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

All right. Great. Good morning, everyone. My name is Trevor Young. I'm one of the Internet analyst here at Barclays. I'm pleased to host Tim Yarbrough from ZipRecruiter. You're actually my first session of the day. So hopefully, we don't screw this one up.

All right. Fingers crossed.

We've had here for a few years. So we know the routine. But just to kick off, actually for the benefit of those tech investors who maybe aren't familiar with the ZIP story. Can you just briefly discuss what ZIP does and how it's differentiated among peers?

Absolutely. So ZipRecruiter is a jobs marketplace that brings together job seekers and employers using the best technology for matching. So the company was born out of, frankly, a lot of frustration in the hiring process. Ian Siegel, our CEO and one of the co-founders and his other co-founders, they were frustrated with the process of hiring for the respective jobs that they're in. And they said, surely, there's going to be a better way, which is a pretty typical startup story. And so they said, what if we had a magic button, where you can push it and then instead of posting your job on multiple different online job sites, it'll just go everywhere for you and then all the allocates will come back in one place. There must be a button like that. There wasn't and so they built it. And so ZipRecruiter was born and soon created another interesting problem for itself. So now you have a bunch of satisfied employers that have stacks of applications to sift through. So then came the era of matching, which we for now a couple of years deep into. When you have a large stack of resumes for employer to sift through, it's a pretty discouraging amount of work to do. And so ZipRecruiter uses matching technology to shine the light on the best fit applicants and job seekers to drive better matching over time. So what we've done on the employer side is up in the process where instead of the job seeker having to go first, we are prodding the employer after we recommend job seekers. We say, "Hey, how about you actually extended invitation to this job seeker." And the job seeker, it's a magical experience to be recruited, when you actually get an inbound request from an employer. Now on the employer side, we're putting much more -- showing much more light on an otherwise terrible process full of drudgery. It's often called the black hole problem. And it's funny that job seekers will refer to it that way, despite the vertical, despite the geo. It's just you put submitting application and then you don't hear back. And so what we do is through our AI-driven personal recruiter called Phil, we give insight into the job-seeking process. So when the job seeker applies for a job, we will tell them, "Hey, an employer just gave you a thumbs up, keep it up, keep going," and it's very encouraging to a job seeker. And not only that, but through Phil, we're learning more and more about what job seekers intents are and not only that, but how they actually interact with jobs. So that gets down to the matching, which is really the critical piece for ZipRecruiter, where we're sitting on billions of data points now over a decade into this, we're observing the interaction between millions of job seekers and millions of jobs. We're paying attention to what works, what doesn't work, and that informs our matching technology.

That makes a lot of sense, and I appreciate you hitting on Phil. We'll come back to that in a second. So a helpful overview.

Bring it into the last couple of years, right? A lot has changed in labor market dynamics since we first hosted you a few years ago, although a lot of the disequilibrium that you had flagged at that point where it was really favorable for job seekers. You'd caution that, that unwind would happen at some point. And in fact, it started to begin. We're seeing that now even with the JOLTS data, that's starting to normalize from really high levels. For those who aren't caught up on the ZIP story, can you just walk us through the past couple of years that disequilibrium and then kind of where we are now today?

Absolutely. Yes, I think what we're in right now is a super cycle. Both the ups and the downs have been unlike anything the industry has seen for quite a long time. So in the earlier days of COVID, we all know those times early days of March and the whole world is falling apart. We saw that immediately in our data where when you have this global pandemic unfolding of unknown depth uncertainty, then that's not an environment that employers want to hire into. So we saw that immediately in our metrics, and we responded very quickly. And then what I think we discovered much to all of our surprises that the American economy rebounded quite a bit faster than expected. And we saw that very early on, very quickly in the later end of December 2020, we started seeing the number of reactivations of our paid employers. So these are paid employees that we had a relationship that churned out. The number of those that came back soon started setting records, as before we've really even turned our marketing muscle back on. So we had a very good close read on the pulse of the business and we invested into that. And so then when we saw through the back end of 2020 through 2021 and really through the middle of '22 was really an upswing by most measures. And so we saw a white-hot hiring environment. Employers were back and then some -- and then we also saw, to your point before, just a disequilibrium in our marketplace. We had, on average, two open jobs for every available job seeker that is a historically tight labor and stay there for quite a long time. Anecdotally, I'm sure all of us have been in situations where you've been into a restaurant and maybe you were turned away because there weren't enough people to actually wait on you, and actually had to do takeout, they can feed me, but I'm not to be at the table. So that was kind of the era of -- through 2022. And back in 2022, that's when we noted that we started seeing the eventual easing of that white-hot hiring environment. And really, since then, we've been on a steady glide path back down from where we were today -- or where we were back then.

