All right, why don't we go ahead and kick it off? I'm Ralph Schackart, internet analyst at William Blair. I recognize many of the faces here. Thanks for coming to our annual conference. Have to tell you to check our website for disclosures. Today, we're really happy to have David, President, and Tim, CFO, here from ZipRecruiter. I think two years ago, we were joking. We were sitting here, and everything was okay, and then the quarter came, and then we found out not so much. And then last year, we had some changes going on as well. So I think what we're gonna do is start with a couple of slides, because there's a lot of generalists here, and then we'll go right into Q&A. And then David's gonna tell us how the economy is going, right? Right. All right, cool. All right, we'll start with that, and then we'll jump in the Q&A. Okay. I'll make it fast because we're gonna predict the economy for everybody. Take it nice and easy. All right, so, nice to meet you. I'm Tim Yarbrough at Zip. So ZipRecruiter is a two-sided marketplace, bringing job seekers and employers together using the best matching, and it was really born out of the frustration that employers felt trying to find the right candidates for their jobs. Back when the company was founded, our founders, who were all working for smaller technology startups at the time, thought, "There's gotta be a better way." They wanted a simple, big, red button where you can press it, and then all of a sudden, your job would show up everywhere across the internet, and ZipRecruiter 1.0 was born. It was actually born while they were still employed gainfully with other jobs. And so after that, though, after version 1.0, we quickly discovered that we created a problem for ourselves. Now, employers had lots of applications to sift through. So what we had to do then was get better with our matching technology. So rather than showering, just showering, employers with candidates, we wanted to shine a light on the best-fit candidates, so that employers can spend less time sifting through piles of resumes and more time interviewing good-quality candidates. So we've revolutionized the way both sides of our marketplace do the job search. So on the employer side, we compel employers to action, so when candidates apply for a job, they are either reaching out proactively, inviting them to apply, or also just reviewing and rating candidates. All of that creates data, and I'll get to the why that's important in a little bit. On the job seeker side, we'll talk about this in more detail, but we have a very novel approach to the job-seeking journey, a journey that's otherwise filled with drudgery, the black hole problem, which I probably don't even have to explain, 'cause you probably understand what I mean by that. That was alive and well back then, but we're shining a light on the whole job seeker journey, so that job seekers know when their application's being rated and viewed, and we can provide positive feedback along the way. So all these different interactions between the millions of jobs and job seekers within our marketplace create a very rich data set, upon which our algorithms can feed and provide better matches, going forward. All right, so five pillars. I'm gonna spend time on the first four, and then the last one is gonna get its own special slide. So, one of the key investment highlights that we're excited about is the fact that this is a very large market, so a $300 billion TAM in the recruiting space, writ large. Within that $300 billion, you have roughly 5% of that is online. So this is another part of the world where software has not yet dominated, and we play squarely in that piece that's growing faster than the overall market today. The second pillar here, leading AI technology, powered by proprietary data set. I've already hinted at this before, but in order to win in this game with technology matching, you need to have good data. You can have great algorithms, anybody can build those, but you need great data from which those algorithms can inform better matches. And so we have now over a decade of billions of interactions between jobs and job seekers to inform better matches over time. So we have this concept of great match, so we delivered 40 million great matches to our employers last year alone. The differentiated offering, I'll talk about Phil a little bit more here. So Phil is our friendly, AI-based personal recruiter that greets you at the front part of your job seeker journey. You can go to ZipRecruiter.com right now, and you can say hi to Phil. Phil will say hi to you and get to know you and specifically what you're looking for. A lot of job seekers actually don't know what job they want, and so Phil will ask you simple questions like, "What are you looking for?" And if you don't know, Phil will serve you up different types of jobs to get a sense, we call it job calibration, to get a sense of the type of work that job seeker's looking for. All of that feeds into that same base of data points that I mentioned before, from which our algorithms can, again, provide better matches to that job seeker specifically over time. And those matches are informed not just by that job seeker's behavior, but by all the other job seekers in our marketplace that kind of look like that job seeker and have similar preferences as well. But Phil is a very friendly way of engaging with job seekers. We know it's working because job seekers that engage with Phil, on average, apply to jobs at roughly twice the rate than those that do not interact with Phil. It takes a long time to build up sufficient brand in this space, and so we're about a decade into spending many hundreds of millions or so in building up marketing. So you probably have all heard us. If you listen to podcasts, I'm sure you've heard ZipRecruiter commercials on your favorite podcast. We don't apologize for that, but we're multi-channeled in our approach. So