ZipRecruiter, Inc.

Thank you for standing by. My name is Carly and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Zip Recruiter Inc. Second Quarter 2025 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 this time, simply press star followed by the number 1 on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. Thank you. I would now like to turn the conference over to Emilio Sartori, Investor Relations. You may begin.

Thank you, operator, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us

on our earnings conference call during which we will discuss Zip Recruiter's performance for the quarter ended June 30th, 2025, and guidance for the third quarter 2025. Joining me on the call today are Evan Siegel, co-founder and CEO, David Travers, President, and Tim Yarbrough, CFO. Before we begin, please be reminded that forward-looking statements made today are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and or the future financial performance of Zip Recruiter. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements. A discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements can be found in Zip Recruiter's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30th, 2025, which is available on our investor website and the SEC's website. The forward-looking statements in this conference call are based on the current expectations as of today, and Zip Recruiter assumes no obligation to update or revise them whether as a result of news of elements or otherwise. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAP financial measures. These non-GAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or in isolation from, GAP results. Reconciliation of the non-GAP metrics to the nearest GAP metrics are included in Zip Recruiter's holder letter and in our Form 10-Q. And now,

I will turn the call over to Ian. Thank you and good afternoon to everyone joining us today. While

the broader labor market remains soft, Zip Recruiter continues to see early signs of momentum. First off, quarterly paid employers, or QPEs, have grown sequentially since Q4, 2024. In Q1, 2025, QPEs were 63.5 thousand, up 10 percent from Q4, 2024. Gap growth represented our largest Q4 to Q1 increase since 2021. QPEs grew another 4 percent sequentially in Q2, 2025. This increasingly resembles the pattern of normal seasonality we saw pre-COVID. Secondly, the decline in popline revenue appears to have stabilized. Q125 revenue of 110.1 million was down 1 percent sequentially. This is in contrast to the sequential decline of 13 percent and 10 percent in Q1 of 2023 and Q1 of 2024 respectively. In Q2 of 2025, revenue grew 2 percent sequentially to 112.2 million. The midpoint of our Q3, 2025 revenue guidance implies another 1 percent sequential increase. These steady signs of stabilization in our business here today gives us increased confidence that a return to modest -over-year revenue growth in Q4 is a likely scenario. Over the past three years, U.S. employers have persistently decreased hiring and the currently employed have switched jobs less often. Navigating this historically challenging labor market has underscored the importance of our resilient brand, innovative product offering, flexible financial model, and robust balance sheets. We believe we are well positioned to emerge from this period as a stronger company poised to capture outsized market share with both employers and job seekers in the years ahead. In Q2, we continue to make steady improvements to our product offerings. Following the 2024 acquisition of Break Room, a workplace rating and job marketplace platform focused on frontline workers, the service has published over 8,000 employer pages with more than 1 million ratings in the U.S. as of July 2025. Further, enterprise customer adoption of Zip Intro is rapidly increasing with scheduled sessions growing by 90 percent -over-quarter as the AI-powered tool rapidly connects employers and job seekers for -to-face conversations. In Q2, we introduce a new feature within our Resonate database for SMBs that uses our AI mapping technology to automatically purpose qualified candidates for open role. This streamlined experience makes it faster and easier for employers to discover strong candidates, resulting in a 12 percent increase in the number of SMB customers who unlocked resumes in Q2 2025 compared to Q1 of 2025. Our long-term focus on product investment coupled with our strong brand and financial stability gives us confidence that Zip recruiters will lead the shift from offline to online recruiting solutions and capitalize on the labor market recovery when it fully materializes. I'll now hand the call over to Dave to share some business highlights. Dave?

