Q3 2023 DHI Group Inc Earnings Call
Participants
Todd Kehrli; IR; MKR Investor Relations, Inc
Art Zeile; President, CEO and Director; DHI group, Inc.
Julie Roby; SVP, Financial Planning & Analysis; DHI group, Inc.
Ethan Widell; Analyst; B.Riley Securities
Eric Martinuzzi; Analyst; Lake Street Capital Markets
Kevin Liu; Analyst; K.Liu & Company LLC
Presentation
Operator
Yes, good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the DHI Group, Incorporated third-quarter 2023 financial results conference call. (Operator Instructions) Also note today's event is being recorded. At this time, I'd like to turn the floor over to Todd Kehrli of MKR Investor Relations. Sir, please go ahead.
Todd Kehrli
Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to DHI Group's 2023 third quarter earnings conference call. With me on today's call, DHI's, CEO, Art Zeile; and Julie Roby, DHI's SVP, FP&A. Before I turn the call over to Julia, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, DHI issued a press release announcing its 2023 third quarter financial results. The release is available on the company's website at DHI Group, Inc.com. This call is 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 risks and uncertainties discussed in the company's periodic reports on Form 10-K and 10-Q and other filings with the securities and exchange commission. DHI undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement.
Lastly, during today's call, management will be referring to specific financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted diluted earnings per share, that are not prepared in accordance with US GAAP. Information about and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release, a copy of which you can find on our website at DHI Group, Inc.com in the investor relations section.
With that, I'll now turn the call over to Art Zeile, CEO of DHI Group.
Art Zeile
Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our 2023 third quarter earnings conference call. We appreciate your time today as we discuss our financial performance and future outlook. First, let's discuss the state of the market. There is no doubt that the ongoing uncertainty in the economy continues to suppress most tech hiring plans.
As of the end of September, [company's] year's analysis of the tech workforce indicates a net reduction of 116,000 positions year to date across the economy compared to a 335,000 expansion of tech positions for the same period in 2022. This coincided with a decline in actual tech job postings with third quarter numbers significantly lower than in the previous year and the pre-pandemic average.
While this downturn in hiring continues to impact our revenue and bookings. We believe there remains a long-term secular trend for adding more tech workers in the United States. In a study focused on the impact of AI on the U.S. workforce released this past July, McKinsey Global Institute predicted that demand for STEM workers will grow 23% from the year 2022 to the year 2030.
McKinsey believes tech jobs will grow at that high rate because it will be technologists who will be implementing AI for all industries in digitizing our economy. This theme is consistent with KPMG's annual CEO survey released just a few weeks ago, which confirms that 72% of U.S. CEOs say that generative AI is a top investment priority.
Question is when will we see this turnaround in hiring actually start to occur? The staffing industry analysts most recent forecast predicts a 3% contraction in the IT segment of the staffing industry this year with a return to growth and a 5% expansion next year. We believe that as businesses have a collective sense of confidence that we are past our recession scenario, they will accelerate their investment in technology initiatives and they will need our platforms to do so.
Our two subscription offerings, Dice and ClearanceJobs provide staffing and recruiting firms, large enterprises and government agencies with the tools necessary to find, attract, and hire the best technologists for their job openings from our 7.8 million candidate profiles. While we wait for [tech hiring] to return, we will continue to improve our industry leading product offerings and our go-to-market engine while doing so in a more efficient and profitable manner, as evidenced by our significantly increased adjusted EBITDA margin.
Now let me dig into our performance during the quarter. In the third quarter, our total revenue declined 3% year-over-year. Dice revenue for the quarter decreased 9% year-over-year, while CJ revenue increased 13%. The decrease in Dice revenue was the result of lower new business bookings and renewals over the past several quarters as well as significantly lower one-time transactional revenue, all of which are a reflection of the uncertain economic environment we have faced during that time.
Having said that, excluding one-time transactional revenue our total recurring revenue was up [5%] year over year. Those new business teams continue to see smaller pipeline volume and more intense deal scrutiny. However, we remain laser focused on those verticals with significant tech hiring needs right now because their technology roadmaps are less likely to be impacted by the economy.