we're doing TV and radio podcasts. We do digital channels, both national and local TV, things like that. So we're multi-channeled in our approach, but all of that has the overall umbrella effect of building up a significant brand advantage over time. So, and this is true for both the job seeker and the employer sides of our marketplace, so that's one of the other defensive moats in our business that we're very proud of. And then lastly, our financial model is very flexible. I'm gonna go ahead and skip to this slide to give a little bit more detail to that. So in the early part of June of 2022, we started to see the hiring climate start to chill quite a bit. And really since then, the hiring market has come down quite a lot. We've already talked about that a little bit, at the preamble to this conversation here. So over the course of 2022-2023, we saw a revenue decrease by roughly 29%. But we were able to reduce our sales and marketing expenses by 45% in the face of that, and it's in response to what we are seeing that we're able to do that. There's a couple reasons why. One is because we have very little of our sales and marketing capital committed to future periods, so we can be very flexible. And two, we're highly metriced in how we're handling a marketing spend. We're scientists, we're not artists. So this is not an exercise of me wearing the finance hat, coming over to the marketing team and telling them what they're allowed to spend. Not at all how it works. But rather, we have a bottoms-up view of our marketing spend, where we're looking at near-term and long-term metrics, and we're also looking at brand awareness metrics over time to make sure that we're dialing in our investments for the appropriate ROI. So all of that resulted in us taking down marketing, sales and marketing expenses by 45% year-over-year, and our adjusted EBITDA, moving up from 20% to 27% in 2020-2023. So we exited the year, and we sit here in front of you today with a very strong balance sheet, with over $500 million in cash on hand. We have another $250 million in a revolver that's untapped. So despite the very fierce downside cycle that we've been experiencing right now, we're in a very strong position financially. I'll end with a couple highlights here. So revenue in Q1 of $122.2 million, with Adjusted EBITDA margins of 17%. We feel good that we're encouraged by signs of flattening that we've been seeing over the last two quarters now, where quarterly paid employers, which is one of the KPIs that we disclose, that was actually up sequentially, which is the first time in the last couple of years. The Q1 or Q2 guidance number that we provided was also a lower sequential decrease than we've seen over the last couple of years as well. So, you know, we're not calling a bottom at this point, but we're getting more, excited about potential flattening that we've been seeing. And then the last bit on here is this revenue per paid employer number of $1,700 and, roughly $1,700. That's a number that has reliably ticked up into the right over time, and there's some bumps along the road here and there. But if you look at this number, both in aggregate, which is what I'm displaying here, this is over the course of the quarter, or if you look at this number over the course of an employer cohort, this number reliably trends up and to the right. So we see a lot of headroom to go on revenue per paid employer over time. But, right now, like, I just wanna close before we go on. We're emerging from this kind of downward cycle with levels of cautious optimism on flattening and in a very solid position financially. Great. I'm not sure if it's for Tim or David, but maybe if we kind of as a jumping off point on the macro, I'm sure a lot of people wanna hear about that. But maybe kind of talk about some of the trends that you saw exiting 2023, and as you came into 2024, the progression, and as we're sitting from last quarter, and if you could speak to today, sort of, the stabilizing trends that you're seeing. Yeah, we've seen three flattening trends that led us to talk about it the past couple quarters. One is, you know, macro consensus. We put sort of the least weight in that, but it's hard to ignore, you know, sort of consensus around soft landing looking viable. Obviously, those headlines change every single day. More importantly to us is, as we look at our own proprietary set of metrics around the total jobs out there in the economy, ZipRecruiter and beyond, we've seen flattening in that number. Our internal numbers were worse than some of the official statistics in 2023 and 2022. But we saw encouraging signs of flattening in early this year. And then, most importantly, you know, last quarter, for the first time in several quarters, our own paid employer count was flat or ticked up, ever so slightly. So those are the, those are the core of the trends we've seen, and, and nothing has caused us to, to change that view. There have been many fits and starts. This economy and this cycle is unlike anything we've ever seen, before in our short tenure and in our study of, of recent history. So, you know, I don't know what that portends for the, for the future, but that's where we're at right now. Can you also maybe talk about the linearity you saw last quarter, as you turned it through the quarter? And then maybe as a follow-up, if you could speak to sort of any discernible trends between SMBs and enterprise? Yeah. So, the in terms of SMBs and enterprise, our historical, you know, experience is that SMBs respond more rapidly than enterprises due to changes in the economic environment. That's a little the, some of that is what we're seeing now and where the flattening in the paid employer number, which is more driven by much more driven by SMBs than enterprises, is consistent with that. Whereas, you know, enterprises are very few, relatively, of our total employer mix, but obviously