Thanks Ian and good afternoon. We continue to focus on product and technology investments that drive better matching and engagement between employers and job seekers. These efforts are what we believe will drive growth in paid employers and revenue for paid employers over time. The 2024 acquisition of Breakroom continues to gain momentum. Since the start of its U.S. rollout in Q4 of 2024, Breakroom has increased the number of employer pages published using aggregated data from frontline workers. As of Q2, Breakroom has published over 8,000 employer pages powered by over 1 million ratings. These pages aim to provide job seekers with a rich, data-driven understanding of working conditions at specific companies to make more informed decisions about their next great opportunity, and we are excited to continue its growth. In 2023, we launched our AI-powered campaign performance optimization solution for enterprise customers, which is designed to provide employers with greater certainty of hitting their campaign targets. In Q2, we further enhanced our bidding model, leading to more efficient spend allocation for employers. Our automated campaign optimization solution was nearly 20% more effective at achieving campaign targets in Q2 compared to the prior quarter. One of our key priorities is to accelerate engagement between employers and job seekers. Zipintro speeds up hiring by using AI to rapidly connect employers and job seekers for -to-face conversations. Our enterprise customer adoption of this tool continues to increase, with interviews more than doubling and scheduled Zipintro sessions increasing by 90% -over-quarter. In Q2, we introduced a new AI-powered feature in our Next Generation Resume Database for SMB employers that automatically suggests qualified candidates for their open roles. This enhancement has streamlined the process for employers, making it even faster and easier for them to find and engage with strong candidates. We're seeing great results from this new feature with a 12% increase in the number of SMB users who unlocked resumes in Q2 compared to the prior quarter. Job seekers found our employers' jobs through various channels, including direct visits to our website, our top-rated mobile apps, traditional web searches, and even generative AI engines. In Q2, we improved our marketplace to make it easier for popular generative AI engines to discover ZipRocreator and see employers' jobs. This resulted in a 58% -over-quarter increase in site service from the Next Generation tool. We believe that reaching job seekers, no matter how they choose to find work, will allow us to continue capturing market share over time. I'll now turn the call over to Tim to review our financial results and guidance. Tim?

Thank you, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. Our second quarter revenue of $112.2 million dollars came in above the midpoint of our guidance and represents a 2% increase -over-quarter. This sequential increase is driven by the continued growth in our quarterly paid employers, which reached $66.3 thousand in Q2, representing a 4% sequential increase in our first Q1 to Q2 sequential increase since 2022. Revenue per paid employer for Q2 was $1,693, down 4% -over-year, and down 2% sequentially. The sequential decrease is primarily a result of the increase in the number of paid employers on the platform, with new and returning paid employers ramping up their hiring campaigns over the course of the quarter. Net loss in the second quarter was $9.5 million dollars, compared to a net income of $7 million in Q2-24 and a net loss of $12.8 million in Q1-25. Adjusted EVITA was $9.3 million dollars, resulting in a margin of 8%. This compares to an adjusted EVITA margin of 23% in Q2 of 2024 and 5% in Q1 of 2025. The -over-year decline in EVITA margin is primarily a result of sales and marketing investments. As of June 30, 2025, our cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities totaled $421.2 million dollars. In Q2, we purchased 10.2 million shares of our Class A common stock for a total of $56.5 million Moving on to guidance, we expect Q3 2025 revenue to be between $110 million and $169 million. The guidance midpoint would represent a 1% increase -to-quarter and, notably, the first time our revenues have grown from Q2 to Q3 since 2021. Our guidance assumes that current trends will continue within a tempered hiring market and dynamic macroeconomic environment. Our adjusted EVITA guidance for Q3 2025 is $6 million at the midpoint, or 5% adjusted EVITA margins. We will continue to be disciplined in our capital deployment and invest in innovative product initiatives and high ROI marketing campaigns. Based on the trends we've observed -to-date, we continue to believe that a return of modest -over-year revenue growth in the fourth quarter, with full-year adjusted EVITA margins in the mid-single business, is a likely scenario. Despite persistent and ongoing macroeconomic challenges, we've maintained adjusted EVITA profitability while investing in our products and technology, remaining confident in achieving our long-term goal of 30% adjusted EVITA margins. Our marketing spend is delivering strong returns, contributing to sequential employer growth -to-date. Our flexible business model allows us to strategically scale investments up or down in response to changes in the hiring environment. Regardless of the state of the labor market, we find it prudent to continue investing in our products and technology to create value on both sides of our marketplace. We remain confident in our ability to navigate the current hiring environment and believe we are well equipped to capitalize on the eventual labor market recovery. With that, we can now open the Q&A window.

Operator?

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question at this time, please press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press star one again. We ask that you please limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. Again, if you would like to ask a question, press star then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from Ralph Shackrack with William Blair.

