Michael Durney
Analyst · Cantor Fitzgerald
Great, thanks Jen. Welcome to the DHI Group second quarter earnings call. This morning we will update you on our progress on improving our operations and further advancement we've made on our strategic plan and at the end of our remarks we'll be happy to take questions. Overall we're pleased with our third quarter performance which reinforces the strength of our diversified business model. We saw continued success with Open Web and a number of our new and emerging products performed well all of which are encouraging signs of the work we've been doing to improve and evolve our products is beginning to yield results. We also made some further operational and structural changes in our organization that continue to strengthen our foundation and align our resources for growth. To date we made real progress against our strategic plan and we continue to work to elevate our business across all of our brands. As we work to strengthen our vertical leadership and our sectors deepening relationships with our customers and the professionals who use our services is a top priority. In this regard we continue to improve our core products in order to deliver challenge to our customers most efficiently and make their equipment process as effective for them as possible. Today we are also providing more ways to engage with professionals in nontraditional ways which has enabled us to expand our relationship with customers and is leading to increased engagement with our services. As we described during our Investor Day and again on our second quarter call, we're focuses strategically on three primary areas where we believe we can play and win; talent acquisition, sourcing management and career management. Within the overall talent acquisition and landscape we continue to believe that sourcing will continue to play an increasingly important role and with that in mind we are working to expand our sourcing management offerings with the unique combination of sourcing tools. As in our organization, we've been energized, focused and committed to executing and the team has accomplished a great deal in the Company's repositioning. Today I'd like to highlight some of our accomplishments in Q3 which demonstrate the continued progress we're making. In the area of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of our core products and services at Dice the ongoing success Open Web is evident as we improve the customer experience, lifecycle marketing and customer on boarding and engagement and we're seeing these efforts pay off with increased usage and retention. We also launched and updated version of the Open Web Chrome Extension for Dice which drove and increase in the number of extension downloads. This puts Open Web more firmly into Dice customers' natural workflow and leads to efficiencies for them. Today they can access profiles of candidates generated from the nearly 190 sources that Open Web aggregates from without the site there on. During the quarter we reached a very exciting milestone for Open Web we had the total paying customer count for Dice in the U.S. surpassed 1000 customers, almost 900 of which are under annual contract. Those are significant numbers for a product that introduce a new method of recruiting to the marketplace and has only been a paid service for less than two years. As we continue to enhance the product and use our experience for Open Web we're focused on improving relevance and increasing the effectiveness of our customers. Also with Dice we've been working to expand the number of applicant tracking system integrations with key customers. This leads to two distinct benefits for us. One, the user experience is more seamless and has less friction which results in a better extremity for both our professionals and our customers and two, improved attribution of the performance we're driving for our customers which ultimately allows us to more clearly demonstrate ROI for them. At RIGZONE, where we continue to streamline and enhance the overall platform we launched a number of new enhancements aimed at improving the user experience and driving increased engagements. These include the launch of benchmarking analytics tools which show customers how they measure against the baseline set of users and modified resume search results with improved graft or user interface and a more comprehensive expanded view of candidates. All the enhancements we are making to the RIGZONE platform are aimed at improving search relevance and the value we provide to customers. While the market continues to be poor for recruitment in the energy industry, customers are noticing the improvements we're making and providing positive feedback regarding the commitment level during a downturn. This gives us more confidence that they'll return when the market starts to recover and then our ability to capture market share over the longer term with a much stronger offering than we had six months or a year ago. We continue to make considerable progress in healthcare during the third quarter with the launch of Spotlight and HEALTHeCAREERS. Spotlight is a new employer branding product suite that features rich content including employee sourced company reviews. Integrated with the job search experience and named it building employer branding as part of the Company's overall sourcing strategy. Not only is this enhanced the users experience with the site but it is a revenue generator as well. Although it is early, feedback has been very positive and customer demand has exceeded expectations. So we're thrilled to see how this service improves our customer's experience in the future. These