Those industries include aerospace, business consulting, healthcare, financial services, and new to the list education. We continue to shift new business resources to focus on where clients are buying, which includes the staffing recruiting vertical as well as the CJ new business team. Dice several new clients this quarter, including Hogan Lovells Law Group, Cornell University, and the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory.
Dice also piloted, it launched pilots with several fortune 500 companies. ClearanceJobs bookings for the quarter increased 5% year-over-year. As we mentioned last quarter, CJ was affected by the debt ceiling negotiations in Q2 and its implied threat of the government delaying payment to military contractors. In the third quarter, we expected to see government contractors and agencies start to re-engage in a more significant manner with this issue behind us.
However, the looming government shutdown suppressed their activity as contractors worried about the suspension of payments during a potential shutdown. As a result, our CJ bookings growth during the quarter was less than we expected. Despite this CJ secured several new clients this quarter, including global technical systems, information, security corporation and loft orbital.
We expect the larger fiscal year 2023 defense budget to positively impact the volume of government projects and the corresponding demand for cleared tech professionals to fill them. Moving on to account management, the difficult economic environment impacted our revenue renewal rates in the third quarter. For the quarter, our Dice and CJ revenue renewal rates were 78% and 94% respectively.
Retention rates for the quarter for Dice and ClearanceJobs were 99% and 112% respectively. As I mentioned last quarter, many of our clients ran out of profile views in their subscriptions and had to pop up during the second and third quarters of last year, which created a difficult comparison for these metrics. This year, we are seeing our customers return to a consumption pattern consistent with a lower number of tech job postings, which has impacted our renewal rates.
Our customer attrition was notably larger than previous quarters, but continues to be concentrated with smaller clients that have been more impacted by the macro-economic environment than our larger accounts in spend less than $10,000 a year with us.
Moving on to earnings during the third quarter, we delivered a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin, which was up significantly from 21% a year ago. In the third quarter, we saw the full benefit of the organizational restructuring we announced earlier this year, which included a 10% reduction in workforce that streamlined our team structure and improved our operating margins.
While it is always a difficult decision to reduce headcount. We are confident that we have the right talent in place to capitalize on the opportunity ahead of us and to do so in a more efficient and profitable manner. The restructuring is expected to generate annual cost savings of approximately $8 million to $10 million. During the third quarter, we continue to focus on strengthening our industry leading product offerings to better penetrate our large market opportunities.
For Dice, we announced the release of Dice connections, technologist and recruiters can now form connections with each other through their respective profiles and see a list of those connections through their network dashboard. Connecting with technologists help recruiters build a pipeline of relevant candidates, making it easier to attract the right person for their current and future postings.
Following the close of the third quarter, Dice also released a new feature called expressed interest. This feature allows a candidate to show interest in a job without going through the formal application process. They wave a hand in if the recruiter likes their experience, they engage directly with that candidate. As you may recall, CJ announced this feature a couple of quarters ago and has already been used hundreds of thousands of times over the last several months.
This is an excellent example of our ability to use CJ, as a test bed for innovation and fast follow with a Dice deployment. We expect the express interest feature to have the same success on the Dice platform. For ClearanceJobs, its candidate mobile app is now available for download on the Apple app store. This is CJ's first native mobile app and comes after a year-and-a-half of development.
It has already been downloaded several thousands of times and represents a new engagement channel for candidates that participate in our cleared network. We are also proud to announce that during the third quarter, DHI Group was named to Newsweek's list of the top 100 most loved workplaces for 2023, DHI was ranked 47th overall.
The results were determined after surveying more than 2 million employees from businesses with work forces varying in size from 50 to more than 100,000 employees. The list recognizes companies that have created a workplace where employees feel respected, inspired and appreciated. It is a testament to the entire DHI team that we have been named to this prestigious list.
