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

All right. So we're going to keep the train moving down the tracks. We're going to go into our next fireside chat with the team from ZipRecruiter. We've got Ian Siegel, CEO; Tim Yarbrough, CFO. Ian, Tim, thanks so much for being part of the conference.

Thanks for having us.

Always a pleasure.

It's always a pleasure to talk to you guys. I always enjoy it. So I know this is going backwards when we go forward probably is not one of your favorite things, but let's talk about setting the stage for those who are either listening or in the audience who don't know the story as well. Can you talk a little bit about the journey you've been on in terms of building ZipRecruiter, what you're trying to accomplish, where we're going. Just set the stage for us a little bit before we get into all the nitty-gritty.

So my name is Ian. I am the CEO. I'm the founder of the company. I've been at this company for 15 years now. ZipRecruiter started with a very straightforward premise. It was designed to be a magic button you could push and you could send a job to all the jobs and all the social networks and all the aggregators across the Internet, effectively turning the Internet into one giant job board and then all the candidates from all those sources would come into one easy-to-review list. That was the original idea. It worked fantastically well. And then it worked a little too well because it turns out that when you keep delivering more and more volume, what people really want at that point is quality after 100-plus applicants fatigue sets in and what employers are asking you to deliver is 5 great candidates that are ready to interview. We shifted our focus at that point from delivering more volume to using techniques like machine learning and deep learning and meta learning to drive quality applicants to employers. We have now entered a third era where we're delivering high-quality matches at rapid speed to employers who post jobs. But it's not enough to get them there. What's important is that we get a human talking to a human. And so now our focus is on engagement. What can we do to make sure that the 2 sides actually meet and find the time to speak and hopefully like each other so that a hire can actually happen.

That does set the table. Okay. Against that backdrop, why don't you talk a little bit about the competitive landscape that you find yourself in, in terms of the talent acquisition market and what you see as some of the key competitors that are trying to build around what you're trying to accomplish?

The recruiting category is interesting because it is heavily supported by online tools and yet the preponderance of the category's TAM exists in offline players. There's over $300 billion a year that is spent every year on online recruiting just in the U.S. alone. As I said, the majority of that is off-line. However, amongst the online players, there has been a wave of innovation, and it's everything that I just talked about. It's the ability to rapidly deliver high-quality applicants to employers and increasingly to do so with precision and providing tools that will enable those employers to engage with those candidates quickly. When we look at the landscape, there are former blue-chip titans like Monster and CareerBuilder, which everybody is familiar with, which have waned significantly. There's a new big 3, which is LinkedIn, Indeed and ZipRecruiter. The 3 of us are vying for what is the hiring market as it exists today. It is a complex time in the labor market and has been for the last 3 years. And I think the reality of where we stand is what it takes to be a player goes well beyond technology and has moved into the necessity of building really strong brand to go along with that technology. And so I think what we're going to see is those 3 names playing a significant role on a go-forward basis.

Against that landscape of those 3 names, you being one of them, talk a little bit about how you see some of the differentiating factors playing out that you're leaning into on the investment side.

Sure. So if you look at the landscape of online, you have LinkedIn, which is a social network that's predominantly the place where the currently employed white-collar professionals with multiple years of experience hang out and try to find each other. They do not play as much in the active job-seeking space. That space is very much competed for by Indeed and ZipRecruiter. And when you look at the 2 of us, if you looked at the strategies that we are pursuing, I think the fairest way to say this is Indeed is a very large online job board, ZipRecruiter is attempting to be a matchmaker. Our goal is to provide technology to employers that enable them to effectively go first to find job seekers they're interested, proactively reach out to those job seekers and drive engagement with them very quickly. We have a variety of tools that enable us to do this. This is things like our new resume database, which has that sort of messaging capability built directly into it and also the new product that we launched called ZipIntro, which you can just think of as speed dating for hiring where an employer says, here's a job I need to fill and our algorithmic matching goes and finds highly qualified candidates and brings them to them within 24 hours to have very fast fit checks over video so that these employers can hopefully find someone they're interested in and move on to a hire.

Maybe just sticking with this theme over the history of the company, you've built really interesting things internally. You've also acquired interesting things along the way. How do you think about against this theme of differentiation, sort of speeding up time to market and creating advantage relative to peers and what you can build versus what you can acquire. And I know we'll come back to a capital allocation question maybe later, but just sticking around the technology theme at large.

