Conference Transcript - DHX 2026-06-17

Greg Schippers, CFO

All right, thanks everyone for being here. This presentation is on DHI Group. I'm Greg Skippers, the CFO at DHI. Unfortunately, due to some scheduling conflicts, our CEO Art Zaley is not able to be here, but thanks everyone for being here. And as I go through this, if you do have questions, you don't have to pick up the mic of course, but But feel free to just stop me. It's a small group, as it turns out anyway. So happy to have Q&A along the way if you want to. All right. And with that, move through here. So this is standard legal forward-looking statement information. So DHI is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DHX. We're headquartered in Denver, and we operate under two brands, Clearance Jobs and Dice. and they are platforms for employers to find and engage with top tech talent. So DHI creates platforms that allow our clients who are recruiters and hiring managers to connect with tech candidates. It's a two-sided marketplace that by definition serve the needs of both our clients and our candidates to succeed. This may sound similar to LinkedIn or Indeed, but we have two key differentiators that make us a necessary tool for recruiters and hiring managers looking specifically for technology professionals. First, we have built in special search algorithms to find candidates based on their specific tech skills. And secondly, we've spent literally decades attracting the highest quality talent to our platforms. We have the profiles of over 9 million tech professionals on our platforms that represent two-thirds of the total skilled technologists in the United States. We largely make money by charging our clients for subscription contracts that allow them to access our platforms and over 90 percent of our revenue is recurring as a result of that. The U.S. has become a tech-oriented economy and has grown the tech workforce by approximately 3% each year over the past 25 years. We have a very unique pool of candidates that cannot be found on other career sites. Based on our research, roughly 20 to 30% of our candidates can be found on alternative career sites like Career Builder, Builder Plus Monster, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and LinkedIn with an up-to-date profile. When they're found on these other platforms, the majority do not include a resume or even contact information clearance jobs is the dominant leader in its market for delivering access to technology professionals with a government security clearance LinkedIn does not offer a solution to find cleared candidates a LinkedIn profile has no field for government clearance and government workers and military contractors are restricted from using the site because it is known to be a target of foreign spies tech professionals as you know are well compensated the average salary for a tech worker in the U.S. last year was roughly $127,000 whereas the average worker in the U.S. made around $50,000. As a company you have basically two choices when hiring tech workers. You can use a recruiter or you do it internally through your HR team. If you use a recruiter you generally have to pay between 20 and 25 percent of the first year salary. The alternative is to pay DICE roughly $7,000 for our entry-level annual subscription or for CJ about $15,000 for the equivalent subscription. You then find and engage the tech talent yourself. Even one hire easily pays for itself compared to paying an external recruiting agency. We target companies that plan for multiple hires over the next year driving an even more compelling ROI. The elevated interest rate environment uh back in 2022 clearly suppressed hiring demand that after all was what the federal reserve's intent was uh to combat inflation uh during that time for that reason the bureau of labor statistics and comptia association forecast that over the next 10 years the tech workforce excuse me the tech workforce will grow by at least 15 percent a growth rate that is twice as fast as the overall employment growth rate the growth is coming from interests and skills that you would logically suspect largely those tied to AI projects many people question whether or not AI will reduce the need for coders independent studies from McKinsey and other consultants show otherwise moreover since the beginning of 2026 the number of new tech job postings per month has increased from 220,000 in January to almost 270,000 in May. The May figure is an increase of 29% year-over-year, and two-thirds of U.S. tech job postings currently require AI-related skills, more than double the 29% we saw a year ago. So we have very large TAMs for both platforms. In the case of clearance jobs, we have approximately 1,700 subscription customers today. The government has publicly stated that there are over 12,000 contractors that hold a facility clearance, allowing them to conduct business with cleared personnel. We also know that there are over 100 government agencies that we can directly contract with as well. For DICE, we have approximately 3,800 subscription clients and know tens of thousands more fit our ideal customer profile. There are also thousands of additional staffing and recruiting firms that we can target as well. So how do we make money? This is a quick summary of how we do make money and have strong visibility into our future revenue. First and foremost, clients pay for the opportunity to access each platform. There is no charge for a candidate to register, create a profile, and start using the platform. As I indicated earlier, because we are largely a subscription-based service with one-year minimum contracts, over 90% of our revenue is recurring. And a majority of our contracts include an auto renewal clause with an automatic price escalator. We allow unlimited emails and texts on our platform, which is another key competitive differentiator. We encourage the recruiter and candidate to engage in conversations. That's how they both win and a reason for them to come back to our platforms again. all right moving on to the financial performance so DHI bookings they represent the value of our contract so we recognized as a revenue within 12 months of the contract start date those bookings have declined at a 1% kegger since 2021 while revenue has risen at a 2% kegger over the same period with over 90% of our bookings and revenue recurring DHI is a very predictable revenue model with approximately 50 percent of each year's revenue already under contract at the start of each year. DHI adjusted EBITDA margin has expanded since 2021 to 27 percent in 2025. Because of the more difficult market conditions in the last few years, we have reduced costs through restructurings over that time period, which has reduced our operating costs by approximately 35 million dollars. We target a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2026. Quarterly