After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Also, please be aware that today's call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Todd Kehrli of Pondell Wilkinson. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to DHI Group's First Quarter Earnings Conference Call for 2025. Joining me today are DHI's CEO, Art Zeile, and CFO, Greg Schippers. Before I hand the call over to Art, I'd like to address a few quick items. This afternoon, DHI issued a press release announcing its financial results for the first quarter of 2025. The release is available on the company's website at dhigroupinc.com. This call is also being broadcast live over the Internet for all interested parties, and the webcast will be archived on the Investor Relations page of the company's website. I want to remind everyone that during today's call, management will make forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Please note that except for the historical information, statements on today's call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These forward-looking statements reflect DHI management's current views concerning future events and financial performance and are subject to risks and uncertainties, and actual results may differ materially from the outcomes contained in any forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause these forward-looking statements to differ from actual results include the risks and uncertainties described in the company's periodic reports on Form 10-Ks and 10-Q and other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. DHI undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Lastly, on today's call, management will reference specific financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, free cash flow, and non-GAAP earnings per share, which are not prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Information regarding these non-GAAP measures and the reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in our earnings release, which can be found on our website at dhigroupinc.com in the Investor Relations section. I'll now turn the call over to Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group.

Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our first quarter earnings conference call for 2025. We appreciate you joining us today as we review our financial performance and discuss our outlook for the remainder of the year. Let me start by saying that Q1 marks an important milestone for DHI, as it is the first quarter we are reporting financial results under our new business segmentation. This segmentation aligns with how we operate and manage the business today and provides greater visibility into the performance of our individual brands. As part of this initiative, we have aligned our operations around our two distinct brands, ClearanceJobs and Dice, each with dedicated leadership and tailored go-to-market strategies that reflect their unique market dynamics and customer needs. This brand-led structure brings sales, marketing, product, and development teams under a single leader for each business, driving greater focus and accountability. At the same time, we've maintained centralized support functions, including human resources, finance, and technology operations, to efficiently manage our employees, business systems, and public company responsibilities. We believe this realignment enhances our profitability and unlocks new strategic growth opportunities for each brand. More specifically, we believe that it allows ClearanceJobs to expand its mission in the GovTech space. Now I would like to provide an overview of our performance this quarter and the measures we've implemented to enhance our position moving forward. First, looking at the company as a whole, despite a 10% decline in total revenue in the first quarter, we delivered company-wide adjusted EBITDA of $7 million, representing an adjusted EBITDA margin of 22%. We removed over $20 million of operating costs through three restructurings since May of 2023, while improving our product offerings and strengthening our sales and marketing teams. These initiatives position us well for a return…

Thank you, Art. Good afternoon, everyone. As Art mentioned, we have completed the segmentation of our business into two distinct brands, ClearanceJobs and Dice. Going forward, we will report our results in alignment with this structure. This segmentation reflects how we manage and operate the business today and offers greater visibility into the performance of each brand. To support this transition, we have also provided historical segmented results by quarter for 2024 in this quarter's presentation on our Investor Relations website. Now, let me take you through our results for the first quarter. We reported total revenue of $32.3 million, which was down 10% on a year-over-year basis and down 7% versus the fourth quarter. Total bookings for the quarter were $42.1 million, down 14% year over year. Our total recurring revenue was down 9% compared to the prior year quarter, and the bookings that drive our recurring revenue were down 13% for the quarter. ClearanceJobs revenue was $13.4 million, up 3% year over year, but down 3% sequentially. Bookings for CJ were $16.8 million, down 1% year over year. We ended the first quarter with 1,891 CJ recruitment package customers, which was down 7% on a year-over-year basis and down 3% on a sequential basis. This reduction is attributable to churn with smaller customers, whereas the number of CJ accounts spending greater than $5,015,000 in annual recurring revenue has increased and is up approximately 14% versus prior year. As Art mentioned, CJ's new business teams were impacted in the quarter by Doge-related uncertainty. Our average annual revenue per CJ recruitment package customer was up 12% year over year and up 3% sequentially to $25,800. Approximately 90% of CJ revenue is recurring and comes from annual or multiyear contracts. For the quarter, CJ's revenue renewal rate was 92%, and CJ's…

Thanks, Greg. I want to thank all our employees once again for their hard work this quarter. It is a pleasure to be part of such a great team. That said, we are happy to answer your questions.