And that time was actually characterized as kind of the great resignation, right?

That's right.

And employees were actually feeling pretty empowered to leapfrog on jobs and get paid up...

Yes. We're financing, you can trip on another job that pays you $20,000 on the way to work. Those days are over.

Yes. So those days are over. That's actually my next question. So like where are we now? What are you hearing from prospective employers. I think David mentioned on the last call, there's kind of like unprecedent, uncertainty among those employers on the platform. Not so much that their own business is necessarily rolling over, but just a lot of uncertainty about the macro environment. Just talk to us about the environment that you're seeing, hey, maybe in the context of the JOLTS data.

Exactly. So I can point to a bunch of different evidences of that uncertainty. I think one would be in nearly every single conversation I have with the investing community, the macro economy comes up many times over. And that's not surprising. So I think that to put it succinctly, whenever there is an economic market that's published and covered by the media, usually, the word surprising is a fix to that. And I think that speaks to the fact that we're just living in very uncertain times. And if you're an employer and you see the same level of uncertainty that all of us see, it's really hard to master the strength and make a long-term decision like hiring, when you have that kind of uncertainty. So the question often comes up, what are folks waiting for. And I think it is semblance of certainty where there is a glide path to something reasonable that folks can underwrite from a company investment and capital allocation perspective.

Right. So hearing a lot of words like difficult macro challenging backdrop. Obviously, you're a procyclical business to begin with. Despite that you and Dave, the rest of the management team continually come across is very confident in your ability to take share throughout a cycle, and whether the challenges again through that cycle. What informs that confidence? And why do you feel as though you are taking share irrespective of the macro?

Yes. So even starting back in 2022, when we first started noting the easing is very clear even in those earlier days that this really is an industry-wide phenomenon. And so it's not just something that we see in our data. We see evidence of that in other macro data, other publicly traded staffing firms are saying the same thing. Everybody is seeing what we're seeing as well. And so over -- from any quarter-to-quarter basis, it's pretty difficult measure share gains and losses. When you're in the middle of a super cycle like this. So -- but that said, we have a lot of confidence because I think we're in a good position strategically. One, we have a solid cash flow position with a very flexible business model that affords us that level of cash flow profitability. We have a very strong balance sheet, about $0.5 billion in the bank right now, with another $0.25 billion untapped and a revolve for that we haven't used yet. So we're a very strong financial shape. Two, we've done the hard work already of building job seeker and employer brand awareness on both sides of our marketplace. That is hard one work. And so we've made those investments over time. So now we enjoy 80% [ AIDA ] brand awareness on both sides of the marketplace. And that sticks around, that endures for a while. Also along with that strategic advantage, we have lots and lots of proprietary data. So that gives my first point that I talked about at the top of this conversation, where if you're using AI to drive better matching, that AI needs good data to feed on. And we have this marketplace that's full of billions of data points that our algorithms can feed on and for better matches over time. You can't roll on a bed and start a business with that. And then lastly, we have a lot of confidence because in the long run, this is a market that's massive. And the online portion of the marketplace where we play today is a comparatively small percentage of that. Roughly 6% of the overall TAM is really comprised of folks like us. And unsurprisingly, that part of the market is growing faster than the overall market. So substantially put, we're in a big market. We're in a portion of that market that's growing faster, and we're using that. We're driving that growth with technology, and we're well positioned. So to keep going that....

