DHI Group at LD Micro Main Event: Strategic Growth Amid Challenges

On Monday, 20 October 2025, DHI Group (NYSE:DHX) presented at the LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference, outlining its robust performance and strategic initiatives. Despite facing a challenging hiring environment due to rising interest rates, the company expressed optimism, driven by a strong demand for tech professionals with AI skills. DHI’s focus on its subscription-based revenue model and innovative platforms, Dice and ClearanceJobs, underscores its competitive edge in the market.

Key Takeaways

• DHI Group reported $142 million in revenue for 2024, with 90% recurring from subscription contracts.
• The company achieved an adjusted EBITDA of $35 million, with a margin of 25%.
• Dice and ClearanceJobs are pivotal platforms, with ClearanceJobs benefiting from defense budget tailwinds.
• DHI is enhancing its offerings with the acquisition of Agile ATS for $2 million.
• The company targets a free cash flow of 10% of revenue annually.

Financial Results

• Revenue & Bookings: $142 million in revenue and $141 million in bookings for 2024, with a 6% CAGR over five years.
• Adjusted EBITDA: $35 million, representing a 25% margin, with a target of 26% for 2025.
• Cash Flow & CapEx: Operating cash flow of $21 million and CapEx of $14 million.
• Debt & Share Repurchases: Debt leverage reduced to less than 1x EBITDA, with $2 million in share repurchases.

Operational Updates

• Platform Enhancements: Launched a self-service option for Dice subscriptions and tested a new premium candidate experience for ClearanceJobs.
• Acquisition: Acquired Agile ATS, doubling its customer base in three months.
• Market Position: Dice is recognized as a leading tech and IT job site, while ClearanceJobs dominates the security-cleared professional market.

Future Outlook

• Growth Drivers: Anticipates growth from a normalized hiring environment for Dice and defense budget tailwinds for ClearanceJobs.
• AI Demand: Increasing demand for AI skills, with 50% of Dice job postings requiring AI expertise.
• Product Initiatives: Focus on integrating Agile ATS with ClearanceJobs to enhance candidate tracking.

Q&A Highlights

• Market Trends: Tech job postings are at 70% of normal levels, with AI skills demand rising from 10% to 50%.
• Acquisition Rationale: Agile ATS complements ClearanceJobs, offering synergies with its 1,900 customers.
• Economic Concerns: Hiring caution persists due to tariffs and economic uncertainties, yet AI-related job postings are surging.

For a deeper dive into DHI Group’s strategic plans and financial outlook, refer to the full conference transcript below.

Full transcript - LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference:

Unidentified speaker: Our capabilities, and we want to essentially ever be more relevant to our community. This year, we created a brand new self-service option to buy and manage your Dice subscription online. We are also in midst of testing, like literally as of two weeks ago, our new ClearanceJobs premium candidate experience, which is the first time that we’re actually monetizing the candidate side of our marketplace. We’ve always been receiving our revenue streams from our clients. So we make money by charging our clients for subscription based contracts.

It’s very important to understand that about 92% of our revenue comes from one year or more subscription contracts. So we are a recurring revenue business as a result. So if you think about our financial overview for the year 2024, here is a quick summary. Five year CAGR trends are also included. DHI drove 142,000,000 in revenue last year with $141,000,000 of bookings, five year CAGRs for each are 6%.

Our adjusted EBITDA was $35,000,000 resulting in a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin. Our guidance for this year is 26. We delivered $21,000,000 in operating cash flow and spent $14,000,000 on CapEx. Almost all of our CapEx, being a software company, is capitalized labor used in software development, and that’s per GAAP accounting standards. And so we have significantly reduced CapEx, and you’ll see that in the financial statements that we deliver in the latter part of this presentation on a quarterly basis.

