Art Zeile
Analyst · Lake Street. Please go ahead
Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal 2021 fourth quarter and full-year earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us today. In 2021, we focused on improving our industry-leading subscription software tools, which we sell into the technology career marketplace through our two brands, Dice and ClearanceJobs. This focus, along with the significant investments we have made to improve our products and sales and marketing over the past year, has allowed us to accelerate our bookings and revenue growth on both platforms during the second half of 2021. As a result, we finished the year strong with fourth-quarter total revenue growth of 25% year-over-year, and total bookings growth of 35% year-over-year. As more employers use our subscription software tools. As the demand for technologies continues to grow at a rapid pace, and the unemployment rate for technologies remains at an all-time low, employers need sophisticated tools like ours to find, attract, and engage with the right tech candidates. Dice, and ClearanceJobs are tech-focused career marketplaces that attract the highest quality tech professionals and enable employers to find and engage these skilled candidates on our platforms as they look to fill the millions of new technology jobs being added over the next five years. Enabling our customers to use our patent pending skills mapping technology to find and engage with the best tech candidates, is a substantial competitive advantage for both Dice and ClearanceJobs. And significantly differentiates our offering from other well-known career sites. Unlike these sites, we are solely focused on serving the technology market where candidates are measured on the technology skills they have acquired over their career, and not a simple job title. Demand for these skilled technology candidates continues to increase as employers require more technologists to drive their evolving digital strategies. As we recently reported in our annual Dice Tech salary report It is a great time to be a technologist with salaries increasing almost across the board, and the average annual tech salary hitting a record level of $105,000 up 6.9% year-over-year. This increase shows that organizations are responding to the heightened need for tech talent. Tools like Dice and ClearanceJobs are imperative to find, attract, and engage these tech candidates. Now let me dig into both of our brand’s performance during the quarter and where we see them heading. Let's start with Dice, which is our largest opportunity for total revenue growth. Our bookings for Dice increased 35% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and our revenue renewal rate remains strong at 91%. All of this resulted in our Dice revenue for the quarter increasing 9% sequentially, and 26% year-over-year. Dice has two opportunities for expansion in front of it, as it directly serves the growing market demand for technologists. Dice commercial accounts is our largest white space opportunity with tens of thousands of companies in the U.S. looking to hire high quality tech professionals. These are companies like 7-Eleven, Volvo, First Citizens Bank, and the University of Southern California that are using our tool internally to find and engage the right technologists to fuel their digital strategies. We believe that there are over 80,000 companies in the United States that have at least ten open tech job postings. And each one of these companies is a target for our commercial accounts sales team to sell the Dice subscription software offering. The staffing and recruiting industry are the second growth opportunity for Dice with over 18 thousand staffing and recruiting firms operating in the United States. Today, we service approximately 4 thousand of them, leaving us with a significant opportunity to expand our reach into these clients. To capitalize on these two growth opportunities, we added incremental new business sales professionals during the year, increasing our quotA -bearing sales team capacity by almost 20%. We also increased our marketing spend to generate more qualified leads to fuel our expanding new business teams. Over the past several quarters, we have generated a significant return on our investment. In the fourth quarter, we exceeded our targets for marketing qualified leads, and our new business teams were successful in converting leads to new clients. As a result, our Dice customer base grew sequentially for the fourth consecutive quarter, adding over 230 net new clients. We also initiated a new Dice branding awareness campaign focused on reintroducing our Dice brand to the more than 12 million technologists in the United States, with the goal of driving new registrations and profile creations. These new digital marketing campaigns launched in September of 2021 include static and video advertising on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch. We have also engaged with several tech influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and YouTube. We are focused on those tech candidates that have less than 10 years of experience. We've invested significantly over the past several years to make Dice the industry-leading marketplace for tech professionals. And now we are ramping up our marketing to these millions of technologists to come check us out. As a result of this new investment in marketing, we're seeing higher reach and engagement metrics that resulted in increased traffic on Dice and we're now adding 33,000 new candidate registrations per month. Now let's talk about ClearanceJobs. CJ's fourth-quarter revenue grew 23% year-over-year, and their sales team also performed extremely well during the quarter, with bookings growth of 35% over the prior year. CJ's revenue renewal rate remains exceptional at 105%. CJ also reached new milestones for new candidate registrations and job postings during the quarter. As with Dice, we have two growth opportunities with CJ. The first is the government contractor market. We currently have approximately 1,800 contractor clients, but know that 10,000 plus can use our services. As with Dice, we have increased our marketing spend to further penetrate this target market. In the fourth quarter, our CJ new business team was successful in converting leads to new clients. And as a result, our CJ customer base grew sequentially, once again, adding over 60 net new clients. CJ's second opportunity for expansion is selling its subscription software directly to the multitude of U.S. government agencies that are in need of highly qualified technologists and are competing against the private sector for these candidates. We continued to advance our relationships with us government agency clients during the quarter, including the CIA and Idaho National engineering laboratory. CJ's sales and marketing teams continue to execute on their growth plans to further penetrate these two market opportunities, as evidenced by their solid bookings’ growth during the quarter. As we exited 2021, for both brands, we saw continued strong interest from our clients, finishing the year with significant momentum, and our prime for continued double-digit revenue growth. Last year, approximately 2/3 of our new business team members across Dice and CJ were at or above quota. As a result of comprehensive training, lead generation to support them, and of course, their hard work and dedication. In 2022, we will be increasing our investment in our proven sales and marketing engine, as we look to capitalize on the large and growing markets for tech professionals. We will again be adding new sales heads during the year to our new business teams with the goal of increasing our quota bearing team capacity by 20% in 2022. We will also be increasing our investment in marketing, both to clients and candidates, as a result of the success we've seen from our new digital marketing campaigns. With the goal of driving increased qualified leads, as well as new candidate registrations and profiles We have created the industry-leading tools for matching employers with the highest quality tech professionals. And we believe we can capitalize on the millions of new technologist jobs being created over the next several years by selling our subscription software to the companies, government agencies, and staffing and recruiting firms that will be looking to fill these jobs. The success we've had to-date with our proven sales and marketing strategy gives us confidence in our ability to continue to grow revenue at a strong double-digit growth rate going forward as we further penetrate our large target market opportunities. 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?