Secular tailwinds to your subset of the market, strong competitive positioning, strong brand awareness, solid balance sheet, positive EBITDA, positive cash flow. So that's kind of what informs the confidence, irrespective of the challenging environment.

That's right. That's right. And I think with that flexible operating model that allows us to weather the storm quite gracefully. So a good chunk of what -- we'll get to this in a little bit, but we intentionally built our operating expenses to be very flexible, so that we can be nimble both on the upside and the downside. And what we're seeing right now in this part of the cycle, is our flexibility to the downside. And so that means that in Q3, we're putting a record EBITDA dollars in margin even as revenues coming down substantially.

Before we get to the cost side, I want to hit on something that you mentioned really strong aided brand or unaided brand awareness among job seekers. Last few quarters, you've flagged strong growth among those job seekers coming to the platform. How is ZIP ensuring that new seekers on the platform retain and build loyalty to ZIP even though it's likely more challenging for them to get placed into a job, given that uncertainty from the employer side of things. And I suspect those employers are being pretty discerning versus 12 or 18 months ago where they were willing to pay up for candidate or maybe settle for candidate because they desperately needed someone. That dynamic obviously has shifted, as you mentioned. So how are you helping candidates?

Yes. So again, the context is important where we're coming from a historically tight labor market. That 2:1 ratio that I mentioned before was really important. So we're now monitoring back to something that's a little bit healthier and a little bit more normal. But that means that it is harder for job seekers to stand down. That also means that there are -- we'll talk about the demand aspects in a little bit, but that's why the things that we're doing through Phil, make it all the more important for job seekers to be successful. So if you -- if it's more important for job seekers to stand out, it's not just a matter of advertising themselves but also being matched to the right jobs because a job seeker might not be the best fit for every job out there. And so that's where our investments in Phil, I think, are going to continue to pay off. They already have been, and I think the over 40% growth in organic job seeker traffic is a testament to our strong brand, but also the fact that we have the #1 job seeker product in the App Store right now. But to the extent that Phil can positively in print himself on job seekers as they come in and their time of need right now, that job seekers going to stay with us for the long haul.

So better user experience. Obviously, there's the brand awareness and kind of addressing some of those problems you apply for a job, and it just kind of goes out into the ether and you never hear back.

That's right.

So that's right, addressing the experience. That makes a lot of sense. Shifting gears a little bit. So revenue per paid employer has been more resilient than the number of paid employers on the platform in the software hiring environment. Can you walk us through the paid employer cohort dynamics and how employer's willingness to spend increases as they mature on the platform, and as ZIP continues to roll out new features, and why is that spend holding up so well? And what are the risks that revenue per employer starts to move in the other direction as those employers maybe feel uncertainty or not.

Absolutely, a very good question. So yes, revenue per paid employer is a metric that has reliably trended up into the right over time. So in broad strokes, there's a couple of drivers of that behavior. One, is that the product is really better. The game of driving better matching is a game of incremental wins over time. So again, building more robust data sets, and then also using the right algorithms to unearth the right insights from those data sets. That's something we're constantly chipping away at. And so as the product gets better, we create more value, that allows us to extract more value. And that's more with large for ZipRecruiter over time. The same phenomenon is also true on a per employer basis, though. And so as an employer uses ZipRecruiter, the more they use it, the more the matching algorithm learns about that particular employer's needs. And so the algorithm get smarter with respect to that particular employer, they like that, they use it more. And ultimately, the ZipRecruiter works like a marketplace. And that means, as an employer pays more, they get more. And so they can invest more in the job search process by doing things like a traffic boost upsell as an example. And it's a way for them to effectively increase the bid within the marketplace and drive better performance. And so employers that have been with us for a while know that and so they'll spend up over time. And then really the last kind of more macro driver of revenue per employer over time has been the gradual mix shift from SMBs to enterprises. So when -- we'll get the enterprise a little bit more in a second, but over time, we say that the enterprise part of the market is roughly 50-50 compared to SMB. We're not close to that today. We're about 20-80, with 20% being enterprise. But that's farther along than we were when this company first started out by focusing on SMBs.