Yes, it's a great question. And I think it goes back to what I was saying when we were talking about the competitive landscape, which is if everyone in this room tried to come up with the name of 5 job boards in their head right now, many of you would struggle with a fifth. And there's over 10,000 job sites, but not many of them are well known, particularly during a downturn like the labor market has experienced over the last 3 years, being the answer to the question, where should I go to hire someone or where should I go to find work is an enormous inherent advantage and should probably be considered table stakes for anyone who is seriously trying to compete in the recruiting category. On top of that, what has come to define the category over the last few years is the ability to use modern algorithmic techniques to leverage the wisdom of the crowd when it comes to matching as opposed to traditional Boolean heuristics. So instead of just saying the job title is marketing analyst and this person has marketing analyst on their resume, we should put them together. Instead, what the system can do is look for patterns in the data and say, employers who are hiring for this job title like candidates on the spectrum who have these characteristics, and it's not required that it be an explicit direct match keyword to keyword in order for that to happen. We've leaned in heavily there. We have all of the brand recognition. We have 80% plus brand recognition on both the employer and job seeker side. We have the required volume of data after 15 years being in business, literally billions of interactions between job seekers and employers to actually utilize these algorithmic matching techniques to find that wisdom from the crowd and apply it to who we introduce to whom. And now we're really taking advantage of the newest form of AI, which is these large language models to really try and stoke more engagement faster once we have put these 2 parties together, and that's happening in everything from our resume database to our novel product, ZipIntro, which is again speed dating for hiring to the acquisition that we just made, which was Breakroom, which is the place where job seekers predominantly in frontline worker roles can find highly structured information about the employers that they are potentially going to apply to, and this is not Glassdoor. This is not reviews of said employers. This is very concrete and specific information that is pertinent to whether or not you want to work there. It's things like how many hours a day do I have to be on my feet? How much do I have to interact with the public? What is the pay schedule and its frequency? How many breaks do you get? These are relevant questions for 60% of the labor market.

Okay. Just building upon this theme and talking a little bit about AI, which you've sprinkled in some of your answers so far. And you guys were talking about AI before it was actually cool to talk about AI. We were talking about a number of years ago on earnings calls and during IPO processes. But talk a little bit about the impact of those AI investments against some of the scaled product initiatives you have today and how you're thinking about the availability of AI on the foundational level that's available to you to continue to sort of partner and scale projects you have for the long term.

Well, certainly, we've been playing with what was traditionally called AI, which is the algorithmic matching approaches and techniques for almost 10 years. And I still remember when we launched the first set algorithms because we were putting it heads up in an A/B test against 8 years of optimization -- 6 years, I guess, of optimization against Boolean techniques. So it was a hyperoptimized Boolean technique against this novel new technology. And it beat it by so much, it was sufficiently advanced, it felt like magic. It just absolutely transformed what was possible and what expectation we should have for matching inside of our category. And that's amazing. That's an incredible evolutionary leap forward that AI made possible. But the truth is this, it doesn't matter if you get the right job seeker to apply to the right job, if the employer takes 2 weeks to then reach out to said job seeker and engage them. And it doesn't matter if you get the employer to engage rapidly with said job seeker who has just applied if the job seeker then takes 3 days to respond to that employer. So the next frontier, the major evolution that is theoretically possible leveraging AI techniques is using AI to stoke rapid engagement between the 2 sides. And that experience of actually driving outcomes is where we are highly focused at ZipRecruiter.

So the driving engagement and outcomes that would be externally faced, one of the recurring questions or themes that have come up as I've had conversations this week is how AI might also be developed and deployed internally into organizations. Any thoughts there about what some of the key initiatives you're working on and any key learnings so far and what it might do for your operating efficiency as a company separate from the impact it can have on your platform and with your users?

AI is a really -- particularly large language models have proven to be like a really interesting opportunity to improve efficiency within our business, and it's already permeating multiple parts of our business. It hasn't so far led to us replacing people inside of our business interestingly enough. But -- so in particular, the most obvious utilization of AI has been as a copilot to engineers who are producing code. Their ability to produce high-quality code that is unit tests that come along with it, which is for everyone here who may not be familiar, that's just the QA instructions that come with it is unparalleled. It is a dramatic improvement in the efficiency with which we can produce new things. That's amazing. Any repetitive task, particularly one where a human is required to check something to make sure it's still good or still working is something that we've been examining utilizing AI for in lieu of requiring a human to go do the manual monitoring of it. But I would say that it is very clear. It will be a significant efficiency boost to our overall organization across multiple departments. Will it ultimately replace a bunch of people in our organization? Of that, I would say the jury is still out, and I remain dubious because for us, at least, who has so many relationships with tens of thousands of employers, having that human-to-human interaction and connection is pivotal to both delivering the product they expect and making them satisfied with our service.