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. Good to see stabilization in the model. A couple of pictures, please. Let me start off. Can you maybe talk to any differences you might be seeing between SMDs and enterprise and just kind of serious, you know, stabilization talking about and return to growth that's fairly broad-based or maybe

focused within a particular kind of sector? Hey, it's Ian and here's what we're going to say about

what we're seeing in the business. That hiring definitely remains muted, but we are seeing a lot of evidence of both, not just, I guess, stabilization, but also of momentum. And that stands SMD and enterprise. And when you look at it, if you look over the last three quarters in terms of revenue performance, you know, one month was interesting, two months was very interesting, three months becomes much more compelling as we look at what's happened with our sequential revenue growth if we were to hit the projections that we gave you for Q3 in terms of revenue. And the same pattern is playing out with quarterly paid employers. So Q1 was particularly strong this year, particularly relative to the last two years in terms of the growth of Q1 over Q4. And then that growth continued sequentially into Q2. That's got us feeling really confident and feeling like this is a broad-based recovery and that it is spanning businesses of all sizes. That is not to say that the labor market is rebounding. That is to say that it is stabilizing. Certainly the quits rate remains very low at the last decade. And so we're watching all of these metrics closely, but it is encouraging to see that the stabilization that we gave you a scenario for and projected was possible back as early as Q1 has proven to be a pattern that is now manifesting. And should it continue, then it's very likely that

EQ4, the recruiter will return to you over your growth. Great.

And then maybe just one more. Maybe just sequentially compare the last quarter on this call. Maybe you can sort of frame the tenor of the conversations you're having with employers about future hiring needs. And then obviously AIs and every conversation is AI impacting and their future hiring needs as well. Thank you.

Thanks, Ralph. This is Dave. Yes. So we have definitely noticed over the past 90 days that anxiety around tariffs has abated a little bit. And as we've talked to both SMBs and enterprises, you hear a little bit less about that. Despite that, they remain uncertain and the overall hiring market remains soft with times of stabilization as you just described. And as we think about different sectors versus this time last year, as an example, healthcare continues to be a big category that continues to grow in terms of overall demand for new labor. And on the flip side, education, which we see a normal seasonal pattern of picking up in Q2 as schools prepare for the following year, is actually weak compared to the prior year, where there's a real catch-up effort at open teacher roles and other educational jobs. So it's down significantly in education year over year, despite it being up sequentially in the quarter. So those are the big trends. Most of the other sectors sort of net out to down a handful of points year over year. And so that's sort of the main trends we see.

Great. Thanks, Dan. And again, I think you're asked about, did

you ask about AI if you have it? Yeah. I did. I just want to say that, yeah, since we're talking about it, I mean, if you look at the category that would be most likely impacted by AI, you look at technology, it's the one that's had the most headlines, it's the one that's had the most discussion, and that was down 5% -over-quarter on a job posting basis. Sorry, sorry, that was year over year, it was down 5%. And if you look at that down 5%, that puts it squarely in the category of ordinary, meaning that if you look at the broad spectrum of job categories, what you see is that makes it a fairly average decline, putting it nearly effectively the median, which means so far, both quantitatively and qualitatively, we're not seeing significant disruption and or

impact from AI in terms of the number of jobs being posted. Great. Thank you.

Your next question comes from Eric Feridin with Goldman

Sachs.

Thanks so much for taking the question. Maybe just one in two parts. I think during the prepared remarks, you mentioned some of the generated AI agents and making more of your content available to them and possibly deriving traffic and maybe even high-yielding traffic from those sources. Why don't you talk a little about the decision behind that and how you think about those potential AI agents as opposed to maybe more traditional marketing channels becoming sources of traffic and sources of conversion. How you think about free versus paid

contributions from those going forward. Thanks so much. Yeah, I mean, let's do it again. It seems apparent that

the use of various AI answer interfaces, whether it be TrashGDP or Google, I mean, usage of that is increasing dramatically, particularly for research-oriented questions. So those would be questions where job seekers were looking for anything from like, what are the skills required to work in a particular job category to what are the salaries paid for job category or even like what are the ratings or reviews that what do people say about working in a particular company. And so they're in higher and higher volumes. We're seeing the various AI large language models interfaces start to play a bigger role. As far as the growth that we are experiencing, yes, we have always made our site as friendly as possible for the variety of methods job seekers might use to find us. So that track was already long laid. And then what makes it particularly effective is the fact that when we do come up as an answer to the question, we are a brand that is strong enough to be recognized, already carries enough credibility to be that recognition to be a destination from that answer for the job seekers who then go visit. And I think a large part of the explosion in traffic that we saw was coming from the fact that we are being included in these answers and people are using these methods more. That said, I just want to reiterate that while that growth is large on a percentage basis, as a measure of the overall traffic that comes to our site, it is still small. It is a rapidly growing channel that we continue

to watch closely, but it is still an emerging channel. Great, thank you.

