DHI Group, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the DHI Group Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2025 Financial Results Conference Call. All participants will be in 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, Pondo Wilkinson Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to DHI Group's fourth quarter and year-end earnings conference call for 2025. Joining me today are DHI's CEO, Art Zailey, and CFO, Greg Skippers. Before I hand the call over to Art, I'd like to address a few quick items. This afternoon, DHI issued a press release announcing its financial results for the fourth quarter and year-end 2025. 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 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 statements. Lastly, on today's call, management will reference specific financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA margin, free cash flow, and non-GAAP earnings per share. which are not prepared in accordance with U.S. GAAP. Information regarding these non-GAAP measures and reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP measures are available in our earnings release, which, again, can be found on our website at dhigroupinc.com in the Investor Relations section. With that, I'll turn the call over to Art Zaley, CEO of DHI Group.

Thank you, Todd. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Art Zailey, CEO of DHI Group, and with me is Greg Skippers, our CFO. To start, I want to remind everyone that at DHI, our mission is simple. We help employers find and connect with the technology professionals who drive innovation across the U.S. economy. We do this through our two brands, Clearance Jobs and Dice, both with strong positions in attractive markets. Our model is straightforward. More than 90% of our revenue comes from annual or multi-year subscriptions. Customers who are employers or recruiters use our platforms to search for, engage with, and recruit tech talent. Our exclusive focus on tech occupations along with our ongoing product innovation gives us a durable competitive advantage. Clearance jobs is the leading marketplace for professionals with active US security clearances, serving approximately 1,800 customers, including Lockheed, Booz Allen Hamilton, Leidos, Raytheon, and many others. With 1.9 million candidates on our platform, we have the largest number of profiles of US cleared professionals, giving CJ a significant competitive advantage as a platform for hiring cleared tech talent for the defense sector. Dice is essentially LinkedIn for tech hiring, built over 35 years with 7.7 million profiles in our database, representing the vast majority of technology professionals in the United States. While LinkedIn emphasizes a person's title, we focus on tech skills, of which there are over 100,000 distinct skills in our data model. Tech professionals on Dice actively update their profiles with new skills, making Dice the most relevant platform for recruiters who need to source tech talent. Both businesses generate strong recurring revenue and robust EBITDA margins, particularly at clearance jobs, where margins run at or above 40%, and helps drive strong free cash flow conversion. Investors often mistake us for a staffing and recruiting firm. But we are an essential software tool used by employers and recruiters to find top tech talent for their open positions. Approximately 6,000 employers and staffing companies subscribe to our two SaaS platforms. Now, I would like to provide an overview of our brand performance this quarter and outline the steps we've taken to improve our position moving forward. Starting with clearance jobs, we believe the fourth quarter marked an inflection point. Bookings returned a positive year-over-year growth in the quarter, following a decline in the third quarter. This improvement reflects both market tailwinds and improved sales execution following leadership changes earlier in the year. The $1 trillion US defense budget for fiscal year 2026 marks an enormous single-year increase over the previous year's budget. Historically, the defense budget has grown roughly in line with GDP growth rates of around 3%. So this is a significant year-over-year increase. Also, NATO countries are boosting defense spending with a target of 5% of their GDPs, which would represent a spending increase of more than $500 billion per year, with US contractors likely to secure a significant portion of this incremental spend. Traditionally, over 60% of EU defense procurement spending goes to US military contractors. These dynamics are promising for clearance jobs. With over 10,000 employers of cleared tech professionals and more than 100 government agencies in need of cleared tech professionals, CJ has a significant growth opportunity as government contractors look to staff new projects. We are also excited about the progress that we have made with our Agile ATS acquisition. It has been integrated with clearance jobs and we have doubled its revenue in less than six months. This acquisition is a clear illustration of what we can, that we can, quote unquote, expand the mission for clearance jobs and leverage the solid relationships we have built with 1,800 military contractors over the past 24 years. Looking back, we have almost doubled the revenue of clearance jobs in the last five years, and we continue to expect clearance jobs to be our primary growth engine in the near and medium term, as defense contractors are increasingly ramping up hiring activity in anticipation of funded programs. We also continue to innovate within clearance jobs. During the quarter, we piloted a premium candidate subscription. initially marketing it to a very small subset of our database. Early results were encouraging, validating the concept as a new recurring revenue stream. Broader marketing to our full candidate base will occur in stages during 2026, and we expect this to become a more meaningful contributor over time. Turning to Dice, the commercial technology hiring environment remains challenging. Dice's performance in the fourth quarter improved in that the rate of decline narrowed, but both bookings and revenue were still down year over year. We believe Dice is well positioned to benefit as broader commercial tech hiring accelerates, but we are not assuming a return to bookings growth in Dice until the tech hiring market returns to growth. Industry data continues to show that overall tech job postings are largely flat compared with late 2024. neither materially better nor worse. That said, tech staffing trends have improved meaningfully. Staffing industry analysts, SIA, now suggests that U.S. tech staffing declined by about 10% in 2023, 6% in 2024, and about 2% in 2025, with growth projected to return in 2026. During the quarter, we continued our rollout of the Dice Employer Experience, an online self-service platform. The platform serves two strategic purposes. First, it expands our addressable market, particularly among commercial employers who want flexible, lower commitment access to Dice through monthly subscriptions or individual job postings. Second, it improves operating efficiency by enabling greater self-service in all our customer relationships. Importantly, Dice Employer Experience is a platform transition, a full-scale rewrite of our Dice code base. Customers will be fully migrated into the new platform by the end of Q1, moving to a modernized interface and workflow, allowing for faster and more efficient new and enhanced product releases. A key long-term demand driver across Dice and the broader tech labor market continues to be AI-related hiring. At the end of 2025, 55% of Dice job postings required AI-related skills, up from 28% a year earlier. Dice differentiates itself through its deep AI skills taxonomy, which covers more than 360 distinct AI-related skills. Rather than treating AI as a single generic category, DICE enables employers to identify and match candidates based on specific, validated skill sets, an increasingly critical capability as AI roles become more specialized. We believe this depth of skill intelligence positions DICE as a differentiated platform for AI talent over the long term. Looking ahead, we expect clearance jobs to deliver continued growth driven by defense spending, improved execution, and our expanded offerings. Clearance Jobs operates in a specialized high barrier market at the intersection of defense, security, and technology, with significant upside from defense budget growth and NATO spending. For DICE, while we believe it is increasingly becoming the go-to destination for AI talent acquisition, we expect it to continue to be challenged until the commercial tech hiring market returns to growth. Having said that, Our subscription model and margin structure give us resilience and allows us to deliver significant free cash flow. We are confident in our ability to deliver strong free cash flow going forward and continue to believe the market doesn't fully reflect the value of each of our distinct brands today, which is why our board authorized a new $10 million buyback program starting this month. Over time, as we execute, grow our customer base, and delivers solid profits and robust free cash flow, we see a clear path to continued meaningful shareholder value creation. With that, I'll turn the call over to Greg to walk you through the financial results and our guidance in more detail. Greg?