Okay. Turning to the employer side of what you built and the platform. Obviously, there's a lot of different types of employers. When you think about the business model you're moving to over the longer term, characterize for us the journey for SMBs versus enterprises and what that might mean for either a transaction-based monetization versus subscription-based monetization over the longer term?

So the labor market in the United States effectively is split between SMBs and large enterprises. ZipRecruiter started on the SMB side of the equation and is now moving upmarket into enterprise. The split of our revenue is currently 80% SMB effectively and 20% enterprise. But we have been laying the groundwork for years to move upmarket in a substantial way into enterprise. And over time, we expect the mix of our revenue to shift to 50-50, which would be reflective of how the U.S. economy actually works. For SMBs, we have offered a subscription product, which you can either purchase on a per day basis or on a per month basis. For enterprises, we have offered a pay-per-click business that works very much like Google AdWords does. We are indifferent to the business model that a customer should potentially use. What we like is giving them the options to buy the way they want to buy. Enterprise is going to be an important part of our long-term strategy here, and it has been a major investment for us. It has been a significant challenge to sell into enterprise because these are companies that use third-party applicant tracking systems like Workday and/or Taleo as their canonical source from which they do all of their recruiting and vetting of candidates. So you must integrate with all of these companies. We've done 180 of these integrations so far. And then many of these enterprises, the vast majority are now buying from agencies, which are third parties they give their budgets to who then distribute those budgets between the variety of vendors who will potentially be interesting as sources for recruitment of candidates. All of that work has been underway for years, and we have made tremendous progress in it. And so I remain confident in our ability to hit that 50-50 split over time.

Maybe just one follow-up there, and you did touch upon it a little bit. Just frame again sort of the elements of the enterprise big opportunity. What are the friction points or challenges that you most struggle with? Is it the onboarding process? Is it the education process, breaking old norms? It seems like it's some mixture of all of those. I just want to put a finer point on that.

The challenge with enterprise is it requires substantial technology integration with third-party vendors that the enterprises have chosen to use to even begin effectively selling into and delivering to them as customers. And then on top of that, the means by which they buy is not direct, but through an agent that they assign in many cases to distribute their budget. And so what you're fighting for is wallet share of their available budget from a third party after you have completed these technology integrations. I consider that a significant moat around would be competitors who want to enter the space and compete for enterprise dollars. And it's a reflection of the fact that it's already 20% of our revenue, how much we have been penetrating into that market, and I would expect that trend to continue.

Okay. Very clear. Tim, let's bring you into the conversation. During the last earnings call, you painted a narrative around where the environment sits today relative to 2015, but you also expressed some optimism in terms of starting to see maybe some elements of an improved environment out there clearly didn't want anyone to get too excited about it because you're like -- we've been on quite a journey, as Ian talked about over the last couple of years. But how are you navigating the current macro environment from an uncertainty standpoint? And as a team, what are you watching for to see more sustained signs of improvement in the labor market?

That's a great question. Yes. And I think to put 2025 into its proper context, again, you got to go back through the cycle that we've been in right now. So soon after COVID, obviously, top level numbers in hiring dropped off significantly. But then what we saw is that very quickly thereafter, hiring started picking up in the U.S. And what followed was a white hot hiring market through the middle of 2022. Around then, we -- that started a roughly 30-month decline in hiring across the U.S. This is validated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but of course, validated in our own information as well. And as we came into 2025, we noticed something different. Throughout December and into January, we're paying close attention because it's an interesting seasonal period of time through the holidays that the number of reactivations from employers coming back into the marketplace as well as new employers engaging in our marketplace was a lot stronger than what we had seen in the past couple of years. And so when we got on the call in Q1, we presented some good results and talked about sequential growth in quarterly paid employers, which is a count of unique employers in our marketplace being up 10%. That's in stark contrast to the declines that we saw in the previous years. And so overall, it looked like we were seeing much more stability than we had seen in the prior couple of years. And over the course of Q2, we saw that continue as well with paid employers being up sequentially, again, another 4%. So when we talk about 2025, given the relative stability that we're seeing right now, we think that being in a year-over-year growth position in Q4 is an increasingly likely scenario given the circumstances that we're seeing on the ground right now. The things that we're paying attention to most is really our own data. We're guided by the paid employer activity, the hiring activity that we see in our marketplace and make our decisions and plan accordingly. But we retain a tremendous amount of flexibility to be able to navigate any ups or downs in the marketplace that we see on a macro level. But given everything we're seeing right now, we're feeling good about that year-over-year growth position in Q4.

