Heidrick & Struggles International, Inc.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Abby, and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Hydric & Struggle's fourth quarter and year-end earnings conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during that time, simply press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one a second time. Thank you. And I would now like to turn the conference over to Suzanne Rosenberg, Vice President of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, and welcome to our 2024 fourth quarter conference call. Joining me today are our CEO, Tom Monahan, and CFO, Nirupam Sinha. We posted our accompanying slides on the IR homepage of our website at hydric.com. and we encourage you to view these slides for additional context. Please note that in materials presented today, we may refer to non-GAAP financial measures that we believe provide additional insight into underlying results. Reconciliations between these non-GAAP financial measures and the most comparable GAAP measures may be found in the earnings press release. Also, in our remarks, we may make certain forward-looking statements. We ask that you please refer to the Safe Harbor language also included in today's press release. Tom, I'll now turn the call over to you.

Thank you, Suzanne, and welcome to everyone joining our earnings call today. I'm pleased to share that Hydric & Struggles delivered a solid performance in the fourth quarter, a testament to our ongoing commitment to creating unrivaled value for our clients. This client focus is especially notable given the amount of change we drove in 2024 through leadership changes and a tightened strategic focus. Our new leadership team has done an excellent job of keeping our colleagues around the world focused on market opportunities and client needs as we more tightly target our solutions and prioritize scalability and profitability. And speaking of leadership, scalability, and profitability, we are thrilled to welcome Neuropom to the leadership team and this call. He's been here less than two months and is already having a huge impact on how we perform. I'd also be remiss not to thank Steve Bondi for his exceptional impact and leadership as our interim finance leader. Today, I'll provide a brief overview of our fourth quarter results, share examples of how our approach is delivering tangible value for clients, and outline our strategic priorities. After that, I'll hand it over to Nirupam for a more in-depth look at our Q4 results, and then we'll open the call for Q&A. Let me start with a quick overview of our fourth quarter performance before Neuropom provides more detail. As context, it's no understatement to note that our clients' jobs have gotten exponentially harder over the past several years. Complex political and geopolitical environments on a global basis, combined with step function advances on technology, think about AI, and volatile markets for financing are just a few of the challenges on their desk. We believe that these challenges create opportunities for our partnership with clients. As a trusted advisor to executive teams and boards, change and complexity are what our business thrives on. You can see this reflected in our revenue performance, which came in above our outlook by our contributions from all of our service lines. Our core executive search platform delivered excellent results with strong performance across regions. On-demand talent drove growth despite the ongoing slowdown in the broader temporary staffing space. This continues to highlight our unique position in attractive market segments. And Hydric Consulting momentum accelerated as the year closed. We also saw strong Q4 confirmations, which suggest that we can sustain this momentum in 2025. Just as importantly, Our fourth quarter top line growth translated into solid profitability as we maintained EBITDA margins in line with our projections. The strong fourth quarter was a fitting capstone to a year of high performance by our teams globally. Even as we lean into a fast start in 2025, I want to make sure that we reflect quickly on what Team Hydric accomplished in 2024. In full candor, the year offered plenty of opportunities for soft performance. Not only were there divisive elections and complex economic conditions in many of our major markets, but we engineered substantial leadership changes across much of the business. Rather than being distracted, our team stayed focused on driving client impact, delivering results which accelerated throughout the year. That said, we know our work is just beginning. Going forward, in simple terms, we are focused on rapidly achieving the long-term targets we set out at our recent investor day. With all our success, we know there is plenty of work ahead. Now let's turn to a discussion around the strategic initiatives we have in place to drive that scaled growth and profit. We described these in depth at our investor day. For those who missed it, we put the webcast on our site. Let's set the table. It's no secret that the single most critical factor driving corporate and organizational performance is having the right leaders in the right roles leading in the right way. And this recognition creates a huge addressable market for us with our world-class professional colleagues supported by our distinctive brand, powerful technology and valuable intellectual property. We have a strong platform to grow and scale and impact. To accomplish this, we've been moving forward with three strategic priorities, each of which are centered on building differentiated, deep and durable client relationships. First, to be the most trusted leadership partner to the C-suite and the board. We believe that our focus on leadership talent differentiates us. We remain committed to consistently growing our executive search and assessment capabilities, which are the cornerstone of our enterprise. This work not only immediately inflects client performance, but it also gives us unmatched access to leaders and their priorities, allowing us to build valuable insights and data sets. As an example, our annual CEO and board monitor digests feedback from more than 900 CEOs and board members. This year's work points to deep boardroom concerns about political and economic volatility. Unsurprisingly, it also clearly points to areas where our teams can have a differentiated conversation and drive immediate client impact. Our second priority is to help clients lead transformation in the new world of leadership. As we shared at Investor Day, relationship size and stickiness correlate strongly with our ability to support clients in multiple ways. This isn't some boiler room cross-selling effort. It's leveraging the access and insight of our exceptional consultants to accelerate client performance in new ways. We enjoy a substantial tailwind in this work. Every leader in every role in every industry has a transformation mandate. It might be to leverage AI or enter new markets or drive cost advantage. Regardless of the destination, this transformation invariably requires new ways of leading and often new leaders and creates a great opportunity for us to partner with them to drive exceptional outcomes. Here's one recent example. The CEO of a major industrial company based in the US was driving a substantial transformation of their portfolio. spinning off several businesses and tightening their corporate focus. While the new structure made great sense on paper, the proof of the transformation would only come by converting the potential of the new structure into sustained high performance. They turned to the leadership of Hydric Consulting's Purpose, Culture, and Performance team to create a plan to align teams globally against the new strategy and drive focus on key outcomes. As you might guess, This work progressed quickly in some areas, leading to sharp performance upticks, but it stalled in others for reasons that are all too common. The new performance goals pointed to some gaps in the company's ability to execute on its strategic agenda. As always, these stalls weren't just a will issue, but were a result of some real gaps in the necessary skills on the client team, such as innovation and technology leadership. This gave our Hydric on-demand team the opportunity to step in with a seasoned interim CIO to accelerate the change effort. As you'd guess, this client has quickly become a major client for Hydric, drawing from various parts of our firm to augment leadership and sustain performance. But more importantly, we helped the client quickly mobilize more than 10,000 colleagues to deliver on the promise of a more focused strategy. The point is that we grow larger and more impactful client relationships by linking our work to ambitious client goals. The great thing about this business attribute is that every economic and or paradigm shift creates a need for new leaders and innovative leadership approaches. These long-term secular are likely to keep expanding, giving us an incredible boost in growing our client impact. Third priority is innovating to create continuous engagement with clients. In our work with leading CEOs, boards, and chief people officers, we continue to see an important theme emerging. Leadership and talent decisions are becoming an always-on activity. This shouldn't be surprising. There has been a step function increase in the annual report language devoted to the economic importance of talent, culture, and succession. And yet, historically, the process for managing this risk has lacked consistency and rigor. We don't expect every company to change how they work overnight, but we also can't imagine a world in which a topic as important as top of the house leadership will be a continued afterthought in ongoing corporate management. And we know that embedding this work at scale in companies will require just the type of at scale tooling that our digital investments are targeting. In sum, as we confront a volatile market, we see enormous opportunities to grow our impact on clients. and thereby our business. We're pleased with our performance in 2024 and see opportunity for even higher performance in 2025 and beyond. Stepping into 2025, we have a clear roadmap for executing on our strategy of creating differentiated, deep, and durable client relationships, which create unrivaled value for clients, colleagues, and shareholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to Nirupalm to provide a detailed review of our financial performance and outlook.