DHI Group, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to the DHI Group's fiscal 2021 second quarter conference call. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Todd Curley of MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to DHI Group's fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings conference call. With me on today's call are DHI's CEO, Art Zailey, and Chief Financial Officer, Kevin Bostic. Before I turn the call over to Art, I'd like to cover a few quick items. This afternoon, DHI issued a press release announcing its fiscal 2021 second quarter financial results. The release is available on the company's website at dhigroupinc.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 historical information, statements on today's call may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. When used, the words anticipate, believe, expect, intend, future, and other similar expressions identify forward-looking statements. 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 delays in development, marketing or sales, the adverse impact of an uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic, and other 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 Commissions. DHI undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements. Lastly, during today's call, management will be referring to specific financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, adjusted earnings per share, and net debt that are not prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Information about and reconciliations of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release and on our website at dhigroupinc.com in the investor relations section. With that, I'll now turn the conference call over to Art Zailey, CEO of DHI Group.

Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal 2021 second quarter earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us today. Before we begin, I want to remind everyone that we completed the spinoff of a majority of our e-financial careers business on June 30th to the EFC management team. With the disposition of EFC, DHI is now solely focused on the technology career marketplace in the United States through our two brands, Dice and Clearance Jobs. We believe this focus will allow us to accelerate our bookings and revenue growth and further drive product excellence in both our remaining platforms. Turning to Dice and CJ, I will provide highlights of the quarter, and then I'll dig deeper into our sales performance and our expectations for increased revenue growth in the second half of the year. I am pleased to report another strong quarter of bookings for DHI. Our bookings strengthened across all teams throughout the quarter, and we ended the period with total bookings growth of 23% year over year. As a result of our strong bookings performance, DHI returned to total revenue growth year over year, a quarter earlier than expected, and for the first time in several years. The second quarter represents a revenue inflection point for DHI Group, as we have turned the corner and are now on an upward revenue growth trajectory. We created the industry-leading online marketplace for matching companies with the highest quality tech professionals and with enterprises focused on tech-enabling their businesses we are poised to benefit from the millions of new technologist jobs expected over the next five years. Now let me dig into our brands and their performance during the quarter and where we see them heading this fiscal year. Let's start with Dice, which is our largest opportunity for revenue growth. Tech job postings continue to increase in the second quarter. According to CompTIA, job postings for open IT positions surpassed 365,000 in May, the highest monthly total since September of 2019. An employer's search for new tech talent reached a level not seen in nearly two years. These stats indicate significant job posting activity and support the Microsoft report issued last summer that predicts that worldwide digital jobs will grow from 41 million in 2020 to 190 million in 2025. Today there are approximately 3,000 companies in the United States that have 20 or more open tech job postings. One of the strongest indicators of the continuing strength in tech hiring is the increased activity across the top 50 companies hiring in the United States. During the second quarter, 82% of these organizations increased their hiring compared to the first quarter. These companies hailed from a number of different sectors including tech, defense, healthcare, and finance. Individual companies and the staffing and recruiting firms that service them will need tools like DICE to find qualified candidates to fill these millions of new tech jobs. As a result of this rebound in tech hiring, we saw our DICE bookings and revenue renewal rates increase substantially in the second quarter. Our bookings for dice increased 25% year over year and our revenue renewal rate increased to 89%, a sequential improvement of seven percentage points versus first quarter. As I've said before, we spent 2019 and 2020 building a better product. And now in 2021, we are capitalizing on that product innovation through accelerated sales and marketing efforts. As a SaaS-based business, our revenue follows bookings. And with our solid bookings growth over the past several quarters, we expect our total revenue growth to increase throughout the remainder of 2021 and beyond as we continue to execute on our growth plan. We have two large growth opportunities in front of us with Dice. Dice Commercial Accounts is our largest white space opportunity, with tens of thousands of companies in the United States looking to hire high-quality tech professionals. The staffing and recruiting market opportunity for Dice also remains significant, as there are over 18,000 staffing and recruiting firms in the United States alone, and today we service approximately 4,000 of them. We continue to focus our marketing spend on generating more qualified leads to fuel our new business team's growth, both for commercial and staffing accounts, and we've seen good results from this investment over the past several quarters. We handily beat our targets for marketing qualified leads delivered to our new business teams during the quarter, which significantly advanced our new business bookings. As a result, our Dice customer base has grown sequentially for the second consecutive quarter. The new client branding campaign we initiated in the first quarter for Dice with the tagline, Where Tech Connects, has driven significant increases in client traffic to our sites and has had a very positive impact on driving more marketing qualified leads. It has been several years since we've actively marketed the Dice brand, and with the launch of Dice Marketplace, we are excited to make sure everyone knows about it. We are in the midst of rolling out a new Dice technologist branding campaign, which we expect will result in driving even more candidate traffic to our sites. thereby increasing the value of our marketplace. Now I'd like to turn my attention to clearance jobs. CJ's second quarter revenue grew 15% year over year, and their sales team performed well during the quarter with bookings growth of 17% over the prior year. The revenue renewal rate for CJ remains very healthy at 97%. The strong bookings we saw in the second quarter gives us confidence in CJ's continued revenue growth. Also, we continue to work hard on expanding CJ's addressable market by making direct sales to U.S. government agencies. In the second quarter, we signed contracts with the Department of Navy, Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The market opportunity for CJ with government agencies is largely untapped and we see it as a significant growth opportunity as we move forward. Speaking of the significant opportunity for growth ahead for both Dice and CJ, this quarter we added two new sales leaders and we have added 16 new sales positions so far this year, increasing the team's strength by approximately 20%. We have created the industry-leading online marketplaces for matching companies with the highest quality tech professionals. And we believe we can capitalize on the millions of new technologist positions being created over the next several years. The success we've had to date executing on our business plan gives us confidence in our ability to continue to grow revenue, which we believe will steadily increase each quarter as we move through the remainder of this year. We look forward to sharing our progress throughout the rest of 2021. And 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?