I'm glad you hit on kind of the mix there because we are seeing some natural mix shift as SMBs or may be more inclined to pull back earlier than enterprise, they have more -- enterprise has more always on budget and so forth. Can you just talk a little bit about any specific initiatives or investments such as like I think you've alluded to it in the past, the campaign optimization solution that you're currently working on to expand the enterprise side of that business to go from that 20% mix, to 50%, again, which is over the very long term. And do you still feel confident enterprise can get there.

Absolutely. Before we get to that, I want to double back so I don't think I answered the last part of your last question. So forgive me for that. So the last part of your question was about kind of near-term macro headwinds on revenue per paid employer. And so everything I just discussed, I think, has been true in the past and will continue to be true in the long run. I think there's a lot of headroom between where we are today and where revenue per paid employer can go. That said, 2023 is a pretty unique part of the super cycle that we're in right now. So revenue per paid employee could be a little bumpier and growth that I've talked about in broad stroke could be sold out in the shorter term. But in the long term, all of the trends that I just discussed, I think those will remain true and we have extra confidence that there's quite a bit of headroom between where we day and where we can be because when you look at some of the off-line aspects of other competitors' businesses, they're charging oftentimes 15% to 30% to first-year salary. That's quite a bit higher than where we are today on revenue per employee per quarter base. But to your question about enterprises, yes, we do think that we have a very solid path to 50-50, which is where we believe the market is. And there's a couple things that we've been investing in to make sure that we get there over time, even given the macro uncertainties right now as employers are responding to what they see on the ground. One is the -- we've disclosed this a few times in the past, but we're really excited about our applicant tracking system integrations. And so when you have a larger enterprise, they have their own applicant tracking system, so iCIMS, Taleo, Workday, these larger pieces of software that they use to manage their hiring process. And so they're buying from us on a per click basis typically. So in order to -- for us to be able to make sure that they're getting the best job seeker traffic that requires integration within those ATSs. There's a lot of them. So we disclosed that we've had as of Q2, 140 ATS integrations. Those are very hard one. And every single one of those are customized. And to win in enterprise, you need to have that done. And the second thing that we were excited about is our bid optimization tool that we launched earlier this year, where basically, it creates better outcomes for both us and for employers where they set a target level spend that they want to make for a given campaign and this automation tool further ensures that they're able to hit that spend target. So on average, campaigns using this tool, hit their targets 34% of the time more than a manual process. So things like that are hard one improvements that we're making to our overall enterprise.

So the ATS helped get integrated in the system that they're reliant on. And so it's probably pretty sticky after that. And then you drive those good outcomes with the optimization anyway. And then you kind of have that employer on a lock, and that enterprise is going stick with you for a while.

That's right.

That makes a lot of sense. Going back to AI. I mean, obviously, we have to hit on the 2023...

That conference is...

An obligatory AI question. You mentioned, Phil, you've been investing heavily here for years, right? It wasn't a 2023, like, hey, we need to get involved here. And it's really on two fronts. It's the ability to match seekers to openings, right, drive better outcomes, but also with the job seeker onboarding and getting better engagement with them. Can you just hit on some of the ways that you're already using AI to drive those outcomes?

Absolutely. Yes. So we've been doing AI for a long time, well before LLM really versus -- we'll hit on that in a second. But getting back to the billions of data points that I keep referring to, I do that because it's very important. And some of the examples could be when a job seeker shows up on the front doors of ZipRecruiter, they're greeted by Phil. And Phil will ask very simple questions like, do you even know what you want to do right now? And a surprising number of them say, no, just -- I just want a job. And so Phil will run them through a job calibration process where Phil will show them jobs. Do you like this? This, this, you'll say, yes, no, yes, no, all the while Phil is learning. All of these inputs from job seekers become data that we will use AI against to form better matches down the road. That's just one of many, many examples of how we're using AI to form better matches. So -- and again, we've been at this for quite a long time. However, LLM, rightfully so, is extraordinary, and there's a lot of buzz about it. It's a very different type of tool that can be very complementary to our current tech stack. So Phil, we're always looking for fill to become far more conversational because Phil is an embodiment of a personalized recruiter. And so to the extent that Phil can get much more conversational, that means that it's a better experience for job seekers. That means that we can probably get more data from job seekers to help them along their path as well. All of that's going to sit nicely around our current tech stack.

