Mike Durney
Analyst · BMO Capital Markets
Great, thanks Rachel. And welcome to the DHI Group second quarter earnings call. Today, I’ll talk about ways we are improving the company and leveraging efficiencies in order to provide more value to our customers and professionals, and about developments of BrightMatter where we have our next generation products. Then I’ll turn it over to John Roberts and he’ll provide updates on our second quarter financial performance, and lastly we’ll open the call up to your questions. But before we start, I just want to announce that John will be leaving us as CFO at the end of August. He’s been CFO for almost 3 years enjoying just as I was transitioning into the CEO role and he’s been a big support for me and the organization with his financial leadership over those three years. And we as a company, and I personally, will miss him. And we have started now our search to replace John. So, moving on to the business. The recruiting industry has been transforming and employers today are continually looking for providers with tools to deliver candidates who are more qualified and to do it more efficiently. We’ve been making changes to build on our core offerings and to move us towards providing more complete digital recruitment platform. We’ve organized the company in a way to add new products and services and while still early are developing product plan at BrightMatter and specifically the getTalent product has met the expectations we’ve made for this group. We’re doing a number of things that are moving the overall business forward, although we haven't yet seen the fruits of it in our financial results. We’ve aligned the Global Industry Group brands, which include eFinancialCareers, Rigzone, Hcareers and BioSpace to achieve the benefit of synergy, while leveraging the expertise we have within the organization. Operationally, I believe returning a corner and anticipate we will see the financial results from these moves in the near future, but not overnight. Even with these changes we realize there is more to do. We recognize we did not only build more value into our services, especially Dice, but we also have to demonstrate value more clearly in a competitive world. We've laid the building blocks for the future and started much of the work that will invigorate the core of Dice, improve key drivers of the business, and prepare this service for its next generation. At Dice, we’ve been working on a number of things to improve the performance of our business. Dice recently launched its all-new mobile app called Dice Careers, the iOS and Android app allows tech professionals to map skills with salary data as they develop their career goals, as well as search and apply for jobs within a defined geographic location. Since launch, new users on the app have jumped 82% year-over-year and 60% of all users who’ve downloaded the app have engaged with the skills map and our proprietary salary mapping algorithm. On site applies to jobs from mobile users rose over 80%, overall sessions have more than doubled. As more professionals engage, we gather more relevant data. The app leverages Open Web data to popularly use the data and create a well-rounded profile of candidates resulting in a better user experience, and then enhancements to the Open Web data itself. We're not just launching new products we’re conceptually changing the focus of Dice to more appropriately reflect the change in recruitment market. The brand has huge value and continues to deliver, but needs to continue to adapt to the market. One issue that permeates the digital recruitment industry is attribution or the proper credit for value delivered. With multiple sources of candidates, an applicant tracking systems that have poor interfaces and tracking capabilities we work hard to get credit for the candidates we provide. To address the issue, we've intensified our effort on integrating the Dice service with more SMB customer’s internal recruitment systems. To date, we've done more than 500 of them and the customer renewal rate and revenue retention and upsell on those customers is quite a bit higher than the overall average. It’s a small detail on the grand scheme of things, but it's an important step in increasing performance and increasing the credit we get for our performance. Getting accurate credit for performance drives higher retention overall. We are creating new affiliate partnerships and refocusing our marketing initiatives on key markets, building in part on our hottest in tech campaign from last year which we are retooling and reintroducing. We've also invested in better reporting tools for customers to provide more analytics to serve them better. Each of these items individually may not resonate as significant, but each of them is starting to have an impact on our ability to deliver and improve our performance. We’re addressing social sourcing on the pursuit of the hard to find candidates who may not be actively looking for a job, but are willing to make a move if the right opportunity presents itself. Dice's Open Web continues to add new customers and show increasing engagement. A new alternative profile view model is driving a rise in customers with multiple users for the service. And the retention rate for Open Web customers was higher in Q2, as compared to Q2 last year. Dice has certainly been a place where recruiters can find a range of talent from actively looking to more passive career managers. That certainly continues to be the case, but the more passive talent is harder and harder to find, and harder and harder to engage. Open Web is proving that it is a valuable source for those hard to find candidates, but in our sales process, the Open Web sale is often secondary were in this ultracompetitive environment we need to make it more top of mind. The receptivity of social sourcing tools has grown quite a bit in those small part due to the efforts on Open Web and now we believe strategically in tech it’s time to move towards leading with Open Web and our go-to-market approach and describing the unique nature of the combination of the social profiles together with the value of the resumes and profiles we have on Dice. If you as a customer believe that there is significant value in social sites in reaching hard to find candidates than those people will be found on Open Web. We know