But certainly the flattening we’re seeing is something of a new phenomenon given the last 18 months of performance.
Brian Fitzgerald: Thanks, Ian. Appreciate it.
Ian Siegel: Yeah.
Operator: Your next question…
David Travers: Sorry. Yeah, so to the second part of your question on verticals, we have continued to see a number of verticals move in the dynamic environment we’re in. So for example, tech, which was a leading vertical that started to tail off in terms of hiring. Tech continues to be quite slow as one example. Another example is government sector where started off the downturn quite strong, but over the past quarter has been fairly soft. And on the flip side, a bright spot is education where there continues to be a teacher shortage and other school, and education related shortages, and where there’s continued catch up hiring aggressively taking place. That said, in every quarter, in every year-over-year period, we see sectors moving in different directions.
And there’s been no major structural change to the mix, or the weighting of our marketplace vis-a-vis the whole economy. Again, in terms of industry, in terms of geography, our marketplace in terms of job skill level, our marketplace looks very much like and is very representative of the whole U.S. economy.
Brian Fitzgerald: Thank you, David.
Operator: Your next question is from the line of Doug Anmuth from JP Morgan.
Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thanks for taking the question. It’s Wes on for Doug. Product improvements and then still investing in the long-term opportunities, I think that’s pretty largely consistent with what you did last year as well. So just kind of given the uncertainty ahead and coupling that with what you’ve already accomplished in ’23, what are key priorities or areas of focus for you coming into ’24 from like a product or investment perspective?
Ian Siegel: Hi, this is Ian, I’ll take this question. We are tremendously excited about where our product is going because it feels like we’ve started to really reap the results of what our long-term strategic roadmap has been focused on. And namely, for a long time we’ve been focused on building the best matching algorithms in the category to bring job seekers and employers together to actively connect them. But what we have learned and where we are now currently deeply and intensely focused is that it’s not just enough to show the two sides the right batch. We also have to stoke them to engage. So we’re spending a lot of time working on engagement features, and you already are seeing the impact of that. And I can bring that home with data.
So if you look at 2023, our organic job seeker traffic increased 40%, which was enough to offset the reductions in investment in paid acquisition for job seekers we did in that year. So effectively 2023 traffic was largely flat with 2022. However, the level of engagement and the number of applications from those job seekers was up 17%. So that is a massive swing in the level of interaction between the two sides of our marketplace. And we’re just really excited about that because it shows that we’re on the right path. And this category for us has very much been about building a brand, so that we get a direct flow of organic traffic to the two sides of our marketplace, building the best matching so that we know who should be talking to whom. And now we are very focused on stoking those two parties to actually engage and engage quickly.
And we’re seeing really healthy success there. And so we’re going to keep investing. It’s part of our thesis on staying nimble this year and keeping investment levels where they are because we feel like our product is rapidly improving. And as I said before, we’re seeing the first — and it’s early, but we’re seeing the first signs of the market flattening. So we are going to stay poised and ready for that.
Unidentified Analyst: Great. Thank you so much.
Operator: Your next question is from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair.
Ralph Schackart: Afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. On the call, you talked about the last few weeks seeing the labor market flattening out. Just curious, was that sort of a gradual, sort of trend to when it eventually flattened out, or was it a little bit more pronounced? And then just to follow up to that, are you seeing that across the board with SMBs as well as enterprises? But any color you could add between those two segments as well, be helpful. Thank you.
David Travers: Thanks Ralph. This is Dave. Yes, so, it’s been fairly broad based. It’s very early, but we’ve seen a few other periods of a couple weeks here and there where we’ve seen some signs of flattening over the past 18 months and then further down trends, but this has been going on for a few weeks now over a month and it’s been pretty broad based in terms of industry and category size. But it’s, I would say, much more gradual than anything sharp, or like a recovery.
Ralph Schackart: Okay. Thank you.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Your next question is from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.
Justin Patterson: Great. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Two, if I can. First, just wanted to go back to kind of some of the investment commentary you’ve given. You’ve obviously made a lot of progress with the products over this past cycle. It sounds like we can expect investment stepping up a bit more here. As you just look at all of the product improvements you’ve made and are leaning into marketing again, how should we think about just market share gains coming out of this cycle versus what existed in the past? And then if got a follow up after.
