ZipRecruiter, Inc. (ZIP) Q1 2026 Earnings Report, Transcript and Summary

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the ZipRecruiter First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Emilio Sartori, Head of Investor Relations. Emilio, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us for our earnings conference call, during which we will discuss ZipRecruiter's performance for the first quarter ended March 31, 2026, and our guidance for the second quarter of 2026. Joining me on the call today are Ian Siegel, Co-Founder and CEO; and David Travers, President and Interim CFO. Before we begin, please be reminded that forward-looking statements made today are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and/or the future financial performance of ZipRecruiter. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. A discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements can be found in ZipRecruiter's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, which is available on our Investor website and the SEC's website. The forward-looking statements in this conference call are based on the current expectations as of today, and ZipRecruiter assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for, or in isolation from GAAP results. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP metrics to the nearest GAAP metrics are included in ZipRecruiter's shareholder letter and in our Form 10-Q. And now I will turn the call over to Ian.

Thank you. Good afternoon to everyone joining us today. ZipRecruiter opened 2026 with a strong first quarter, delivering revenue of $107.5 million and beating the midpoint of our guidance. Net loss was $4.7 million, and adjusted EBITDA came in above the high end of our guidance range at $9.7 million. At ZipRecruiter, our mission is to actively connect people to their next great opportunity. We do that by playing the role of active matchmaker. Increasing direct meaningful conversations between employers and job seekers is a central focus of our R&D. And in Q1, we saw engagement increase across multiple metrics. First, we launched our next-generation search and matching AI engine in Q1. This represents a massive leap forward in how we drive more conversations between employers and job seekers. This engine delivers 2 major upgrades: a step change in how we assess candidate qualifications; and a new level of precision in interpreting job seeker intent. The results were immediate. Application volume increased by 37% for job seekers using the new engine. While only live for a subset of job seekers, we expect a full rollout by the end of Q2. We also created significant momentum with Be Seen First, a product that empowers qualified high-intent job seekers to stand out by highlighting exactly why they are a fit for a role. Adoption is scaling fast. Over half of our paid employers now receive Be Seen First responses on their postings. In Q1, 12% of all applicants chose to be seen first. Only qualified candidates for a role can utilize this feature, ensuring a high-quality experience for employers. Be Seen First candidates are nearly 2 times more likely to receive a message from an employer than those using traditional applications. Over the past year, we've deployed multiple products and enhancements across both sides of our marketplace. From ZipIntro and our redesigned resume database to Be Seen First and our next-generation search and matching engine, each innovation is focused on the same goal, driving more conversations between employers and job seekers. This momentum is reflected in both our data and job seeker app store reviews. With a 4.9 rating and over 1 million combined reviews, ZipRecruiter remains the #1 rated job search app on both iOS and Android. Over the course of Q1, we saw a notable increase in positive reviews, specifically mentioning getting a call from an employer or landing an interview compared to Q4. We believe the most valuable thing we can do for job seekers is get them into conversations with employers. And the most valuable thing we can do for employers is deliver them candidates they want to engage with. The data is moving in the right direction. The app store reviews are one signal. The product data is another. Together, they tell a consistent story. The quality of connections happening on ZipRecruiter is meaningfully improving. All of these improvements were delivered against what remains a sluggish hiring backdrop. In Q1, the quits rate and total hires stayed near their lowest levels since 2015, while job openings were down 3% year-over-year. In spite of this subdued hiring environment, ZipRecruiter outperformed our Q1 results, and we believe this is due to our product improvements and the efficacy of our marketplace. The pace of innovation across our marketplace is accelerating. In a market where many companies are competing on the breadth of their AI capabilities, we believe the long-term winners will be those that translate technology into real outcomes. Employers finding the right person, job seekers landing the right role, that is the bet we are making. We believe the quality of our marketplace has never been stronger and that we are building a business that will capture disproportionate share as the hiring market normalizes. Q1 is evidence that we are moving in the right direction, and we look forward to showing you more. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Dave to share some additional business highlights, financial results and guidance.