that Dice's financial performance needs to improve and we believe it well based on the types of things we’re addressing today. As we work and make progress and deliver results there is no doubt we’re facing headwinds in some of our businesses, particularly energy. And there is a new level of uncertainty as we think about the impact of the United Kingdom's vote to lead the European Union on our global brands. While a relatively small part of our business is based in the UK, it’s strategically important for the eFinancialCareers. This issue will be top of mind however it's too early to gauge the overall impact. Uncertainty could be a challenge for our business. Uncertainty slows hiring decisions, and can further lengthen already above average time to fill positions. It puts us making hiring decisions in pause mode even when hiring is necessary to move projects forward. At this point, few of our clients have raised an immediate issue related to hiring, but it's clear no one knows what's to come related to Brexit or the timeline. We do believe though that this decision would great opportunity elsewhere as other European markets look to fill roles outside the UK. It’s likely that European financial markets like Paris, Frankfurt, Brussels and Dublin for example will jockey to become bigger players and that Germany, Ireland and other countries will like to become larger tech players. This won't happen in the near term, but we are preparing now for what opens up in the future. As hiring organizations everywhere evaluate the best partner to unlock insights and discover the right connections, the right talent, we will be poised to provide actual data, workforce analytics, and innovative hiring solutions. For us innovation in improving our competitive position remains key. As we've discussed before we believe innovation needs to take place at several levels in the company. We’re investing and innovating at the brand level across the global industry group and within BrightMatter through next-generation talent acquisition and talent sourcing products and services. BrightMatter offers sourcing management issues, and focus on bringing new products to market to work across all of our verticals. getTalent, our new SaaS sourcing and talent relationship management platform designed to help hiring organizations easily pipeline and engage candidate leads. We are in the pre-apply phase, launched its version 2.0 at the tail end of the first quarter. Our conversations with customers have been productive and we’re gaining insight into the sales cycle with large enterprises and midmarket customers. getTalent's unique product vision continues to engage perspective customers and while still early customers interest in pipelining talent is strong. The BrightMatter teams have been working in tandem with our brands garnering leads from each of the verticals and testing pricing models. getTalent's unique value proposition comes from a combination of other offerings from BrightMatter such as FreshUp, a Cloud based service that updates resumes and customer records based on the latest social information and from Open Web. There are more developments to launch soon from BrightMatter, including tools aimed at helping employers reach highly targeted candidates at scale through tailored recruitment messages across social channels. This ongoing building of social data, new interaction methods and recruiting marketing solutions are key components for getTalent. This is how we offer services that help hiring organizations everywhere operate efficiently and effectively. GIG is making progress helping certain brands realize their market opportunities, as well as leverage expertise across marketing sales content product and technology. The structure has worked well, since we put it in place and the individual brands are benefitting from the collaboration and streamlined process. Leveraging data and workforce analytics to assist our clients in making better hiring decisions is one example of this. At eFinancialCareers, our client reporting tool is one way we deliver data to provide deeper market insights to our clients, while reinforcing our unique value proposition. Content is another way we provide value to customers and professionals. Leading up to and in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, eFinancialCareers saw a significant uptick in traffic and record page views as the site publish unique interviews with senior finance professionals along with our proprietary data. In healthcare, demand for professionals continues to be good pressuring healthcare organizations to find alternative methods to recruit and to hire talent. DHI has seen an evolution over the past few years and we’re finding new ways to support hiring managers and HR organizations. As the hiring landscape changes, economic uncertainties arise and technology shifts to new recruiting forms, our goal will remain the same and that’s to provide employers with the best candidates, the best insights and the best connections so they can make the best hiring decisions most efficiently and most effectively. As professionals consider resources to manage their carriers, the HR and our brands will be at the forefront of advice, insights and data to help them make the next step towards building their carriers. We’ve refined our brand and product portfolio with the goals of providing the best value to our customers and we’ll focus our best people on the most important things to drive improvement and results. I’m pleased to welcome Jen Deason to our board; as she had joined earlier in July. Jen is an Executive Vice President at Bain Capital and among other things has held a number of senior level roles at companies in which Bain has invested. She brings a wealth of operating, financial and strategic experience to our board and we are thrilled to have her. I’m also happy to report we’ve hired a new Head of Inventor Relations, who will be starting in August and we look forward to many of you having the opportunity to meet and speak with him in the months ahead. I continue to be impressed how passionate our people are about providing professionals with tools to manage their carriers, helping them find opportunities to thrive and this is hard work and I thank them for the dedication and commitment every day. And so, with that I’m going to turn it over to John.