drive on a per employer basis, drive significantly more revenue and drive up that, average revenue per employer. So we've seen more, you know, on the, on the margin, slightly more green shoots among the SMBs, and that's consistent when we went in and first talked about softening happening in the labor market post-COVID, starting in June of 2022. You know, we said that we saw those first signs of softness in the SMB market, and that's consistent with previous changes as well. ... Great. And then, I know historically you've talked about your platform being representative of all the jobs in the U.S., from lower paying to high paying, and sort of everything in between. Maybe talk about some of the trends you're seeing within different verticals, be it healthcare, government, tech, and I guess just bluntly, have you seen tech come back at all? I think everybody's way down there. Yes. So, in technology, we have not seen a huge change there. The hiring, we still seem to be in the year of efficiency, I would say, from a technology standpoint. And in healthcare and government, on the flip side, have both been more resilient over this time period. And, you know, for a long time, as the total economy cooled down, travel and leisure remained very strong. That has changed, and travel and leisure are much weaker sequentially now. So those are some of the puts and takes we've seen, but those are on the margin. Generally, what we've seen is, over the past 18 months, the Great Resignation, which caused a huge number of people to switch jobs and a huge demand from employer to backfill open positions, has turned into the Big Stay. There are a number of reasons for that. But, but beyond changes in overall hiring, the much bigger effect has been lots of people switched jobs right after COVID for a myriad of reasons, you know, locked into their low 30-year mortgage rates, inability to meet very high salary packages from 2022, grandfathered in, work from home and flexible work arrangements, etc., etc., have caused lots of people who would normally be switching jobs to stay in place. And then I think you talked about for 2022 and 2023, that your trends were sort of worse than what was reported. But yet you sort of have a view that you're representative of the whole economy. So perhaps why the disconnect, A? And then, B, is your platform dynamic enough where you're seeing changes happening daily, or is there a lag effect, or, you know, what sort of visibility do you have? No, we see changes happening in very real time, and we're pulling from a number of different sources that triangulate and give us great confidence in what we see. So I can't speak to other, the nature of other data points out there. We look at them, but what we're very confident in is, A, employers' activity directly on ZipRecruiter, B, the fact we work with hundreds of other job sites and see their activity, and, C, we work with the largest applicant tracking systems in the world that send us their jobs very directly every single day. So we have a very good sense of exactly what's happening in many different sectors of the economy. And so, you know, we're tentatively seeing signs of flattening, and we see it in how customers are talking to us, that they feel the caution from talking to fellow business people and looking at headlines and watching CNBC is offset to some extent by the strong results they're seeing in their own businesses, and so their, you know, hiring levels are somewhat steady. Any of the verticals, maybe tech included, or some of those that have been hardest hit, are you seeing the second derivative sort of slope out or any changes of encouragement, or is it more sort of the same with the kind of the early cycle, cycles? Yeah. What I... It's been steadier than more dramatic. What I would say is the arc of headlines has been, the coming and going of headlines about layoffs, etc., has been more dramatic than actual behavior. The actual behavior has been slower and steadier. And what we've seen in some large, notable headline gathering cases is that the actual number of jobs downsized or layoffs that occurred were less than the announced amounts. And I think there are a number of reasons why that may have happened. But obviously, there are some very high-profile companies that have significantly trimmed their workforces. Anything we didn't touch on the macro that you'd like to highlight or clean up or... No. ... catch all? No. Did I ask about tech? I wasn't sure. All right, let's move on to your investments. The last quarter, you talked about the trends we just talked about flattening out, and now is the right time to think about investing. I think some investors may say, you know, "Are you too early? Is this sort of like counter to maybe what we're thinking?" So maybe kind of walk through why now is the right time to think about reinvesting. Yeah, I think there's a number of different things. One is, you know, the changes in the bleeding-edge technology that we're using to enable incredible steps forward in from taking a job search process that is historically, in the minds of job seekers especially, but employers as well, uncertain, with filled with rejection and causes a lot of anxiety. The nature of the matching technology we're bringing to bear is going to allow that to turn into a process that has much higher and more certain chances of success and with much less serendipity required. And so a number of things are gonna enable that, but it's less LLMs and ChatGPT, and it's more meta-learning and deep learning, different flavors of AI that will be at the very forefront of that, where we're investing heavily. And, it's thoughtfully thinking about what data streams from job seekers and from employers make sense to intuitively to a job seeker and employer, and how we explain some of the deep learning and meta-learning-generated recommendations that result. And what we find is, the