are just a few examples of the enhancements we've been making that are improving the user experience of both customers and professionals. Another area of strategic focus for us is developing deeper, higher value relationships and we also made progress in this area during the third quarter. Our sourcing concierge product suite continues to perform well and posted another quarter of record sales demonstrating that customers are embracing new tools outside of traditional job postings and resume database access to help engage quality candidates and garner efficiencies. From our perspective sourcing concierge's offerings provide and effective way for us to extend our specialist expertise, provide enhanced support to our customers and deepen our client relationships. Also in the area of developing deeper, higher value relationships we launched a new Rig Data an analysis service at RIGZONE during the third quarter called Rig outlook which is targeted to industry decision-makers and other industry stakeholders and supplements are existing RigLogix service. We’re working on other projects that leverage the data we have in the energy business which will expand our offerings in this area. In terms of our continued strategic positioning we're following the rebrand of the IT Job Board to Dice at the end of June. We extended our Dice service into the UK and Continental Europe with one international tech offering the rebrand has been well received by customers. While still small we're now getting a number of customers buying Dice across our U.S. and European sites. The next phase of the integration project will entail creating a user experience for all international Dice sites that is consistent across the board with full platform integration to take place in phases over the next year or so. As we look forward to how best to capitalize on our opportunities in both our existing brands and with new initiatives we have realigned part of the company and shifted some leadership responsibilities to optimize ourselves for further growth. We've created a separate entity to focus on our new initiatives some of which you saw and heard about at Invest Day. We've put some of our best and most passionate product people on those projects under one leader who will marshal the resources of the organization to bring those products and services to market. With that change, we've also realigned the Dice management structure to build upon the product improvement we've made over the past few years. And lastly, we've combined three of our global brands, RIGZONE, eFinancialCareers and Hcareers to report to one leader through which structure we expect to get operating efficiencies and sharing of best practices that we believe will benefit all three brands. Moving on to other areas, we're happy with the continued growth delivered by our Healthcare segment with year-to-date revenue growth of 12% for HEALTHeCAREERS and 26% for BioSpace. These businesses continue to benefit from favorable market conditions, but also improvements we've made in the product, our go-to-market strategy and our sales and support organizations. HEALTHeCAREERS also continues to supplement its core product portfolio with new offerings in addition to Spotlight which I mentioned earlier, we've previously discussed SHIFT a new mobile platform for the contingent and freelance workforce in healthcare that was launched in Beta in Q2. As we expended SHIFT to more than 7000 active SHIFTs and more than 4500 registered professionals early customer feedback has been positive around the quality of applicants and apply the higher ratios and expansion of SHIFT will continue as we learn and innovate from early adopter feedback. Looking forward the environment for most of our verticals remains broadly similar to recent trends with the exception of the energy industry where job cuts continue. For most companies in the oil and gas sector all hiring continues to be frozen while they adjust their businesses to the volatility in the marketplace. While we've seen some signs of the customers we're engaged in we expect the negative impact on our business will continue in the fourth quarter and into 2016. And as I have discussed earlier the team is working diligently to continue to improve RIGZONE's position for the longer term. We've made a lot of progress on our key strategic initiatives, although we have a lot more to do. Our path of innovation, integration and evolution continues, but I believe the key elements that will enable us to grow are in place and it is encouraging to see many of our new and emerging products and services gaining traction. Across all of our businesses we made great strides in elevating our product, our people and our processes all of which are leading to increased engagement with our customers and professionals, greater affinity with our brands and deeper client relationships. While we continue to improve product performance and capabilities across our existing brands we're also pursuing new opportunities for growth including ones that will allow us to expand our addressable markets. So before I turn it over to John I'd just like to take a moment to thank all of our team members and acknowledge the tremendous amount they've accomplished. We have a much stronger foundation now in place and continue to believe that as the strategic positioning work we have accomplished begins to take hold and new and emerging product offerings being to show increasing contribution we're well positioned to drive improved financial performance beginning 2016 and deliver increased value to our shareholders over the long term. So with that, let me just turn it over to John.