Your next question comes from Trevor Young with Barclays.

Great, thanks.

Actually just dovetailing on that prior question. How is AI overviews in hacking paid and organic traffic to the recruiter, whether it's on the employer side or the speaker's side, and any call-outs in terms of which one of those two, either candidates or employers,

that is maybe being more impacted, if at all? So, again, AI overviews are effectively

answers to questions that job seekers type in that appear above blue links and they are being used in increasing volume for those research type questions that job seekers have when they are performing job search. So it's certainly impacting job seeker traffic in terms of those that are doing research. In terms of active or engaged job seekers who are actively looking for work, it is having a very small impact and in fact when we look internally at that population, not only is it extremely healthy on the job seeker side, continuing the trends and momentum that we've been talking about for the last 18 months, but further the traffic that's being delivered is highly engaged and very active in their job searches on ZipRecruiter. So AI answers has been a tailwind for ZipRecruiter over the past three months in terms of driving high-intent uses

to ZipRecruiter from which we are then helping them find work. Great, thank you for that, Ian. And as a follow

-up, implementing AI features to help more employers streamline the whole hiring process, how do you think about guardrails on that to ensure compliance with all hiring regulations? There's some notable lawsuits getting headlines in the last few months around some other AI recruiting tools in market and I'm sure you're looking to steer

as far clear of those types of issues as you can. Well, ZipRecruiter is no stranger to experimenting with

a wide variety of applications of AI. I would say we have been at the forefront with our AI personal recruiter Phil who has been assisting job seekers for

many

years at this point and go over that for us one, you can see all the various things that Phil is doing and he does so in a variety of different ways. We also deploy AI in terms of what we do with our employers, but we are deeply thoughtful and have been very careful to make sure we abide by all hiring laws and part of the work we do is to make sure and ensure that when we deploy technology it is doing the things that we expected to do with the guardrails that you talked about. So we are aware of the lawsuits that you talked about. I don't believe they pose a risk to ZipRecruiter and I feel that the innovations that we've been rolling out will continue to roll out with appropriate review and

confirmation with what the laws require as we go forward. Great, thank you very much.

Again if you would

like to ask a question please press star, send the number one on your telephone keypad. Your next question comes from Justin Patterson with KeyBank.

Great, thanks for taking the question. This is Miles Chikubiak on

for Justin.

I

would like to ask about ZipIntro to start. It was really impressive adoption there. I was wondering if you could talk about how this is impacting hiring outcomes and just how it's resonating with employers and job seekers given that impressive growth. And then just one quick follow-up on that really impressive growth last quarter given the market on paid employers. So just curious how you've or what areas you've seen success in driving sequential

paid employers growth during this market. Thank you. Yeah this is Ian again. I will take the ZipIntro question. We're

really excited about ZipIntro and it's one of the premier innovations that we brought to market. The fundamental thing that it does so well is it gets job seekers and employers face to face in a very very short window of time. Both sides are highly engaged and the volume of response that employers are getting is significantly higher when they make themselves available to talk face to face with job seekers which as employers discover this phenomenon the advantage it conserves in their hiring process is driving not only these initial adoptions of the ongoing utilization. So this is something where I would expect us to continue to invest. I think the market is responding with real positivity to it. I think we're finding product market fit with it and we're going to be undoubtedly

investing and expanding with it over time. And this is Tim, Paul,

and just the second part of your question on paid employer growth. So Marcy said we've had some healthy paid employer growth over the course of the year. So up 10% sequentially in Q1 and then another 4% in Q2. And as we mentioned before our customer base largely reflects the U.S. economy. So Dave mentioned that healthcare has been sequentially strong, eating strong on a -to-year basis and that's largely reflected in our paid employer base as well. And we saw again relative strength in areas such as education which is up sequentially and then even in transportation storage along those lines. So that's been particularly interesting

to us. But largely reflected in the overall economy. Okay, thank you.

Your next question comes from Josh Chan with UBS.

Hi, good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. So I appreciate the comments about stabilization not being a rebound. I guess, you know, at the same time, you know, when you talk about paid employers growing and expecting them to ramp in their hiring, that sounds a bit more like recovery than a stabilization. So could you just kind of like reconcile how you think about the end market and where you think we are at the labor

cycle if you will? Thank you.

