Art Zeile
Analyst · B. Riley. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our fiscal 2020 second quarter earnings conference call. As always we appreciate your interest in DHI. I want to begin by saying a few words about COVID-19 and our response to this global pandemic. Our foremost concern at DHI is to ensure the health and safety of our DHI community. As such, when the pandemic began to unfold in mid-March we at DHI jumped into action to aid our communities by launching COVID-19 resource centers on each of our brand sites to assist both clients and candidates alike with information relevant to their needs in these challenging times. These sites provide information on virtual career fairs open remote job posts real time high re-trends industry insights, articles and hiring resources. We also launched a campaign to provide free recruitment services to U.S. hospitals to help them find technologists in fields like electronic medical records, healthcare administration and computer system processing. Also all our employees have been working from home using the best possible remote communication and collaboration tools and our team members including sales and support, marketing and product development continue to be highly effective. In fact our product development team actually gained efficiency working for home this quarter delivering dozens of new product releases. I'll dive more into these product releases later in the call, but first let me provide a quick update on the current market environment for tech jobs. The pandemic is certainly challenging the way we all live and work. We saw job postings drop in the early part of the quarter that come back to the trailing 12-month average levels in June and July as companies became more confident in their hiring strategies. Many firms serving highly impacted industries have paused, while reduced their hiring plans. And we believe that our bookings are highly correlated to the state of geographical restrictions and reopenings which certainly remain influx. It's clear that our collective future will be more online and businesses will accelerate their efforts to digitize. These efforts will of course require technologists. A recent report released by Microsoft in July predicts that the worldwide digital jobs will grow from $41 million in 2020 to a $190 million in 2025. Of the $149 million new digital jobs created, $98 million are forecast to be in software development. With our technology skills data model, in technology focused marketplaces we stand ready to capitalize on this trend. Now let me provide some more detail regarding the product development efforts I mentioned earlier. During the second quarter our product development team continued to deliver a high pace of product innovation. With the release of Dice recruiter profile, we took the first leap forward in Dice's transformation from a job board to a full-scale career marketplace. Dice recruiter profile allows our client recruiters to enrich their brands with photos, personal information, details of our corporate culture and improve important news, as well as information about latest hires, upcoming events and future hiring needs, all of which create more transparency and personalize the recruiter behind the role. Candidates can now discover the recruiters that are aligned with their interests and use recruiter profile information to better engage on job postings and respond to outreach. With the Dice marketplace, we're creating a trusted environment where recruiters and candidates can learn much more about each other to facilitate more effective career discussions. We also launched Dice remote jobs. The pandemic has demonstrated the candidates can successfully work from home and want to do so and more jobs are predicted to be remote-qualified in the future. Remote job opportunities has been the top requested feature by both clients and candidates since the start of the pandemic and the views for these job postings have been significantly higher than non-remote job postings. This is an excellent opportunity for employers to tap into pools of remote workers across the United States to increase talent pipelines and diversify their workforce and we at DHI want to be the leader in the technologist's part of this important trend. We also launched ClearanceJobs automated recruiter workflow in the quarter which we believe is a true game-changer. Workflow is an easy to use set of tools that allow our recruiter to automate routine tasks in today, including talent sourcing, pipelining, engagement, marketing and it works. When specific candidate activities occur, they trigger automated pre-planned actions and responses. As an example, if a recruiter is looking for an Oracle database administrator in California, when a new candidate with the correct profile registers on database, Workflow will automatically connect the recruiter with the new candidate, tagged on their pipeline, produce an email introduction and generate a text notification that all of this has been completed. Our internal estimates indicate that, this powerful set of tools can eliminate approximately 3.5 hours of administrative task time, per recruiter, per day. ClearanceJobs is the only career site in the world, that incorporates this capability. ClearanceJobs continues to be DHI test-bed for key market leading features, like this one of a kind technology. We also