performance, although we're seeing signs of improvement, we have experienced challenging market conditions over the last few years, as I mentioned, in the HR tech space with bookings and revenue declining on a year-over-year basis. So on revenue stability, the subscription-based business creates predictable revenue with revenue generally being recognized ratably over the annual contract term as services are delivered to the customers the slide here depicts how our committed contracts at the start of the year shown as backlog become revenue over the next year and then how our customers up for renewal during the year drive revenue as the year progresses the remainder of our revenue comes from our new business efforts and transactional business which primarily includes short-term job postings career events and our talent sourcing products Okay, cash flow. DHI produces strong operating cash flows with the low points for operating cash flows over the past five years at $21 million and the strong markets in 2021 and 2022, driving operating cash flows to $29 million and up to $36 million. Our capitalized development costs, which are part of fixed asset purchases in our cash flow statement, primarily represent the cost of our internal labor to build the products and features on the clearance jobs and DICE sites. With a lower internal headcount resulting from the restructurings I mentioned previously, capitalized development costs declined to $7 million in 2025 compared to $12 million in 2024. So our free cash flow, which is operating cash flows, less capital expenditures is driven primarily by adjusted EBITDA and capitalized development costs, shown here as CapEx. Over time, we're targeting free cash flow at 10% or more of our revenue. Liquidity, so despite our significant share repurchases over the last five years, we've maintained low leverage with debt at the end of March of $33 million, and that results in less than one times EBITDA, which is our target. We generally maintain approximately two million dollars of cash on hand and utilize our 70 million dollar revolver which was refinanced in early April to manage liquidity. Related to buybacks, since 2020 we've repurchased 20 million shares and have reduced shareholder dilution by approximately four million shares or almost 10 percent. Our current 10 million dollar share buyback program runs through a Q1 of next year. So, clearance jobs revenue has a five-year CAGR of 12%, with the first quarter of 2026 being up 5% year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA for clearance jobs is very profitable, with a margin of approximately 40%, and very low spend on capitalized development. for dice revenue has a five-year kegger of a negative four percent uh it being the most impacted by the market conditions that began late 2022 with the interest rate hikes in the most recent quarter it was was down 17 percent dice's adjusted EBITDA margin is increased in recent quarters due to the restructurings i mentioned in the most recent quarter was at 28 percent dice capitalized development costs have also steadily decreased and were a million dollars in the first quarter all right so so why buy dice stock or dhi stock we believe dhi is uniquely positioned at the intersection of two powerful and durable trends increasing global defense spending for clearance jobs and the growing demand for highly specialized talent technology talent particularly in ai clearance jobs continues to demonstrate strong growth and expanding opportunity as government and contractor demand accelerates while dice is well positioned to benefit from the increasing demand for tech staffing at the same time we're successfully extending our platforms into adjacent services creating new monetization opportunities and deepening our relationships with our customers importantly our highly recurring revenue model has a strong free cash flow giving us flexibility to invest for growth while continuing to return capital to shareholders so with that happy to take any questions yes yeah sure so the question was I think it's dice in particular about how bookings generates into revenues so for dice as I mentioned dice is a had some pretty big headwinds since 2022 late 2022 and 2324 and even into 25 and so it's down quite a bit I think maybe 17 percent in the first quarter there but you know we are seeing signs of stability and growth for instance the a company or a group called CompTIA they take Bureau of Labor statistics data and and then they put out their publications but they show new tech job postings you know up significantly May was around 270,000 as I noted, we consider that an early indicator of growth in that business. And so we expect DICE to get back by the end of the year to roughly flat on bookings. And then to the point of the question as well, those bookings will generate into revenue approximately six months later. So there is a lag from when the bookings hit to when that turns into revenue. So I hope, thank you. Yep. Sure. So the question is, is we've taken a lot of costs out of the business and is there opportunity to take any more, particularly with AI? And it's interesting because we've been using forms of AI for many years. Our search algorithm, which is based for many of the other sites like LinkedIn, is based on keyword searches and things. Ours is built on skills, like 100,000 skills or something along those lines so it's very specific not to titles or keywords but to actual skills so as it relates to cost yeah we the cost we took out in 2025 we're focused on first restructuring the business which we did in january of 2025 so we could show the profitability profiles for dice and clearance jobs separately and then we did one mid-year and that was really the culmination of a lot of technology effort on the DICE side. So it was really focused on DICE. And then some of the support teams went along with it. But the DICE website was completely rewritten. So the underlying code base was completely new. And as a result of that effort, we were able to cut our tech team roughly in half. That was a big driver. And then we also were at the beginning stages of a self-service platform. We could take customers under a certain annual revenue threshold or annual subscription value threshold and we pushed them to a self-service model as opposed to going through the sales team and so we did the same thing on the sales team and ultimately cut about 90 people which was about 25 of our head count at that time so as related to future opportunities to cut costs we do feel like right now we have a pretty good cost structure in place we're pretty comfortable with it there's always opportunity to do that if the market demands it but And, you know, we would not anticipate that in, you know, the near future for sure, based on particularly what we're seeing with the tech job demand out there, especially with AI skills.