That makes a lot of sense. And I would imagine all that data that you have from years and years helps inform...

Absolutely.

That better extent.

And there's the simple things that we have done as well. For example, employers don't like creating job descriptions, they're also quite bad at it. And so we can do that for them now using things like generative AI, similar on the job seeker side, they are still often required by employers to create resumes. They don't like doing that. They're also not good at it. So we can help them along the way as well. So these are small things that we can do to help smooth the process. Ultimately, what we want to do is eradicate all the friction from the job seeking process both from the employers and from the job seekers perspective. And generative AI, I think is a very helpful way of helping that along.

So remove pain points on both sides of the equation and just drive better outcomes. Makes a lot of sense. You alluded to it before, we'll shift to the cost side. Obviously, sales and marketing is a major investment area for you, both on the employer and job seeker side, you've driven brand awareness over the years of investments. But it's also a big lever for you to flex in good markets as well as in more challenging markets. I think sales and marketing was down upwards of 50% year-on-year this most recent quarter. What sort of signal would you look for to start leaning back in on that marketing, and can we expect sales and marketing to be structurally lower levels from here out given that really high unaided brand awareness and so forth.

Yes, it's the same signals that we saw in the earlier days of COVID in the recovery. So while admittedly, I think everybody is living in this era of uncertainty that's unprecedented. In the very near term, we have near perfect insight what's happening today within our marketplace because we can see what employers are doing versus what they are saying. And so it's the same type of data points that we looked at back in the earlier days of COVID. We know how our marketing channels are performing. Some of them have very quick returns, quick reads, so more digital channels, things like that. We can see if employers are waking up and becoming more interested in hiring, the number of employers that are reactivating organically, that's also something that we pay attention to. The amount of enterprise budget that we're gaining and having increased over the course of a month. These are all interesting KPIs that we stare at every day, so that we make sure that we're able to capitalize on the inevitable recovery. Ultimately, one of ZipRecruiter's, I think, strategic strength is not the ability to predict the future but the ability to respond to what we see faster than everybody else. And so that is true both in the up cycle and the down cycle. So to your question about whether sales and marketing becomes structurally lower in the near term as things recover, I think the answer really depends on the strength of the recovery that we see because we make those go-to-market investments based on ROI metrics. So we're looking at near-term ROI as well as extrapolating longer-term LTV to CAC ratios and also over the longer period, measuring impact on brand. And so if we see opportunities to invest, we'll lean into that. So when we see a very strong recovery similar to what we might have seen in later 2020, you saw us invest aggressively and our level of aggression, is pegged to our level of conviction based on what we see. But we are now on the other side of a lot of brand investments. And so that means that the incremental marketing dollar does a lot more for us because that we have that nice halo effect of having strong brand over time.

Makes sense. So good real-time signal that you can adapt to, you're flexible in your ability to spend, but also it sounds like some of the heavy lifting on brand has been done historically. And now you say that you're not going to do it going forward, but maybe that area gets a little bit deemphasized because you have all this great brand equity, that strong. I mean the brand awareness, #1 app in iOS and Android. So it's really going to be more on the performance side that you'll lean in at the point in the future once you see that signal coming back.

That's absolutely right.

Got it. Okay. Shifting gears to now on the R&D side, it's trending around mid-teens percent of revenue and then to the most recent quarter had been growing year-on-year. But still in absolute terms, isn't huge dollars spending upwards of $100 million run rate, meanwhile investing in areas like AI and so forth. And how do you feel about the level of investments from here, particularly for building out more tools behind sales and help that be a better experience for both seekers as well as employers. Does that become much more of a focus in a recovery where, hey, we can lean in on R&D to drive more innovation.