Thanks, Ian, and good afternoon. Our performance in the first quarter reflects the continued success of our product-led strategy. I'm excited to share several highlights with you. On the SEO front, we are seeing strong growth in high-intent traffic despite a year-over-year decline in total web traffic across the hiring category. In Q1, our engaged job seekers, defined as those who applied to job postings, grew 26% year-over-year through organic search. At the same time, we are leaning into Generative AI. In March, we launched the ZipRecruiter app for ChatGPT, extending our reach directly into the AI tools job seekers are increasingly adopting. We see this as an early step in broadening our presence across Generative AI platforms, and we'll look to expand our integrations over time. Taken together, our increased share of total traffic, 26% year-over-year growth in engaged job seekers through organic channels, and a new distribution footprint across Generative AI platforms, we believe ZipRecruiter is gaining share at a moment when cyclical hiring demand remains muted. That combination does not happen by accident and we believe it positions us to disproportionately capture volume when the hiring market normalizes. After investing over $1 billion over the past 15 years to achieve over 80% aided brand awareness on both sides of our marketplace, we are now leveraging our branding expertise to empower our customers to tell their own stories with multimedia branding. In Q1, we rolled out integrated branded pages for our employer listings on ZipRecruiter, powered by Breakroom, a workplace rating and job marketplace platform, to increase visibility of employers' brands to job seekers. These pages allow employers to move beyond static text and use video, images and testimonials to showcase their true workplace culture. We look forward to scaling these multimedia capabilities across our entire marketplace. Finally, our enterprise strategy continues to gain traction. Adoption of our automated campaign performance solutions grew over 50% year-over-year as large employers look for more efficient hiring solutions. Our go-to-market improvements drove a 5% year-over-year increase in performance marketing revenue, proving that our technology investments are delivering for employers of every size. With that, I'll now discuss our financial results and guidance. Our first quarter revenue of $107.5 million came in ahead of our guidance midpoint, with a 2% decline year-over-year and a 4% decline quarter-over-quarter. The year-over-year decrease was driven by a soft hiring environment, while the sequential decline reflects post-holiday seasonality, where employers join or return to our platform over the course of the quarter. We finished the first quarter with over 63,000 quarterly paid employers, which was flat year-over-year and represented a 7% increase sequentially. Quarterly paid employers remaining flat year-over-year in spite of macroeconomic volatility, demonstrates the stability of our employer base. The sequential growth is consistent with our historical seasonal patterns where quarterly paid employers typically grow over the course of Q1 after the holiday slowdown in Q4. Revenue per paid employer was $1,698, down 2% year-over-year and down 10% sequentially. The year-over-year decrease reflects more muted hiring demand. The sequential decrease was primarily driven by seasonal growth in the number of quarterly paid employers as they ramped up their hiring campaigns over the course of Q1. Our net loss in the first quarter was $4.7 million. Adjusted EBITDA in Q1 was $9.7 million, representing a 9% margin coming ahead of the high end of our guidance range. This compares to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 5% in Q1 of '25. Cash, cash equivalents and marketable securities totaled $393.5 million as of March 31. During the first quarter, we repurchased 3.5 million shares totaling $9.4 million. Moving on to quarterly guidance. Our Q2 revenue guidance of $112 million at the midpoint represents a return to flat revenue year-over-year and 4% growth quarter-over-quarter, demonstrating the impact of our hiring solutions despite underlying macro headwinds. Our adjusted EBITDA guidance for Q2 is $13 million at the midpoint, representing a 12% margin. Looking beyond Q2, we continue to expect hiring demand to follow a typical seasonal cadence throughout 2026, albeit at subdued levels. Under this scenario, we expect to achieve flat year-over-year revenue in 2026, which is a 5 percentage point improvement over the 5% decline in 2025. In this scenario, we also believe adjusted EBITDA margins can expand by 5 percentage points from 9% in 2025 to 14% in 2026. This margin expansion reflects our commitment to operational efficiency alongside targeted investments aimed at capturing growth. The stabilization in the business and accelerating pace of innovation we've seen in our marketplace are encouraging. We remain confident that our focus on driving more meaningful conversations between employers and job seekers will position ZipRecruiter to outperform the broader hiring category over the long term. With that, we can now open the line for questions. Operator?

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Ralph Schackart with William Blair.

First question, maybe can you talk about the differences you might be observing between SMB and Enterprise segments? It sounds like you're making some good traction within Enterprise. And then as 2026 progresses, how would you expect perhaps the behavior within each of these segments to perhaps change? And then I have a follow-up.

Thanks, Ralph. This is Dave. So yes, we've been pleased with the execution we've seen on both sides of both customer segments, SMB and Enterprise. Enterprise mainly comprises performance marketing revenue, so it was up 5% year-over-year. That continues a long-term trend of expanding our percentage of revenue that comes from Enterprise. So 24% of revenue this quarter. If you did go all the way back to our S-1 pre-COVID, in Q1 of 2019, we were at 12% of revenue. So we've doubled our percentage of revenue and we expect to continue to expand revenue there over time. As it evolves over the course of the year, I think we expect to, as I said, continue to see that. And what we've seen in talking to the customer base from both sides is consistent with the macro data we've seen. We're in a subdued but relatively stable environment and that captures the mood of employers on both sides of the marketplace. They're responding to conversations being driven and job seekers are responding to that, as we talked a lot about in the letter, and we expect to continue to see the benefits of that as we continue to execute. This year is consistent with our guidance when we're guiding to double our top line growth versus what we did Q2 over Q1 last year, showing $4.5 million of growth top line at the midpoint as opposed to just over $2 million in the same quarter last year.