We will now begin the question and answer session. And our first question will come from Gary Prestopino with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, all. Art, I guess the obvious question here, and we appreciate the fact you've broken all this out in adjusted EBITDA. For both segments, what is it that gives ClearanceJobs an adjusted EBITDA margin that is more than twice of what Dice produces?

I would have to say it's the revenue per employee. In the case of Dice, I'm sorry, in the case of ClearanceJobs, it's running at about $700,000 per employee. For ClearanceJobs, it's about half that. I'm sorry. For Dice, it's about half that. So we have had to work a lot harder on fixing legacy code and bringing Dice to the same level of feature set and capability as ClearanceJobs over the course of several years. So that's the answer. It's a bigger team. And quite frankly, more so in the tech spend and what we've been doing over the course of time than for ClearanceJobs.

Okay. And then as I look through these numbers, Greg, maybe you can answer this. Is it is your corporate before anything below that line running at about $6,050,000 per quarter? Is that about right?

Our corporate expenses are going to run, excluding anything that is kind of unusual in nature, is gonna run about $7 million a year.

Annually.

It's a pretty small group. There's a handful of employees in there. Our public company costs.

So it's only $7 million a year that $6.058, okay. Where I wanna put it. Alright.

Yep. And you'll see that, Gary, in more detail in the investor presentation is posted just following this call, you'll get detailed by quarter running from Q1 of 2024 forward. So you can see all the different pieces that roll up.

And then just two other questions. And I'll let somebody else go. With Dice, you said bookings are down 20%, lower demand on renewals. What exactly when you're talking about lower demand, could you maybe just explain that a little bit in terms of how you how your revenues book out in that regard? I just wanna make sure I understand how the lower demand could would help to reduce bookings by 20%.

So yeah. Gary, the I'll take the first part of this Art and then maybe you can jump in. Of the issue on the first quarter as Art mentioned, was the multiyear contracts that were entered into in Q1 of 2022 and 2023, are still high demand periods. We had in the neighborhood of $6 million of renewals in the quarter. Coming up on those, and those were challenged, you know, from a conversion given the demand environment today. So that's a portion of it, and then I'll just turn it over to Art.

No. I think you covered it well, Greg. The bottom line is that the larger staffing recruiting firms like to have a multiyear contract relationship with us. It's easier for them. It also cements a better relationship, quite frankly, between the two parties. And in that 2022 and 2023 first quarter period, they were feeling pretty good about the growth of the overall economy, especially in 2022 coming out of COVID. There was kind of a surge of demand for all technology positions and hiring in general. And so they locked in contracts that had a higher level of profile views. Once they realized that they were not consuming that same level, in 2024 and in this first quarter, they decided to reduce their contract spend. They're still moving forward on multiyear contracts, but at a lower level.

Okay. That helps a lot. And then just lastly, real quickly here. Has any of the contractors that you're dealing with starting to see a flow of any kind of funds from EU defense spending, or is it too early at this point?

So I would say it's kind of interesting. Talking to contractors in February and March, they were very fearful of Doge. And, you know, any kind of a I would say, contract termination. And there's a tracker online that you can go to that shows all the contracts that have actually been terminated by Doge by department and by dollar value. And so there's a fear that they would run through Department of Defense. They have not substantially. And so I think that that fear has receded, especially with regard to the pronouncements of President Trump and Secretary Hagzeff, as I've indicated, as well as the House and Senate Armed Services Committee chairmen, their willingness to boost the exact the defense budget. Now that hasn't been signed into law. Those are kind of forecasts for the future. So we haven't seen a dramatic change in the funding of additional defense projects, but I think it just based on the news cycle and the constant discussion of the need for stronger defense, we believe that that's very, very likely for later this year.

Okay. Thank you.

Of course. Thank you, Gary.

And our next question will come from Kevin Liu with K. Liu and Company. Please go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon, guys. Maybe if we could continue on the conversation on Doge. Could you kind of parse out the actual impact on your quarter? I'm just curious to what extent it impacted churn, if it did have any impact there? Versus just kind of delaying new bookings? And then maybe if you could talk about kind of what you've seen early in Q2. Has the fact that a new defense budget has been proposed and it's not much larger? Is that giving any sort of added confidence in letting customers move forward now?

