ZipRecruiter, Inc. (NYSE:ZIP) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

David Travers: Thanks Josh. This is Dave. Great question. Yeah. iCIMS is a significant player in the applicant tracking system space, well into the top 10 of a very fragmented market. So they are very significant, we want to have some very large Fortune 500 clients, as well as a lot of more mid-market enterprise clients and so it’s an important one for us. It’s part of our overall strategy, where we have 150 and growing ATS integrations, where these software systems that are really the dashboard and the starting point every day for recruiters at these large enterprises to manage their entire workflow and for hiring managers to manage their workflow. Having our candidates seamlessly show up in their workflow without ever having to leave the ZipRecruiter marketplace, which we call ZipApply, is a huge part of that integration effort and having their jobs appear in our organic search results so that when we knock on the door of a new enterprise prospect for the first time, we are already delivering candidates to them and showing, we have already showed them value before we show up to talk to them for the first time, is a really powerful model.

So that’s a significant investment in these 150 integrations. iCIMS is a big one and allows us to really seamlessly, in a way that’s better than you can get from other marketplaces, be able to integrate and also gives us an incredible amount of data that we can then use where we see how our candidates perform over time via these integrations and then our AI tunes the algorithm and tunes the results to drive better and better candidates. So the more you work with ZipRecruiter, the more you invest with us, the better our results will get over time and we see that happening. The enterprise part of the market, which we view to be half of the market overall in the United States on a dollar basis is an area where we are under penetrated and given our rapidly growing scale in the job seeker side of the marketplace, were increasingly compelling given that 65% organic traffic growth is a place that we are really increasingly bullish, the more we learn, the more excited we are.

But we also know that enterprises are slower to react to macro changes than SMBs. So as we see the macro backdrop change, we are very confident that enterprise demand will change as well, but it will probably be a little bit slower if past is prologue, it will be a little bit slower to react in the SMB part of the market.

Josh Beck: Thanks so much.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Brian Fitzgerald with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Stan Velikov: Hi. This is Stan Velikov for Brian. Thanks for taking our questions. I guess on focusing the question on one of the growth pillars in the marketplace, the job seeker. So can you share more about the level of job seeker activity that you are seeing on the platform, any trends like incremental profiles created, resumes added or updated visits, engagement? And has the job seeker activity increased in the past few months given the incremental changes in the most recent job market reports?

Ian Siegel: Hi. This is Ian. And what I would say is, first, broadly top of funnel job seeker traffic coming in, which is the 65% growth year-over-year that we talked to you about is just way up and there are a variety of contributing factors to that. But what I am very excited about is not just the top of funnel traffic, it’s the down funnel metrics. It’s the number of job seekers who are being actively propositioned by an employer without having to go reach out to them first. It’s the number of applications per job that we are delivering to jobs in the SMB space. It’s the number of times job seekers are shown jobs that they actually have interest in and should they apply, they will in fact be a top candidate for that job because the algorithmic matching just continues to improve.

So really it’s the engagement metrics in addition to the top of funnel metrics, which have all been climbing and there’s a variety of inputs that have been driving these metrics up. Some of it is Phil and the process of having a human voice guiding the job seeker through the experience, it’s been a force multiplier everywhere that we have put them, some of it is just straight technological algorithmic improvements and some of it is just site experience which we also continue to improve, but across the board, it’s not just top of funnel traffic, it’s also the engagement metrics on our site. And you can see that in a variety of different places that we have reported on, but also it’s interesting to see that the number of downloads of our mobile app, which is the preferred method of search for the really serious job seeker has also been going up pretty significantly.

So just generally it’s been a very good season for job seekers.

David Travers: I just want to add on, to double click on what Ian said about the 65% organic job seeker growth and how we think about that. So over that same year-over-year period, we have seen our sales and marketing investment come down by 38% and so when you add up organic and paid according to third-party data, we have in March, our total U.S. visits was up 13%, despite that reduction by 38% in sales and marketing. So that’s the power of those products investments and improvements that Ian was just talking about and those brand investments we — that are over the long-term that we referenced earlier and the net impact of that is that we are growing over 10 — in March over 10 percentage points faster than any of our largest competitors on the job seeker front in the U.S.

Stan Velikov: I got it. Thank you.

Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Mark Mahaney with Evercore. Please go ahead.

Unidentified Analyst: Hey. This is Luke [ph] on for Mark. What are some key data points suggesting just general market share shifts or any evidence you can offer that you are successfully gaining share versus your competitors? And then just a kind of second question, in the peak of the cycle, how high can revenue per paid employer go like, what are some opportunities out there to grow revenue per paid employer over time? Thanks.

David Travers: Great. This is Dave. I will take the first part of that. So it’s a two-sided marketplace and so I would think about market share in two different ways. One, I just referenced, which is growing the job seeker side in terms of visits year-over-year by 10 percentage points faster than any other major player in our space. So clearly there and we have seen over time a good historical correlation that when there’s a major move in job seeker market share, employer dollars will follow and we have seen that over multiple players, over multiple years. And then on the employer side of things, we have seen large public staffing firms release, we don’t have any pure play online comps, but large public staffing firms have released quarterly performance for Q1 and we saw U.S. permanent placement revenue as low as 40% down year-over-year, which we think as we look across the market and our partners’ data and our scope of the entire U.S. labor market, that’s a pretty good indicator of what’s going on out there.