Yes, I think it's less of an aspect of ramping up spend necessarily, but building up our robust road map. And right now, when we look at the initiatives that we're funding right now, we feel really good about our future. And so as with all things we're good judicious allocators of capital. And so ramping up areas of spend come with high levels of conviction. So right now, based on the road map that we have in front of us, we feel really good that it's well funded.

Okay. And you're also not starving the business, too, right? You mentioned most recent quarters kind of record high EBITDA margin as you pull back on that sales and marketing in the cycle, but you're still making the investments you need to in R&D for the longer term to continue to accrue that share.

That's absolutely true.

Okay. So pretty healthy and consistent EBITDA and free flow over time. Are there any other areas of the business where you think you could actually invest further. We talked about sales and marketing, and we talked about R&D, but anywhere else you can put dollars to work.

For sure. Yes. So when it comes to capital allocation, our philosophy has really been the same ever since we got started. We feel really good about the level of organic investments that we're making and all the initiatives that you just mentioned right now. Product road map is robust and well funded. Our sales and marketing motion, again, is funded based on the opportunities that we see in front of us, and the results, I think, speak for themselves. So we feel really good about all of our organic investments, and that will forever more be our first priority. Secondly, we are ever diligent on looking for inorganic growth opportunities, M&A opportunities. And so we have processes going where we're looking at lots of different companies, and we have a very high bar. And so -- and historically, we have not been terribly acquisitive, and we're much more of an organizational bias towards building versus buying. But that's something that we're -- we would be interested in pursuing if we find the right level of talent and the right product fit. But I think it's pretty unlikely that we would come with a big announcement of a large flashy transformational acquisition, just hasn't really historically been part of our DNA. And then lastly, after looking at those two, we're still cash flow positive. So what are we going to do with that. So capital returns is always something that is on our list. We approach it opportunistically when we see any kind of dislocations in market value between what we have conviction on and what we see in the market right now. But we're doing so cautiously, not as any programmatic announced return of capital program. We just want to be smart about every dollar that we're investing, whether it's in something on the go-to-market side or something in terms of buying our own shares. But we do participate in share repurchases because we feel like it's a -- there's a good opportunity for us to strong ROI there as well.

Okay. And obviously, you mentioned earlier, ample cash on hand, incremental capacity should you need it, but also being thoughtful like, hey, we want to have enough firepower to navigate this. And you already alluded to it on kind of appetite for M&A and appreciate that it's probably more kind of the [ acquihire ], get some interesting capabilities rather than transformational, what about thoughts on like international expansion and then back on M&A, would you say your appetite is greater now given the private stamps that maybe come in versus a year or 2 ago?

Yes. So on international, the vast majority of our revenue is U.S.-based. So international is not going to be a 2024 focus for us. It's something where we, again, have much more of a bias towards being focused. And if you look at an enormously successful ZipRecruiter 5 years from now, I think it will have to be true that we have further penetrated the U.S. market versus doing well in other international markets. So I think that remains an opportunity for us, but not something in the near term. As far as M&A is concerned, there's a bunch of interesting product fits that we're looking at all the time. This become more interesting as prices come down. Yes, absolutely. I think if you look at the private market maybe 1.5 years ago or so, the price premium was very apparent. And over time, I think there's been an exercise of capitulation among...

Expectations has come back down.

Yes. Yes, public valuations seep into the private markets. And so more opportunities become more interesting over time. But we've never been the type to really discount really those primary criteria that I mentioned before, making sure that the talent level on the team is top-notch and making sure that the product and strategic fit is top-notch as well. So just because something becomes more affordable, it doesn't mean that we also spend in more and inclined to buy something that doesn't meet those first two criteria.

Yes, makes sense. So international may be at some point, but profit, if I'm hearing you correctly, isn't top priority. And it sounds like ample runway here in the U.S. given the secular tailwinds more spend coming to online channels versus traditional recruiters anyway that you have a good runway there to continue to approve share.

Correct. Yes.

Great. That wraps up my questions. I want to open it up to the audience if there's any questions. And if not, we can wrap it there. It doesn't look like any. Great.

Al right. Thank you everyone.

Thanks so much, Tim. Really appreciate it.

Yes.