Josh Chan: That’s good color. Thanks, Keith. For my follow-up, could I ask about the revenue comparisons? You gave the October, first two weeks of October. I guess given the fact that last year, you saw this deceleration in November and December. Would you expect that if there’s a somewhat stable environment that the revenue declines would lesson as you go through the fourth quarter?
M. Keith Waddell: This whole weekly sequential versus quarterly sequential versus year-over-year has many moving parts and is complicated. That’s why for us to understand how we’re performing right now, we believe the best thing to look at is how our weekly revenues are progressing on a sequential basis. So the fact that we’ve had three quarters of sequential declines by definition, you’re going to have negative year on year growth rates because you’re starting in the hole. But to the effect that you’ve flattened out most recently that’s certainly helpful on a year on year basis but you still have the issue of the past three quarters have been down less than what they were a year ago. And so year on year, has a lot of moving parts, including what happened a year ago, obviously, but how we’re doing right now sequentially on a weekly basis is what we think is most indicative of what our market conditions.
Josh Chan: That’s helpful color. Thanks, Keith. Thank you both for your time.
Operator: And our next question will come from Stephanie Moore with Jefferies.
Stephanie Moore: Got it. Thank you so much. Appreciate the question. You know, maybe continuing on the last question. As you think about, the fourth quarter and, you know, maybe the trends you started to see at the end of end of September, I’m sorry, the end of the third quarter, maybe in October. Any feedback you’ve been hearing from your clients or customers, any seasonality to think about, I think, we’re all just trying to get our heads around where are we in the cycle? And I think this is a cycle where you had a lot of pockets of weakness, you know, whether you know, tech or elsewhere financial institutions over the last year. So maybe any customer color that you can point to, particularly, you know, towards the end of the third quarter that you’ve seen so far going into the fourth quarter would be helpful.
M. Keith Waddell: Thanks. Well, I’d say customers are still cautious. That said, it feels like it’s beginning to stabilize. The numbers are the numbers, as I just described, from beginning to end, our average weekly is only changed by 2% that’s not much. And that’s a lot better than it was 90 days ago. And so there are signs of stabilization customers still have requirements, still have demands, consistent with the fact that job openings in the US are still high. So they still need people. They’re just very selective. They’re waiting for the perfect person to come along. And they feel like they can be patient and they have time to do so. But to us, the good news is when you look week by week for several weeks in a row, it looks much better than it did 90 days ago.
Stephanie Moore: Absolute. No. That’s crystal clear. Appreciate it. Maybe just pushing gears quickly. Could you talk a little bit about some of your tech investments? I think we spent a lot of this call talking about some of the work you’ve done to kind of enhance your mix, but in terms of maybe some of the other actions within your control, can you talk a little bit about some of those digital and tech investments and kind of the opportunities in through 2024. Thanks.
M. Keith Waddell: So I presume you’re talking in part about AI, and we’ve been very pleased about what AI has done to our recruiting kind of interesting this past quarter, we did a major three year back test of the effectiveness of our AI. We randomly choose over 70,000 candidates over the last three years and we tested how accurate our model was in predicting which candidates we placed and which we did not. And the good news is it was highly accurate in making that prediction. And the even better news is that clients gave us higher loyalty scores and had higher response rates where we involved our AI model in the selection process than where we did not. And so that just, reinforced what we already believed about our AI as we use it in recruiting, as we said last quarter, we’re in the process of customizing a large language model, which we think will further improve our AI.
And so we’re excited about what it’s done for us on the recruiting side. We continue down the path of using AI to help our people in their outreach as to which current customers, which previous customers, which prospects are the most likely to give them an order when they call. So that’s an effort that’s on-going. There’s some positive signs on that horizon, but that’s much less developed than we are on the Can recruiting side. So we’re excited about our AI, our investment. Now we were into AI well before AI was in the paper every day. And it’s very practical. It leverages data that only we have. We have candidate performance data across millions of assignments that they work for us. We leverage that information and it’s a key portion of our AI as we now know it.
Stephanie Moore: I didn’t want to say AI, but you did it for me. Appreciate it. Thanks for the color.
Operator: And we’ll take a question from Manav Patnaik with Barclays.
Princy Thomas: Hi, Keith. Thanks for the question. This is Princy Thomas on for Manav. Can you talk about any public sector impact and exposure from the UAW and other labor strikes for Robert Half?
M. Keith Waddell: Yeah. So there’s very, very, very little impact from labor strikes on Robert Half. Either UAW or the LA entertainment based. I mean, small impacts, but certainly not enough to move the needle.
Princy Thomas: Gotcha. And switching gears. Can you talk about any factors that are influencing your outlook for internal hiring?