Yeah. I could speak to that, Kevin. And great question. I would say that, first and foremost, when Doge kind of rampaged other agencies, other government institutions, there was a fear that they wouldn't withhold any kind of activity from the Department of Defense. And I would say that what that really meant is that a lot of people were fearful that they might be losing contracts or that there might be a suspension of new contract activity. That did not really play out. It did scare most of the smaller contractors, as indicated by Greg. The folks that did not renew for the most part were smaller military contractors. It also scared the folks that were talking to us about buying ClearanceJobs licenses for the very first time. So there were a couple of weeks where, for the very first time in the history that I've been on board, there were no new business bookings for ClearanceJobs, and that was just really, like I said, very unusual. Our pattern is to have new business bookings in for the ClearanceJobs new business team single day of the week for the most part. So, again, the fear was there. I'd say that the larger contractors did not have that same level of uncertainty, fear. They had existing contracts. So they felt comfortable renewing in largely the same pattern that they have for the past. So this is something that again, it affects renewals of smaller customers for ClearanceJobs as well as new business relationships that we're trying to establish.

Got it. And just also for ClearanceJobs, as we make our way through this year and presumably, you know, sentiment gets better with a higher defense budget, how should we think about kind of your willingness to spend on the marketing front? Would you there kind of a floor level that you want the CJ business to have in terms of an EBITDA margin? Somewhere north of 40% or are you willing to go lower than that, if the opportunities are there to really reaccelerate the growth profile?

I think that we're pretty effective in terms of our marketing spend today. A lot of the marketing spend is geared towards generating marketing qualified leads. And we're always experimenting with new channels, new ways to essentially make those more targeted. I still think that ClearanceJobs should be a 40% EBITDA margin platform for the foreseeable future. I don't know if you have anything to add to that, Greg.

Yeah. No. I completely agree with the 40 plus percent, and Art mentioned, it would be targeted marketing if we spent any more where it would be accretive to the margin. And in particular, you know, getting more exposure in the Western Part Of The United States, super dense for us in the DC area, but we have opportunity when you move west for ClearanceJobs.

Got it. And then maybe just lastly on the Dice side of things, can you just talk about kind of the new business environment today? Obviously, there's been a lot of uncertainty, maybe related tariffs, which might impact some of your customers in certain segments. But just wondering if you're sensing that, you know, things have kind of bottomed out here and we start to see an improvement or if the environment is still pretty challenging out there.

Great question. And you have to understand that for us, new business is divided into two teams. One is a team that attends to staffing recruiting agencies, and the other is a team that attends to commercial relationships. Like, we announced American Airlines and Flexjet this quarter. I would still say that there's a lot of uncertainty and fear for commercial accounts, and therefore, we have seen those bookings suppressed. It's been a positive surprise to see that bookings for staffing and recruiting agencies have actually exceeded our internal expectations this first quarter. I think that's because for most companies, they view hiring through a staffing recruiting agency as a less risky proposition in this kind of environment. It makes it a variable expense as opposed to a structural expense for an employee being on your payroll. So we have seen a solidification of new business bookings for the staffing recruiting new business team, but not the other one, not the commercial accounts team.

Got it. Appreciate the color there, and good luck here in the second quarter.

Thank you very much. I really appreciate it, Kevin.

And our next question is a follow-up from Gary Prestopino with Barrington Research. Please go ahead.

I just wanted to ask in terms of some of the expense categories, product development, sales and marketing, G and A, D and A, or depreciation. Greg, should we look at the percentage of those expenses on sales to maybe hold steady throughout the rest of the year?

Yes, good question. I would say if you're using the first quarter of 2025 as the comparison, it should stay in that general area.

Okay.

You know, as revenue expands, of course, there'll be some on those expenses. But otherwise, yeah, you should look at it relatively flat.

Okay. Thank you. Now just this one follow-up on that too, Gary. If you think about capitalized development costs, that will trend down from last year's numbers. And maybe be, you know, more consistent or in line with what we're seeing here in Q1 and trending towards 9 to 9 and a half million, maybe 10, you know, for the year as opposed to almost 14 last year. So yeah, direct cash savings there, but it's not reflected in EBITDA.

Okay. Thank you.

And this concludes our question and answer session. I'd like to turn the conference back over to Art Zeile for any closing remarks.

Thank you very much, and thank you all for joining us today. As always, if you have any questions about our company or would like to speak with management, please reach out to Todd Kehrli, he will help arrange a meeting. Thanks, everyone, for your interest in DHI Group, and have a great day.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect your lines.