Okay. And just to clarify, you -- just so I have it right, you said modest year-on-year growth in Q4. That was the language you used on the last earning call, right?

That's correct. That's correct.

Okay. I just want to put a proper framing around that. Against that dynamic, Ian, maybe I could just get you to weigh in before turning back to Tim. When you think about that landscape you find yourself in and even beyond Q4, what are you watching for? What are you continuing to monitor for that slope to be either steeper or less steep in terms of a recovery dynamic? What could accelerate or decelerate the time line to a better set of outcomes on the top line of the business?

What we have just witnessed was an unprecedented downturn in the labor market that lasted for 32 months straight. For 32 months in a row, there was less hiring each month than the previous month. To put that in context for you guys, if you go back to the 2008 financial crisis, that downturn in hiring lasted 22 months, and everybody thought it was the worst that we had seen in our lifetime. So -- this is rare. This is particularly bad news if you're a recruiting business than the recruiting category. However, finally, for the last 2 quarters, we have started to see stabilization where the decline has leveled off, and that has led to a foundation from which many things have been revealed about both our business and the category overall. It's not entirely macro. We did not sit idle for the last 2.5 years. Many, many improvements were introduced to our business. So I'd say there's a split of impact between the things that we are in control of and have been doing to improve the efficiency and the return that we're getting from customers in our business and then also a softening of the downturn in the labor market, not a recovery, a softening. And so when I look at the labor market to answer your bigger question, which is like what are we looking for? The #1 thing we're looking for is stability. We talk to thousands of businesses every month. And what they're saying, the word we hear the most is uncertainty, uncertainty about the future, uncertainty about interest rates, uncertainty about the impact of tariffs. And so if we can get to a place where we are seeing stability again, that will potentially lead to businesses hiring and has in all cases in the past. And then the other thing is the headlines are scary. And what's true is that the currently employed are scared. And so the quits rate over that same 32-month period has also been declining. And the #1 thing that drives hiring in America is when an employee leaves their current company for a different job, and they are necessary to backfill by the company that they left. And that is happening at ever diminishing frequency in the United States. And so what we're really looking at is for the quits rate to go up and a period of overall stability to be reintroduced.

Yes. And it's interesting just to editorialize from my side for a minute. You guys have talked about this macro backdrop pretty consistently, but there's been a lot more volatility in some of the public stats. But then you wake up this morning and you get a reduction in the backward-looking stats that -- I guess what you talked about 4 quarters ago, look a little bit more what the dynamic was versus what the reported stats were against the way you were framing it a couple of quarters back.

I just want to characterize. I just want to be very clear. There's 3 stats you can look at. There is the jobs report, which is what you see on all the news channels. The jobs report is in, 75,000 new jobs created. That is the number of new jobs the economy either added or lost in a quarter, it is a de minimis percentage of overall hiring in America. Every month, roughly 5 million people are hired in this country. And so it's the hires number that really drives our business as is the quits number, which is also measured in millions. So like -- but the new jobs is a great example of where like data can be difficult to trust that you are seeing. Fortunately, all of the news about the recount and the adjustments, that was long ago baked into our business and has had a very small impact.

Yes. Understood. Tim, bringing it back to you. What we've talked about a lot across both of you, but Ian has been the main drive here has been growth investments. When you have to bring it back to the P&L and think about the balance between funding all the investments you want to make over the medium to long term, delivering to rooms like this to investors who want margin. How do you think about striking the right balance there?

Well, we have a couple of pillars of our investment strategy. One is our product. We're a product-led organization. Ian is a product guy in his DNA. And he talked already about a lot of our investments there along our job seeker experience. And because of all those investments, we have the #1 rated app in both app stores. And that's also showing a lot of fruit in growing our job seeker traffic over time. Over the last couple of years, we've been outpacing our competition in terms of job seeker traffic overall. So that's one of the big pillars of our investment that's showing a lot of fruit right now. Even along our employers, resume database was redeployed over the last year, and that's bearing a lot of fruit as well. ZipIntro was a new product that Ian talked about as well. So our product investments are first and foremost and bearing fruit. Secondly, we have a strong go-to-market motion that we've been leaning into, especially over the last couple of quarters. So I mentioned this at the top of the discussion, but we retain a tremendous amount of flexibility in how we market to our end markets. So we strategically do not commit large amounts of marketing media to future periods. That gives us a lot of flexibility to manage our spend up and down. But between product and our go-to-market motion, that's what we want to continue to focus on.