more and more we marry this bleeding-edge technology with a deep psychological understanding of what it's like for a job seeker to look for a job and how we personally advise them rather than expose them to a list of search results, the more positive the results we get, and the better the job seeker does. All those R&D investments are things that we want to continue, even when we see revenue being roughly in this kind of flattening framework. It's really within this kind of flat revenue construct that we're talking about our adjusted EBITDA guidance, or not guidance, but adjusted EBITDA projections in the low to mid-teens. So it's within that envelope that I think we want to continue to increase, continue to invest in R&D initiatives while kind of monitoring sales and investments. And how much flexibility do you have on the model if the trends you're seeing today reverse? You know, what would sort of be the effect or on investment then? Would you continue to plow through it- Yeah ... or would you pull back? So we have a lot of flexibility. Everything we do in financially structuring our business is to create flexibility. So we can react, not predict the future, but react faster and more decisively, as the situation evolves and as performance of the business evolves. So, you know, if there were a big recession in the second half of this year, we have a cross-structure that's, you know, prepared to adapt to that. We've adapted before. We will adapt again. On the flip side, if we see a pickup in hiring activity, we will see that very quickly, and we will invest behind that in go-to-market activities, while continuing our slow and steady, consistent R&D investment. Go-to-market activities, marketing and sales will increase, and you won't have to wait to see that revenue comes through. You'll see it very quickly. It may not pay for itself, and margins, depending on how sharp a recovery may be, margins may come down or not, because we're investing into a recovery, but you'll see revenue move right away. And historically, before Gen AI came on and has all the buzz and hype, you had been sort of, I guess, a legacy or traditional pattern recognition AI company. Can you maybe talk about, you know, how that served you well until now? And then when you layer on Gen AI, what does that do from a product perspective, and how are you implementing it today? Yeah. So Phil, our personalized recruiter, has been live for 6 or 7 years, so he was, he was old school, I guess, by today's standards. So what we found is making the process more human, as I talked about earlier, causes job seekers to feel more confident and gives us the right to make recommendations and change as a job search changes. So if a job seeker starts out looking for a manager position, but then we show them several manager positions and also a few positions at their current level as an individual contributor, but those current positions are 10% or 20% higher pay than their current role, and they immediately apply for those, you know, Phil has the right to say, "Hey, it looks like, you know, you may not be looking for a promotion so much as you're looking for a raise in pay. Here are more great jobs that look like the ones you just applied to, and by the way, those jobs, those employers gave you great feedback immediately." And so that human interaction gives people a lot of confidence that to what Tim heard about, spoke about earlier, which is that black hole is what job seekers hate, which is they apply to lots of jobs, and they don't even get rejected. They just hear nothing back. And so when they're putting all this effort and also putting themselves out there emotionally to be rejected, they love the idea that all this work and emotional investment is causing something. Something's happening out there in the universe, and I'm getting the feedback. And so that is what causes an activity loop that causes job seekers to then give us more feedback on how their thoughts are evolving and changing. And having that back and forth in a conversational mode, as opposed to a, "Let me update my search query with some, you know, more Boolean qualifiers," is a much more intuitive way for job seekers to think about that. As you think about market share and all the organic traffic you're getting on the job seeker side, you know, are you gaining share? How do you measure it? And then, you know, eventually, when we get through this tunnel, what does that mean in terms of backdraft and growth potential? Yeah. So as I think about the whole market, the hires data that came out yesterday, flat basically to the month before, basically shows that we're down about 10% from pre-COVID in total hires in the economy. Meanwhile, the economy's gotten bigger, the labor force has grown, but hires are down 10% due to that big stay phenomenon I referenced earlier. At the same time, the revenue run rate in Q1, we just talked about, is, you know, 12% or so above pre-COVID. So while the market is down 10%, our revenue's up 12% from the pre-COVID level. It's been a wild ride in between, pre-COVID to today, but we feel incredibly well-positioned from a technology, balance sheet, infrastructure standpoint to take advantage of the hiring economy as it recovers, and it inevitably will. It's a when, not if, and we're happy to continue to bet on the U.S. labor market, like has been a good bet for the past 100, couple 100 years. One more, and then we'll turn over to Q&A. Enterprise has been a market segment that I know you've been working at for a while. Maybe kind of talk about your product set today, what's your go-to-market strategy, and if you fast-forward a couple of years, what would your prediction be for how you're faring in enterprise? Yeah. So enterprise is a newer part of the market for us. You know, roughly about half the dollars in the US are spent by enterprises in recruiting, the other half from SMBs. We started 