DHI Group, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the DHI Group Incorporated fourth quarter and full year 2021 financial results. 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 a touchtone phone. 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, MKR Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon and welcome to DHI Group's fiscal 2021 fourth 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 fourth quarter and full year 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 the 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 statement. Factors that could cause these forward-looking statements to differ from actual results include delays in development, marketing or sales, and 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 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, and adjusted earnings per share 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 the earnings release and on our website at dhigroupinc.com in the investor relations section. And I'll turn the call over to Art Zailey, CEO of DHR Group.

Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our fiscal 2021 fourth quarter and full year earnings conference call. Thank you for joining us today. In 2021, we focused on improving our industry-leading subscription software tools, which we sell into the technology career marketplace through our two brands, Dice and Clearance Jobs. This focus, along with the significant investments we have made to improve our products and sales and marketing over the past year, has allowed us to accelerate our bookings and revenue growth on both platforms during the second half of 2021. As a result, We finished the year strong with fourth quarter total revenue growth of 25% year-over-year and total bookings growth of 35% year-over-year as more employers use our subscription software tools. As the demand for technologists continues to grow at a rapid pace and the unemployment rate for technologists remains at an all-time low, employers need sophisticated tools like ours to find, attract, and engage with the right tech candidates. Dice and Clearance Jobs are tech-focused career marketplaces that attract the highest quality tech professionals and enable employers to find and engage these skilled candidates on our platforms as they look to fill the millions of new technology jobs being added over the next five years. Enabling our customers to use our patent-pending skills mapping technology to find and engage with the best tech candidates is a substantial competitive advantage for both DICE and clearance jobs and significantly differentiates our offering from other well-known career sites. Unlike these sites, we are solely focused on serving the technology market where candidates are measured on the technology skills they have acquired over their career and not a simple job title. Demand for these skilled technology candidates continues to increase as employers require more technologists to drive their evolving digital strategies. As we recently reported in our annual DICE tech salary report, it is a great time to be a technologist, with salaries increasing almost across the board, and the average annual tech salary hitting a record level of $105,000, up 6.9% year over year. This increase shows that organizations are responding to the heightened need for tech talent. Tools like Dice and clearance jobs are imperative to find, attract, and engage these tech candidates. Now let me dig into both of our brands' performance during the quarter and where we see them heading. Let's start with Dice, which is our largest opportunity for total revenue growth. Our bookings for Dice increased 35% year-over-year in the fourth quarter, and our revenue renewal rate remained strong at 91%. All of this resulted in our Dice revenue for the quarter increasing 9% sequentially and 26% year-over-year. Dice has two opportunities for expansion in front of it, as it directly serves the growing market demand for technologists. Dice Commercial Accounts is our largest white space opportunity. with tens of thousands of companies in the US looking to hire high quality tech professionals. These are companies like 7-Eleven, Volvo, First Citizens Bank, and the University of Southern California that are using our tool internally to find and engage the right technologists to fuel their digital strategies. We believe that there are over 80,000 companies in the United States that have at least 10 open tech job postings. And each one of these companies is a target for our commercial account sales team to sell the Dice subscription software offering. The staffing and recruiting industry is the second growth opportunity for Dice, with over 18,000 staffing and recruiting firms operating in the United States. Today, we service approximately 4,000 of them, leaving us with a significant opportunity to expand our reach into these clients. To capitalize on these two growth opportunities, we added incremental new business sales professionals during the year, increasing our quota-bearing sales team capacity by almost 20%. We also increased our marketing span to generate more qualified leads to fuel our expanding new business teams. Over the past several quarters, we have generated a significant return on our investment. In the fourth quarter, we exceeded our targets for marketing qualified leads and our new business teams were successful in converting leads to new clients. As a result, our Dice customer base grew sequentially for the fourth consecutive quarter, adding over 230 net new clients. We also initiated a new Dice branding awareness campaign, focused on reintroducing our Dice brand to the more than 12 million technologists in the United States, with the goal of driving new registrations, and profile creations. These new digital marketing campaigns launched in September of 2021 include static and video advertising on LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and Twitch. We have also engaged with several tech influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram and YouTube. We are focused on those tech candidates that have less than 10 years of experience. We've invested significantly over the past several years to make Dice the industry-leading marketplace for tech professionals, and now we are ramping up our marketing to these millions of technologists to come check us out. As a result of this new investment in marketing, we are seeing higher reach and engagement metrics that resulted in increased traffic on Dice, and we are now adding 33,000 new candidate registrations per month. Now let's talk about clearance jobs. CJ's fourth quarter revenue grew 23% year over year, and their sales team also performed extremely well during the quarter, with bookings growth of 35% over the prior year. CJ's revenue renewal rate remains exceptional at 105%. CJ also reached new milestones for new candidate registrations and job postings during the quarter. As with Dice, we have two growth opportunities with CJ. The first is the government contractor market. We currently have approximately 1,800 contractor clients, but know that 10,000 plus can use our services. As with Dice, we have increased our marketing spend to further penetrate this target market. In the fourth quarter, Our CJ new business team was successful in converting leads to new clients. And as a result, our CJ customer base grew sequentially once again, adding over 60 net new clients. CJ's second opportunity for expansion is selling its subscription software directly to the multitude of US government agencies that are in need of highly qualified technologists and are competing against the private sector for these candidates. We continued to advance our relationships with U.S. government agency clients during the quarter, including the CIA and Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. CJ sales and marketing teams continue to execute on their growth plans to further penetrate these two market opportunities as evidenced by their solid bookings growth during the quarter. As we exited 2021, for both brands, we saw continued strong interest from our clients. finishing the year with significant momentum and are primed for continued double-digit revenue growth. Last year, approximately two-thirds of our new business team members across Dice and CJ were at or above quota as a result of comprehensive training, lead generation to support them, and of course, their hard work and dedication. In 2022, we will be increasing our investment in our proven sales and marketing engine as we look to capitalize on the large and growing market for tech professionals. We will again be adding new sales heads during the year to our new business teams with the goal of increasing our quota-bearing team capacity by 20% in 2022. We will also be increasing our investment in marketing, both to clients and candidates, as a result of the success we've seen from our new digital marketing campaigns with the goal of driving increased qualified leads as well as new candidate registrations and profiles. We've created the industry-leading tools for matching employers with the highest quality tech professionals, and we believe we can capitalize on the millions of new technologist jobs being created over the next several years, selling our subscription software to the companies, government agencies, and staffing and recruiting firms that will be looking to fill these jobs. The success we've had to date with our proven sales and marketing strategy gives us confidence in our ability to continue to grow revenue at a strong double-digit growth rate going forward as we further penetrate our large target market opportunities. 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?