Maybe this is a question for both of you, whoever wants to take it, but it's sort of a follow-up. And I've asked you guys this question on earnings calls, and I always find it interesting the way you frame it. You guys have remained a product-led company. You've continued to invest through the headwinds that you've articulated over the last almost 3 years. What does this company look like in a stable growing labor market scaling on top of the investments you've already made that can improve and reduce friction in the way hiring happens at a better run rate than we see today?

Yes. I think over the long term, we're confident in a 30% adjusted EBITDA margin business. And right now, in 2025, we've been delivering roughly mid-single-digit adjusted EBITDA margins. And that's because we're leaning into the relative stability that we've seen so far, not pulling back on the organic investments that we're making I just talked about. So the path from the 5% or mid-single digits to the 30% will vary based on how the economy improves or erodes overall over the course of cycles. But over time, we're going to continue to get scale over the marketing dollars that we're deploying as revenue continues to grow. So that's, I think, the rough size and shape of the trajectory from here there.

And I just want to add to that. If you look at our history, we spent our first 4.5 years as a bootstrapping business, got to north of $50 million in revenue with millions of free cash flow before we ever took $1 in. And then subsequent to that, we ran as a profitable entity for many years and all the years that we've been public and have demonstrated significant much higher adjusted EBITDA margins than we're currently delivering. And I like to think of what we do as running a sensible operating practice and like we consider the margin of our business part of the health of our business. And I think those 30% margins he quoted are absolutely attainable and a portion of that is going to be that shift mix from 80-20 to 50-50 between SMB and enterprise. And I think that the road map in front of us is well set for that kind of a strategy.

Okay. Understood. Tim, if I can ask you to bring us home, I always do like to ask about capital allocation. Your current priorities might shift those priorities. We've talked a little bit during this discussion about growth investments, maybe doing some tactical and strategic M&A. Level set the paradigm today for capital being deployed by the company and what might alter that in the years ahead?

Absolutely. So we're very fortunate to be in a very strong capital position with a strong balance sheet. So our order of priority has not changed since we've gone out in the public markets. And that's, first and foremost, investing in all of the initiatives that Ian and I have been talking about today. Organic investment is by far and away the thing we're leaning into the most. Secondly, we're interested in corp dev opportunities, looking at M&A. We talked about Breakroom, which is our last -- our most recent acquisition. We're constantly looking at other opportunities as well to invest in. And then lastly would be looking into shareholder returns or returns of capital to either on the equity or debt side. So over the course of our history, we've been much more acquisitive on the equity side. And that's because we're opportunistic as we're approaching these decisions every quarter when we see a good opportunity for return on investment, and we see that in our own shares, we'll do -- we'll make that investment, taking into account the other priorities that we have that stack above that.

Okay. Maybe last one because we've got a few minutes, and I'll try to squeeze one in for you, Ian. If we're sitting here, hopefully, we are, we're having this conversation a year from now, talk to me about what the 2 or 3 things that you're most focused on executing over the next 12 months that we'll be reflecting on and discussing as backward-looking rather than forward-looking in a year's time?

I think the thing that made me most excited this year was the 10% quarter-over-quarter growth in new employers that we experienced Q1 over Q4. That compared to only 2% the prior year and a negative relationship between Q1 and Q4 the year prior. And why is that happening? It's happening because of product improvements. It's happening because people are getting results on our site. And so I think we understand why they're getting results, and we're leveraging both the algorithm matching approach as well as the new opportunities presented by LLMs to enhance the things they like about our product, and that is manifesting itself in the proactive sourcing options they have in our resume database, that new product that Tim talked about, and it's manifesting in ZipIntro, which is very strong at finding the right candidates who are qualified and ready to talk to employers so that engagement can happen very quickly within a day of a job being posted. And I think what we'll be talking about is not vanity metrics like the number of visitors, the number of applies, but rather about the level of engagement that we're generating through our site. And then the other big category is enterprise. I mean we have built a fantastic recruiting solution. It works for companies of all sizes. It's just merely getting it into the right shape and form so that these companies can take advantage of it. It has been a -- there are a lot of steps in order to effectively be a partner to these companies, and we are through the majority of those steps and building relationships at a rapid clip. So...

Okay. Why don't we leave it there? Please join me in thanking the team from ZipRecruiter being part of the conference.