Hey Josh, this is Dave. Thanks, great question. Yeah, so we, you know, we see the labor market still being frozen based on quick trade and soft hiring rate versus sort of pre-COVID normal in terms of significant pooling over the past three years or so as we discussed at length of this call and previously. And to your point exactly, we feel great about growing paid employers by 15% over the past two quarters. You know, 10% last quarter, 4% this quarter. That feels really positive and is what we would expect during the stabilization period of performance for us despite the challenging and uncertain backdrop. So, you know, what we see going forward is we are increasingly optimistic about the scenario where we get that fewer of a regression in Q4 and that is only one of the data points that makes us optimistic about that.

Okay, thanks Mark. And I guess when you do get back to -over-year growth in Q4, I appreciate that the guidance is for missing with the margins for the year. How quickly do you think margins can lever any improved revenue trends? Should you

see them kind of in the ensuing quarters? Hey, Dr. Sint. I think a lot of

that will depend on the shape of 2026 macroeconomically and then the progress that we see against some of the initiatives that we've been outlining during the last couple of calls. Just as a reminder, we, when we're making our decisions on significant investing in social marketing in particular, we're doing so from a bottom-up perspective. Responding to the environment that we see and investing into areas of opportunity as they materialize and then doing so with a high degree of confidence because we have a lot of track record now of seeing how different employer cohorts mature over time and come back to us when they have higher needs if they are more age-mitten. And so that results in the margins that we're signaling as a likely scenario for this year missing the digit margins. Now, to the extent that we see a considerable amount of strength, then that means we'll invest in that strength and we'll see revenue growth and then give it the margins follow over time. But as a historical context, we saw margins in the 20% range when we were at the height of the high market back in 2022. And so the difference between where we're at today and our long-term margins of 30% will largely be a function

of the opportunities that we see between here and then. Great. Thank you, Wilfawa and good luck in the second half.

Your next question comes from Doug Edmuth with KPMorgan.

Hi, this is Neeraj from Doug. I just had a question on, you know, just pricing and monetization. So, I know, you know, job openings in the US have continued to remain big, but could you talk about the ability to improve pricing and monetization over time

as

we continue to provide better

quality candidates to employers? This is Ian. I think when you look at a 32

-month decline year over year in the number of hires that are going on, that that is not the optimal time to try to raise prices on customers. But we have not been sitting idle. We've made numerous investments in just straightforward optimizations. We have announced multiple significant innovations that we've rolled out to both veteran forum job seekers as well as getting talking face to face with employers faster. Both sides of our marketplace are growing and thriving and appreciating the service we deliver. Certainly monetization remains available to us, particularly as we start to not just see stabilization, but we start to see a recovery. Our philosophy internally is one where we deliver value first, get people to adopt the solutions that we provide, and then extract value from them. I feel really good about where our strategy is out right now, not just in terms of the health of the marketplace, but also the adoption of the novel innovations that we're bringing to market and the speed with which they are growing. Definitely in the future, increasing monetization is a tool that is available to us and one we are focused on, but we will not do it while we are in this period of protracted decline in demand for recruiting

services and protracted decline in the quick rate in the U.S. Great, thank you.

Your final question comes from Glenn Schell

with Raymond James.

Great, thanks. Just one from us. I'm on for Josh Beck with Workroom rolling out in the U.S. and now with over a million ratings. Where do you see this edit in the years ahead and where could the impact show up across your traditional KPIs?

Thanks Glenn, this is Dave. Yes, we're very excited about Break Freeing based on getting past a million job seekers who are already giving us ratings and thousands of their major companies that now have a very meaningful rating there, et cetera, et cetera. But we're early on in our journey and so there I think there's exciting opportunities for us from an employer branding perspective and helping employers with that. The other area where we're excited about that is from a job seeker perspective, which is we see job seekers more confident and that confidence comes through in their behavior when they're more educated about the job and about what a workplace is like before they go to work there. So if you think about a front line worker who goes into an workplace that has loud vehicles or knowing that they have to stand up for several hours at a time or something like that, you want to know that going in and not have that be a surprise and there's some jobs where that's a non-negotiable item and many, many others. And so we're going to see that in terms of the number of job seekers that are attracted to us because you give them better information about what it's really like to work somewhere. We're going to see that in terms of that and subsequently apply and accept the position and we're going to see it with employers because it's another way to provide value for them that we believe they will pay for over time, as Ian said, as we first prove value and then think about how we capitalize on the value that we've created that employers will, that will be part of the monetization overall. We look forward to updating you more on that as the core

reason you're strong. Thank you.

This concludes today's

question and answer session and concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.