going to lean into that investment and margins come down. And if we see the opposite, we'll lighten up and then margins will creep up all other things equal. So that's philosophically how we approach these types of decisions. The vast majority of our marketing spend is highly flexible because we don't contractually commit too many years out in advance, which allows us to dial things up or down as we need to.

Okay. So I guess looking into 2026, how would you frame the potential range of margins depending on what happens in the macro.

Yes. I think it would be the application of that same philosophy. I think one thing that we're very clear about is that our long-term adjusted margin profile looks like 30% margins. And so -- but the distance between the 9% for 2025 and that 30% will largely depend on the macro backdrop. So again, we're equipped and well prepared for that wide range, but the 30% is something we have increasing conviction on.

Okay. Okay. And then how do you think about the conversion of free cash flow from either EBITDA or net income? Should free cash flow improve with earnings in the coming years?

Yes. So free cash flow is not something we've guided on historically, but I wouldn't anticipate anything significantly different in terms of conversion from adjusted EBITDA to free cash flow.

Okay. And then could you talk about the -- how do you plan to deploy capital?

Yes. Yes. So our priorities haven't changed. We have -- in order of importance, we want to, one, continue to invest in our organic business. Secondly, preserve the flexibility in our balance sheet to take advantage of any opportunistic M&A that's strategic. And thirdly, would be shareholder returns, either in the form of share buybacks or debt retirement. But that's the strict order that we've always been marching against.

Okay. It seems like this year has been tilting more towards buybacks. So what's your philosophy around buying back the stock in terms of timing, amounts, things like that?

Yes. So we don't have any programmatic or systematic return of capital philosophy, but we approach it much more opportunistically. And so you're right, over 2025, in particular, we've been much more acquisitive of our own stock as we see the opportunities. But we're balancing the decision to buy back shares against the aforementioned priorities and also maintaining a flexible balance sheet so that we can -- weather -- any kind of storm or also be poised to invest in the business organically to the extent that we see an increase in opportunity.

Okay. And then debt doesn't mature for a while, so there's not much near-term urgency. But at what point would you think it's financially attractive to repurchase the public debt at a discount versus the par, I guess?

Yes. So debt retirement and shareholder returns kind of fall in that same third bucket priority, and that's a topic of discussion with our Board every single quarter. Historically, we're biased much more towards shareholder share repurchases with -- given where the market has been trading. So that seems to us to have a higher return, but that's something that we have a live discussion with every quarter with our Board.

Sure. I think there's two questions from the audience, maybe...

[indiscernible]

Sure. Yes. So the question is about just share price over time over the last couple of years with the decline, how do we approach that. I think the fact that the labor market has been in a steady decline is no secret. That's something that other players in the online space have experienced as well as those in the offline space. And so I think what we've done is manage the top line revenue pressure as well as possible and while protecting margins accordingly. So the stock price is going to do what it's going to do. We're going to get -- we're going to stay focused on executing on the business as well as we possibly can.

[indiscernible]

Yes. So nothing right now. So we're very squarely focused on this large, large TAM that's in front of us. And so yes, it's been a hyper cycle that we've been in for quite some time right now. But I think the long-term potential hasn't changed. We're still very bullish on the U.S. economy. We think that this is a large and growing TAM. We think that we have a lot of pent-up demand for our service, especially with the quits rate being as low as it has been. I think it's reasonable to expect a lot of churn within the currently employed, which will give rise to a lot of hiring, we're going to benefit from that.

[indiscernible]

Yes. So that's still a relatively small percent of overall job seeker traffic, but it's growing quickly. And so I think in the 140% growth that we've seen quarter-over-quarter, we're demonstrating that we're open to that for sure. And so there's changes that we can make internally within our own jobs corpus and modifications that we can make to -- make sure that we're being picked up appropriately and getting more than our fair share of that. We'll see how the space evolves over time. I think it's still very early stages, but we're very much interested in reaching job seekers however they want to start their jobs -- job search.

There's a question in the back.

I just want to clarify [indiscernible]

Yes. So that was in reference to overall TAM in the U.S. So online recruitment, including those like us, $10 billion to $15 billion or so information is not perfect out there, but you can -- if you look at IBIS, that's what they're going to put out there with a much larger addressable market for the offline portion. And I think one of the things that the off-line market is very good at is compelling action or engagement between both the recruiter and the candidate being recruited. And that's something that I think our technology has been very focused on to kind of stoke that engagement. I think inertia is a very real phenomenon, especially when it comes to larger employers' processes in hiring. And so it's going to take some time, I think, for folks to kind of transition over. But things like AI really taking root in mainstream, I think, will help propel that transition from offline to online solutions like ours.

Great. I think with that, we're out of time. Please join me in thanking Tim for the presentation.

Thanks for having me.