Lastly, earlier this week announced, we announced the addition of Raime Leeby as our new Chief Financial Officer. What impressed us most about Raime is a versatile skill set, including direct responsibility for FP&A financial operations, tax, treasury and M&A functions, but also the multitude of times in her career where she solve tough business challenges by taking on additional responsibilities in operations, sales, and strategy roles.
We're thrilled to have her start with DHI in early December and look forward to introducing her on our next earnings call. In summary, while the difficult economic environment is impacting us in the short term, there remains a long term secular trend for adding more tech workers in the United States. And as the economy improves and as companies across all industries continue their investment in technology initiatives.
We expect increased demand for our tools, which enable companies to attract fine and hire the right technology professionals for their open positions. Until then, we will continue to focus on improving our products and our execution and doing so in a more efficient and profitable manner. On that note, let me turn the call over to Julie, who will take you through our financials and our guidance.
And then we'll take any questions you may have. Julie?
Julie Roby
Thank you, Art, and good afternoon, everyone. Let me take you through our financial results for the quarter. We reported total revenue of $37.4 million, which was down 3%, both on a sequential and year-over-year basis. Total bookings for the quarter were $31.2 million, down 15% year over year. Dice revenue was $24.8 million, which was down 6% sequentially and down 9% year over year.
Dice bookings were $19.1 million, down 23% year over year. We ended the quarter with 5,752 Dice recruitment package customers, which is down 4% from last quarter and down 10% year-over- year. Our average annual revenue per Dice recruitment package customer was flat sequentially and up 4% year-over-year to $15,531.
Approximately 90% of Dice revenue is recurring and comes from annual or multiyear contracts. For the quarter, our Dice revenue renewal rate was 78% and our retention rate was 99%. ClearanceJobs revenue was $12.7 million, up 3% sequentially and 13% year over year.
Bookings for CJ were $12.1 million, up 5% year-over-year. We ended the third quarter with 2,054 CJ recruitment package customers, which was down 1% on a sequential basis and up 1% year-over-year. Our average annual revenue per seated recruitment package customer was up 3% over last quarter and up 11% year over year to $21,422, approximately 90% of CJ revenue is recurring and comes from annual contracts.
For the quarter, both CJ's revenue renewal rate and retention rate were up sequentially. CJ's revenue renewal rate was 94% and CJ's retention rate was strong at 112%. The outstanding retention rate demonstrates the continued value CJ delivered in the recruitment of cleared professionals.
Turning to operating expenses. Third quarter operating expenses were down 6% to $35.2 million when compared to $37.3 million in the year ago quarter. This quarter includes $300,000 in restructuring charges. Our third quarter operating expenses reflect a full quarter of the cost savings associated with the May restructuring, which included a reduction of our workforce by approximately 10% and is expected to generate annual cost savings of approximately $8 million to $10 million.
During the quarter, we sold a portion of our ownership interest in eFinancialCareers for $4.9 million and recognized a gain of $600,000, which reduced our ownership interest from 40% to 10%. For the quarter, we had income tax expense of $759,000 on income before taxes of $1.8 million. Our tax rate for the quarter differed from our normal expected rate of 25% due primarily to the deduction limitations on executive compensation and a valuation allowance related to the impairment of an investment.
We recorded net income of $1 million or $0.02 per diluted share. For the prior year quarter, we reported a net loss of $900,000, or $0.02 per diluted share. Adjusted diluted earnings per share for the quarter was $0.03 compared to $0.02 for the prior year quarter. Diluted shares outstanding for the quarter were $44.3 million compared to $44.2 million in the prior year quarter.
Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter increased 16% to $9.4 million, a margin of 25% compared to $8.1 million or a margin of 21% in the third quarter a year ago. Operating cash flow for the quarter was $5.6 million compared to $9.2 million in the prior year period. The reduction in cash flow from operations in the third quarter was due to severance paid of $900,000 and lower bookings from the current uncertain economic environment.
From a liquidity perspective, at the end of the quarter, we had $3.7 million in cash and total debt of $40 million under our $100 million revolver. Total debt outstanding decreased $3 million from the $43 million at the end of the second quarter. We continue to target approximately one times leverage for the business.