Operator

Other questions? Okay. Well, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Greg Schippers, CFO

We do have one, maybe. That's a great question. And so the question was, is our staffing companies out there, let's say Deco or Robert Half or somebody like that, are they competitors or are they our customers? And they are 100% our customers. So about 80% of DICE's customer base is staffing and recruiting and consulting companies. So it was really based on that profile, what we call commercial accounts. so that's just normal businesses that have an hr department and they have tech needs within their internal tech environment that's about the other 20 percent so so yeah they are definitely our customers and they use us to find you know their their consultants their revenue producing individuals and so that is a huge piece of the dice business clearance jobs those primarily with government contractors so all the big names you would think of in the in the government security kind of defense contractor space yeah yeah so so the question is is why wouldn't somebody just replicate what dice has or what clearance jobs has so I'll start with dice so dice has been around for 35 years and so that you know they've accumulated upwards of 9 million profiles and it's just you just can't reproduce that you know in a in an efficient way and so you know that is that the search algorithm is the the real asset for dice um and as it relates to clearance jobs clearance jobs is based on trust right because just as you would think with the government security clearance um there's a lot of trust if somebody goes out there and they put their personal information in including their level of security clearance and so there has to be a lot of trust across that platform and you just can't reproduce that there have been some attempts and there is one company that is maybe a 20th of our size that is out there but they primarily focus on career events like live in-person events and their databases a fraction of ours thank you for the question any others yes sir what is our primary mechanism for growing and is it candidates or are just talking more generally bookings and revenue candidates and profiles okay uh it's it it is marketing um it is you know getting in front of the the the right people and we have like so we have roughly two-thirds of the technologists in the u.s already on the site so then the the trick is making them active because not all are active of course you know not everybody's looking for a job so you know it's it's digital marketing just as you would expect keeping in front of these people the content on the sites to make it a place that you know that they'll want to come and and visit on a regular basis so that you get more kind of click-throughs and exposure on the site those are the primary models and and quite frankly some of it is economy driven so when there's a lot of demand for tech professionals by corporations out there naturally you know more candidates are going to be surfing around to see what opportunities are there in 2023 when you only heard of layoffs and nobody was hiring you know you didn't get nearly as much traffic because everybody was keeping their head down just trying to make sure they kept the job they had so i hope thank you okay thank you very much