100% SMB-focused, and we're closer to 80/20 today, where most of our enterprise revenue comes in the what we call performance-based revenue, as opposed to subscription-based revenue that's dominated by SMBs. So that go-to-market motion is much newer for us. What we're finding is enterprises are much more sophisticated, require much more technology integration. You've seen, and will continue to see, a steady stream of integration announcements with large applicant tracking systems that manage the recruiting workflow for large employers, which is critical to make us seamless to work with and continue to upgrade the power of our solution. What it does is, it allows us to deliver much better results for both job seekers and employers when we integrate with an applicant tracking system. What does that mean? Instead of clicking off the ZipRecruiter marketplace when you find a good job and applying on the job site, of the employer, you can stay on ZipRecruiter and use your existing profiles, resume, all the questions you've answered before, and apply often in just one click. And that's a magical experience for job seekers that results in way more applications and way more subsequent activity from job seekers and allows employers to get way better results. And so that's just one example of how we're using our expertise in job seeker psychology, married with leading-edge technology, to build these long-term relationships with customers, where we will give them some organic results before they're ever customers, show them the results of what we've been doing, by having all the jobs in the US economy to begin with, and then saying, "But that's just a fraction of what you could get by working with us on a more ongoing basis. And the longer you work with us and the more you invest, the better your results will get, because we'll get to know you and your hiring needs and your company better and better." And we've seen it. We've seen that companies that use ZipRecruiter brand new this quarter, versus those that last quarter, versus those that have been with us for over a year, those that are with us over a year get three times as many great matches. And so the system learns and gets smarter, and by investing more over time, you'll get more from ZipRecruiter. Great. Thanks, Dave. We've time for a few questions, if there's any from the audience. Colin? Just a quick question, and this may show a lack of understanding your business, but, ZipRecruiter, I think you slowed down on revenue by 22 year-over-year, probably like Robert Half, I think, down maybe 10%. I think of you guys as a secular share gainer, and Robert Half as more legacy. So what do I not understand about your business continuing to go back down, though? Yeah. So setting aside the specifics of any other company, how do we compare to the performance of staffing, the offline part of the world? What I would say there is that staffing firms largely, setting aside the specifics of any particular player, have a combination of domestic and international, and a combination of permanent placement and temp staffing. Temp staffing follows a very different set of cyclical puts and takes, and has responded differently in COVID, as many other parts of the economy have. So when you look at U.S. permanent placement revenue, compared to those handful of staffing companies who released that, we're doing very well, which is the market we play in. So we're gaining share. Even more importantly than that, and I talked about the sort of pre-COVID, post-COVID hires versus our revenue. Most importantly, the big swings historically, since jobs came online, the big swings in market share from an employer revenue, where the dollar's being spent, have been largely preceded by big swings in job seeker traffic. So, you know, the job seekers move, and eventually the employers will follow. And so we talked about this past quarter, that our organic traffic grew by 60%, year-over-year, even though we pulled back on marketing and sales by about 38% year-over-year. And so that, the difference in that growth versus that efficiency on the expense side, that is a forward indicator to us about the power of our marketplace and the results we're gonna drive to employers. And if past is prologue, that augurs good things. Bill? I have a related question. 5% of industry penetration online, I mean, you would have thought that maybe you've been at it for a while here. How has that changed over time, and where do you see that going, and maybe why hasn't it flowed and pulled up by those? Yeah, great question. So why, why hasn't online taken more share from offline already in the job space? A few different things there. One, online's been growing faster than offline, but it hasn't, you know, software has not eaten this part of the world, in, in its entirety, and I think there are a number of factors there. The biggest is, back to the human psychology point, understanding that for employers, and even more for job seekers, the psychological stakes are high. So just as in buying a house feels like a huge decision, and has not been entirely subsumed by software, where to work, where to get my livelihood is a huge decision, and where to find my one great next employee that I'm looking to hire right now is a huge decision. And so some reassurance that I'm not alone in this process, that I have someone to talk to, someone to point my boss at or point my spouse at and say, "I took their advice, they know the market. This is the best thing that's available for me right now," is incredibly psychologically important. That's why marrying our bleeding-edge technology with our understanding of what it's like and what the anxieties and needs are of a job seeker and an employer is incredibly important, so we can give them the confidence to make the leap, and feel like: I've taken in the entire market, I know where I stand, and I'm ready to make the best decision for me.