launched eFinancialCareers, enhanced candidate profile during the quarter. eFC candidates, can now expose a richer profile, equivalent to that offered on ClearanceJobs to recruiter specializing in their respective field. And in mid-July we launched eFC Follow, Voice and Video. These features complete by eFC marketplace, delivering a rich set of communication tools, for recruiters and professionals to engage in career discussions. Now finance and tech professionals and recruiters can connect virtually with video and voice calling, as well as instant messaging all, through the eFC platform. We have many new releases planned for the remainder of the third quarter. Dice is completing the design for its own enhanced candidate profile and messaging system, with an expected launch by year-end. We are working on delivering calendaring, integration for ClearanceJobs. And for eFC, we will be releasing a modern new brand identity, starting with their B2B site. Now let me touch briefly on, the progress we continue to make improving our go-to-market strategy and execution. And then I'll touch on, our sales performance for each brand, before I turn it over to Kevin. We continue to transform our sales organization this quarter with the addition of a new customer success leader, a new Dice agency program leader, and the relaunch of managed services, as sourcing services, with a focus on delivering embedded candidates, for targeted client searches. Much like other trends in our business, we have seen a steady improvement in the demand for sourcing services, since April. Turning to sales performance by brand, for all of our brands, as we were experiencing a check mark shaped recovery, not a V-shape recovery. Dice's current bookings are trending towards their performance pre-pandemic, although our new business teams, including the Dice commercial accounts team, remain challenged, due to the extra conservatism of potential new clients, in this environment. Despite this challenge, the commercial sales team has been heads down, training and improving its core practices. They are becoming more sophisticated in their go-to-market approach and as a result brought in the largest, new business deal in the history of our company. This deal with a large U.S. government agency is worth $270,000, in annual contract value. To put this in perspective, we typically sign new business yields, in the $7,000 to $10,000 range. This success, along with the momentum we saw in signing new customers in the weeks leading up to the start of the pandemic in mid-March, gives us great confidence, that our focus on commercial accounts will be the cornerstone for our growth, as the business environment normalizes. Our renewals with existing Dice plants, while impacted in the quarter as a result of the pandemic, are slowly returning to expected levels. And existing clients have told us that they cannot find appropriate technologists, without our platform. It's important to note, that this dip in renewable based bookings during the quarter, we will manifest itself in lower revenue, for the remainder of the year. As we recognize each booking as revenue monthly, across the duration of the contract. ClearanceJobs has been relatively unaffected by the pandemic, as its performance is generally correlated to the U.S. DOD budget. We are very fortunate that the 2021 Defense Authorization bills appear to be moving forward towards approval. We continue to work hard on expanding CJ's addressable market, through direct sales to U.S. government agencies. And have booked $0.5 million in new contract revenue, through the first half of the year. We expect ClearanceJobs to add several new government customers, as we make our way through the rest of this year. Finally eFinancialCareers remains our most challenged brand. From the Hong Kong protests last summer, to the uncertainty of Brexit last fall, to the current pandemic, eFC trying to face significant challenges that have certainly affected our bookings. The global banking community is still working out the hiring plans, in light of the indeterminate effect of the pandemic, on loan portfolios. We are fortunate that eFC is generally focused on larger banking institutions and counts 50% of the global 100 banks for clients. These institutions believe in online banking future and continue to hire technologists even now. There is no question, however that the uncertainty in the banking industry has weighed down eFC's performance to-date. And we'll continue to do, so at least, through the remainder of the year. As I conclude my remarks, I want to reiterate that we are successfully executing on our plan to build career marketplaces, for matching tech professionals with employers. We believe we have created a better online platform that our competitors, for matching companies with the highest quality tech professionals and with our proven go-to-market strategy, we believe we can capitalize on the millions of new technologist jobs expected over the next five years, and grow our revenue at or above, the market rate of growth. While this growth won't happen overnight and COVID-19 certainly presents uncertainty. We are confident in our business plan and the continued progress, we are making towards achieving our goal. With that, let me turn the call over to Kevin, who will take you through our financials. And then, we'll take any questions you may have. Kevin?