Great. And then just a follow-up, maybe shifting gears a little bit. You talked about the Zip app for ChatGPT. Just curious what you're learning there? I think you talked about expanding potential integrations. Any more color you could add on the product front there would be great.

Well, the new app went live on ChatGPT and on a percentage basis, the growth of LLMs in general has been impressive as a new traffic source. Overall, LLMs still represent a -- they are still a tiny contributor in the overall mix of where traffic comes from to ZipRecruiter, but it's good to be there at the beginning and to enjoy the ride up with them as they become an ever more popular way for job seekers to look for work.

[Operator Instructions] The next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBanc.

I'd love to hear more about just the upcoming rollout of the next-generation AI engine. It sounds like you had some really strong returns so far. So how are you thinking about that as a potential market share driver in a market that's still a little bit subdued here? And then the second question, just as a quick follow-up. We've seen a lot of companies just trying to balance the productivity benefits against the rising token costs from Gen AI tools. So I would love to hear more about how you're thinking about that dynamic and what it might mean toward your longer term headcount needs?

Well, I'll take the second question first and then go to the first question last, which -- AI is permeating really every department within our company. It's driving extraordinary efficiencies across the board, which we haven't looked at as a cost-saving opportunity as much as we've looked at it as a mechanism by which we can realize and increase our ambitions. So if anything, it has accelerated our road map as opposed to saved us money. And you can see that -- output of that acceleration in Q1 where multiple large-scale initiatives, some of which have been worked on for over 1 year, we were able to deploy. The next-generation search engine is one of those. It increased applications by 37% for the job seekers who are exposed to it. We expect all job seekers to be on the next-gen search engine by the end of Q2. It's really exciting. These -- This algorithm and the other components of this were -- they were retrained to prioritize more meaningful signals for job seekers in terms of the depth of their interest in roles. We can see that play out when we use those algorithms to deliver results and that they're applying at a far higher rate, and these are jobs that they are far more qualified for at the same time. Further, when they do apply to those jobs and when they are qualified for those jobs, adoption of Be Seen First has been exciting. We saw 12% of total applicants choose to be seen first when they apply, and this is confirming an extraordinary advantage to them because employers who are looking at their list are seeing these very interested candidates who have now got a mechanism to show their enthusiasm. They're not just qualified, they're eager. And that is coming through and employers are engaging with those candidates at almost twice the rate that they're engaging with candidates to go through the normal apply process. Overall, when we look at all the features that we've launched, not just in this quarter but really over the last 3 to 4 quarters, and it's including things like ZipIntro, it's things like our redesigned resume database, the acquisition and deployment of Breakroom, what you see is that the strategy we've built is working, and it's not me saying that or say it's not just me, it's the job seekers. I've been really excited reading the reviews and seeing the spike in the specific language that those reviews contain. The job seekers are using the language that we use internally when we talk about our objectives. They are saying that they are getting more interviews and they're getting more phone calls from employers. They are saying, "ZipRecruiter works." That's exactly how we look at it internally and how we describe it. So it's really rewarding to see the strategy paying off both quantitatively and qualitatively here. There's so many more improvements to come. We're really excited about the momentum we have here, and AI is proving to be an incredible accelerator of our ability to rapidly deploy these improvements.

Your next question comes from Josh Chan with UBS.

This is [indiscernible] on for Josh. I wanted to ask on the margin, because the margin certainly came way above what we expected. So I was just wondering if you can provide more color on where -- what drove that upside against like maybe your internal expectations because it also came above the guide as well?

Thanks. This is Dave. Good question. So yes, the EBITDA margins this past quarter did come in above expectations and above the high end of the range we had said earlier. Obviously, when you look at it from a year-over-year basis, we've been driving efficiency across all 3 major categories of expense: G&A; sales and marketing; and R&D. However, versus our expectations and what we had last quarter, as we've said many times, we're scientists, not artists when it comes to sales and marketing investments. And this quarter, the team did an extraordinary job of looking for and finding high ROI marketing opportunities and areas to invest in our go-to-market. And so we saw that in the results and the results were that we came in above the high end of the range. So obviously, that gives us increasing confidence in our ability to achieve the likely scenario we laid out for the whole year, which is top line being flat, which is 5 percentage points better than prior year, obviously, and at the same time, improving bottom line margins from 9% to 14% for the full year, which is also 5 percentage points improvement along the bottom line. And so that execution this quarter gave us even more confidence about our ability to do that, and we felt great about it.

That is the end of the Q&A session. This concludes today's call. You may now disconnect.