Deferred revenue at the end of the quarter was $48.8 million, down 7% from the third quarter of last year. Our total committed contract backlog at the end of the quarter was $108.4 million, which was up 5% from the end of the third quarter last year. Short-term backlog was $87.8 million at the end of the third quarter, an increase of $3.6 million or 4% year over year.
Long-term backlog that is revenue to be recognized in 13 or more months was $20.6 million at the end of the quarter, an increase of $1.9 million or 10% from the prior year. During the quarter, we did not purchase shares under our share buyback program. However, we purchased approximately 218,000 shares for $800,000 at an average price of $3.76 per share related to employee stock vesting.
Year-to-date, we have repurchased 2.8 million shares for $13.1 million under our repurchase program. As a reminder, our current $10 million program began in the first quarter and runs through February 2024. Of the $10 million authorized $4.8 million remained at the end under the program at the end of the quarter. As Art mentioned, the current economic uncertainty continued to impact our new business team.
As such, we now expect our full year 2023 total revenue to grow in the range of flat to 1% year over year. Given this current environment, we will continue to manage our expenses closely as we focus on EBITDA and cash flow generation and paying down debt for the balance of the year. For the fourth quarter, we expect adjusted EBITDA margins of approximately 25%.
To wrap up. While the current hiring environment is impacting our growth, we expect companies across all industries to continue their investment in technology initiatives, which will drive increased demand for our product and services as the economy improves. In the meantime, we are focused on improving our industry-leading offerings and our go-to-market execution while doing so in a more efficient and profitable manner.
And with that, let me turn the call back to Art.
Art Zeile
Well, thank you, Julie. I'd like to thank all of our employees again for their hard work this past quarter. It is a pleasure to be part of such a great team. With that, we're happy to take your questions.
Question and Answer Session
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, we'll begin the question and answer session. (Operator Instructions) Zach Cummins, B. Riley.
Ethan Widell
This is Ethan Widell for Zach Cummins. Thanks for taking my questions. I'm going to start first; can you speak a little further to the uptick in turn with Dice in the quarter and what areas are experiencing the greatest pressure there?
Art Zeile
I would say that systemically we're seeing the same pattern of turn just at a more elevated rate. And what I've described in past quarters is that we've examined our turn profile are those customers that are more apt to leave us, and they're generally smaller staffing firms. And so think of these as firms that are anywhere between 1 and 20 employees. They're the staffing firms that are most at risk in this kind of an economic uncertain condition. And that's from what we're seeing. But I would say at a higher pace.
Ethan Widell
Thanks. And then on what are you hearing from tech hiring managers in the current environment and what's the focus for IT new business teams?
Art Zeile
So I'd say the interesting thing about our situation right now is that there is a widespread acknowledgment that generative AI will fundamentally reshape business models across the United States economy. I would say most our executives understand that and are preparing for it.
But right now, in the current environment, we've seen a pretty significant downshift in the number of tech job postings. We specifically look at the comp tier monthly report, that's generally published about three to four days business days after the end of any particular month.
And it shows, as of September, we had 184,000 tech job postings, in a normal month, let's say, in a non-operational year like 2019 or pre-pandemic in general, we would see on the order of 300,000 to 350,000-odd tech job postings. So again, the environment has slowed down dramatically in terms of demand for tech hiring right now, but there's this acknowledged longer term hiring from horizon that acknowledges that we will need more tech workers to implement generative and other AI solutions.
Ethan Widell
Thank you. And then if I can squeeze in a third one. Of course, what are the expectations for ClearanceJobs in the near term? And do you state that you'll see an impact from the uncertainty surrounding a potential government shutdown?
Art Zeile
The answer to the first part of that question is we still think that our clearance jobs will definitely continue to grow. Generally speaking, in the double-digit revenue range it has done that historically over the last 10-plus years, I would say that we did see conservatism in terms of the sales cycle in third quarter associated with getting closer to that government shutdown date.
And we would anticipate that unless the politics can change radically, we're going to probably see the same thing happening in as we get closer to the middle of November. We do know that the fear that's there for the military contractors is that they get slow paid for delayed paid, they will ultimately be caught up. But the point of the matter is it does affect their cash flow pretty dramatically if we do go into a government shutdown.
The other thing that happens is that contract officers are literally tens of thousands of contract officers that are managing contracts for the government and especially establishing new contracts with the government, they're all furloughed. So there you can't have any amendments to existing contracts and you can't essentially launch new projects if the government goes into a shutdown, that's the other impairment that we would see in that scenario.
Ethan Widell
Understood. Thanks for the color.
Art Zeile
Thank you Ethan.
Operator
Eric Martinuzzi, Lake Street.
Eric Martinuzzi
I wanted to focus on the bookings of the Dice of 23% in Q3 and then CJ. You characterized the 5% growth is a slightly disappointing. Like I received a recall of this Q4 of 2022 when the economic headwinds sort of caught up to DHI, and I was curious to know what's your expectation just on a year over year bookings growth rate or contraction rate. What's your expectation for Dice and CJ, Q4 versus Q3.
Art Zeile
So I'd say that we continue to see a negative bookings rate, meaning that we're going to see a decline for Dice and the bookings are, of course, a combination of renewal rates for existing customer contracts, but also new business activity. I think that renewal rates are going to still hover around the 80% mark for our Dice customers.
And that's because, again, we're still shaking out some of those smaller staffing recruiting firms from our customer base. And we are still seeing an impairment specifically to commercial accounts, new business bookings, we are seeing an improvement, I would say slightly over the course of time with the staffing recruiting new business team.
So I hope I give you at least a qualitative sense that we do expect that there is going to be a decline in bookings from Q4 of last year to Q4 for this year for Dice and the mechanism behind that. CJ is different, I still think that the jury is out just as I described in my answer, too, Ethan the last caller who and we talked about the fact that there is a looming government shutdown anytime that happens.
And specifically, we saw at least in the last month that it happened pretty dramatically where our contractor activity slowed down because the contractors are waiting to see what scenario exists, whether or not they're going to get paid, whether or not there's going to be us a short government shutdown or an extended one. '
So I still believe that CJ is such an absolutely vital tool to find cleared professionals that even those folks that are continuing forward with their existing platforms they need ClearanceJobs, but the new business bookings are affected when there is the prospect of a government shutdown.
Eric Martinuzzi
Okay. You kind of got me halfway there on the bookings trend I guess maybe it's something that you're not comfortable putting too fine a point on. But I guess my might I was hoping to is there any sense of a troughing that things will we don't expect to get too worse from in Q4 versus Q3?
Art Zeile
I would say qualitatively, we saw a little bit worse bookings performance in Q3 than Q2, but I feel like we're going through the trough right now. I think that we're not seeing a pickup in activity, but we're not seeing a significant decrease in activity. And the reason why I talk about Q4 of last year versus Q4 of this year is, of course, Q4 is our biggest or one of the two biggest quarters for our renewable bookings.
Most of our customers have termination dates in their contracts have either December or January. And that's why I wanted to bring out the point of seasonality.
Eric Martinuzzi
Got you. That's helpful. I guess the ARPU on the contracts Dice up about 4% and then CJ up about 11%. How much of that is kind of seek driven versus price increase?
Art Zeile
I would say that that is probably by price increase almost entirely. But I would also say that we're currently shaking the tree pretty hard and these less stable customers. The ones that are less than $10,000 in annual spend are the ones that are dropping out of our customer count. And so that also makes a difference in terms of how we mechanically would get to that average RPU figure.
Eric Martinuzzi
Okay. And then for the 27% of those contracts that are choosing to not renew, where are they going or is it just fewer seats, what's the alternative finance takeout renewal Dice itself?
Art Zeile
What we've now and again, this is the cohort of customers that are on effectively not renewing their Dice licenses and they are very, very small firms. So they generally either gone out of business or they've suspended a lot of their expense structure as they're waiting for the demand environment to improve. They're not getting the orders on their side to essentially staff, certain customers that they've had in the past.
Eric Martinuzzi
Got you, okay. And then lastly, the good work on the 25% adjusted EBITDA margin, you've also given an outlook for 25% on the adjusted EBITDA margin for Q4. Does that imply any further restructuring or cuts or is the kind of the cost structure relatively stable, now?
Art Zeile
The cost structure is stable at this point in time. We do have the ability to on make our marketing digital marketing campaign changes almost literally daily, and so we have the ability to use that as a significant lever. But I would say that in general, our expense structure is where we wanted to be from here moving forward.
Eric Martinuzzi
Got it. Congrats on getting new, your CFO candidate and look forward to connecting with her when she starts in December. Thanks for taking my questions.
Art Zeile
Absolutely Eric. Thank you.
Operator
Kevin Liu, K. Liu & Company.
Kevin Liu
Good afternoon. One thing to start with just the Dice bookings growth trajectory here. You've talked about kind of the top-up impact over the past two quarters here. But any way you can quantify how big of a drag that's been on the bookings. And then as you move into kind of your stronger and more typical renewal periods, wondering if that impact just kind of naturally abate since claims generally wouldn't be topping up then?
Art Zeile
I think that's a great question, and I'm going to ask Julie to respond to that. She's the one that's been deep and looking at these trends. So Julie, do you want to speak to that.
Julie Roby
Yes. So the topping up of our customers probably impacted our renewal rates by a few percentage points each quarter on. So for our larger staffing and recruiting firms, and that was a drag on our overall renewal rate. But again, as Art was talking to before, it was at the renewal rate was also impacted by this model customers that were returning.
Kevin Liu
And this is relates to kind of a Q4 and Q1 renewal period. Do you guys typically have that type of impact to work through still or since those are more usual timeframes. Does that kind of headwind go away?
Julie Roby
Yes. I would say that that headwind goes away. We saw more of the customers topping up in the second third quarter of last year. And so, that is moving behind us as we go forward and our customers have normalized their contracts to the demand that we're seeing today.
Kevin Liu
Okay, that's helpful. And then just for both Dice and ClearanceJobs, as you look at kind of the top of the funnel and your marketing qualified leads and have those continued to grow? Or has have you seen any sort of declines there as well this as you've paired back on some of your marketing investments?
Art Zeile
I would say that we've seen a pretty steady state of marketing qualified leads, although coincident with the lower demand for tech job postings in general, I'd say that we see less commercial accounts, marketing qualified leads as part of the mix. So when we say marketing qualified leads, we're talking about all the leads that come in that service, both the Dice new business teams, the commercial accounts and the staffing recruiting team and proportionately, we've seen more staff and recruiting leads come in, but the same total amount.
And I think that is consistent with the view that a lot of companies have decided to use staffing recruiting more frequently this year because it means less risk to them. It means that a person is not on their payroll directly.
Kevin Liu
Understood. And you mentioned kind of see a forecast for kind of a return to positive growth in IT staffing next year. I'm just as you kind of look out and I know it's still early here, how you guys thinking about that forecast and whether you would want to start to remove some of the investments either in the commercial account team or elsewhere in the business?
Art Zeile
Yes, I think that right now, obviously, look, we don't have the crystal ball like any more so than anybody else does. But I would say it is positive to see that they have adjusted their forecast upward for 2023, I'm sorry 2024. Now with that said, a really big growth driver for us. Last year was our commercial accounts team, and I view that as a big driver for growth for the future in general.
So I think we come back to what I would consider to be on a normal economic growth rate for Dice once we see that commercial accounts interest in demand improves.
Kevin Liu
Great. Appreciate you taking the questions.
Art Zeile
Well, thank you, Kevin.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll be ending today's question and answer session. I'd like to turn the floor back over to management for any closing remarks.
Art Zeile
Well, thank you, Jamie, and thank you for everyone 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 and he will help arrange a meeting. Thanks, everyone, for your interest in DHI Group and have a great day.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we'll conclude today's conference call and presentation. We thank you for joining. You may now disconnect your lines.