We instituted a share buyback program at the beginning of this year, in January specifically, which had been suspended since the 2023. As a result, we ended 2024 with less than 1x EBITDA or debt leverage. The $2,000,000 of share repurchases indicated here also includes shares that were repurchased under our buyback program from net settlement of employee grant vesting. So DHI offers candidates specifically that cannot be found elsewhere. In the case of Dice, our biggest competitor is LinkedIn, and I’m gonna spend a little bit of time talking about that.

In the case of ClearanceJobs, we really do not have a competitor because you’re not supposed to use LinkedIn if you have a security clearance in The United States. The bottom line is that The United States has become more of a tech oriented economy over the course of the last twenty five years. Generally speaking, each year, the tech workforce has grown approximately 3%. Roughly 20 to 30% of our candidates can be found on alternative sites like LinkedIn or Career Plus Monster, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, speaking about the Dice community, but they do not have up to date profiles. They generally do not respond to in mails.

So this is a very specifically tech oriented professional community. ClearanceJobs, as I said, is the dominant leader in its market. It really doesn’t have natural competition in the form of any alternative career marketplace. It has no field for government clearance. And again, the individual candidates are not supposed to be using LinkedIn because there is a government executive order that says that it is a place where foreign spies are found.

So if you think about the basic return on investment that we deliver to our clients, these recruiters that are either in staffing firms or in commercial business in The United States, It is associated with their choices of how they find tech candidates. Tech professionals in general are very well compensated. The average salary for a tech worker in The United States last year was a $111,000, whereas the average US worker made approximately $50,000. So as a company, if you are interested in finding one of these tech professionals, you have two choices. You either use a external recruiter or you do the search yourself.

If you use a recruiter, you will generally be charged 20% to 25% of the first year’s salary. The alternative is to pay for the Dice or ClearanceJobs platform, which roughly run $8,000 and $15,000 for entry level one year subscription and engage with the tech talent and bring them on yourself. So even one hire under either one of the platforms for a year long license justifies the return on investment compared to using an external recruiter. And we’re usually looking for companies that have five or more tech hires as our ideal candidate profile for both platforms. So our value to the tech industry was validated by Forbes Magazine in 2024.

It announced Dice as the number one career site for tech and IT jobs. The elevated interest rate environment has obviously downshifted the demand for hiring, and that’s demand for hiring across all sectors, not just technology, but all sectors clearly. And that was the intended result of the Federal Reserve to essentially lower the interest or I should say the inflationary environment by working on inflation that’s associated with wages. And nevertheless, the famous quote is that every company has become a software business now. Because of that reliance on technology in the basic operations of just about every business model in The United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and CompTIA have generated this forecast of growth of 18% from 2024 through 2034 in terms of the tech workforce.

That rate of growth is approximately twice the rate of growth of the overall workforce in The United States. So forecasting very healthy tech growth. It’s probably very difficult to see on the right hand pane, but the growth is really coming in those occupations, those skill sets that you would logically suspect. There is an ever greater demand for data scientists and for engineers to manage and hire and enable AI inside of their work streams. And also, there is an ever larger number of cybersecurity analysts and engineers that are gonna be needed to protect us against the threat environment.

So I told you earlier that a focus on skills is what makes us very different and unique. Like I told you, LinkedIn uses a paradigm based on titles and a concept of soft skills like public speaking. But we have a taxonomy that was given a US patent about three years ago that includes over a 100,000 technology skills and how they are interrelated. And so we fundamentally search based on the skills that are requested by a job posting, not based on the title. In fact, if you looked at the title of most people that have been in the software development world for several years, you’d find that their last title, senior software developer, might be the title that they maintained for literally twenty to thirty years of their career.

So titles really mean very little in this environment. And we win because we’re a specialist in these technology skills. So here are two case studies that demonstrate kind of the return of investment that you get by using these platforms. Leidos has been a client of ClearanceJobs for over ten years and has increasingly and continuously increased its spend with us. Montefiore Healthcare System, which is a very large health care system in New York City, has also been a client for Dice for the last ten years and has doubled its spend with us over the course of that time.

In fact, Montefiore’s case study illustrates something that is kind of a misnomer when it comes to people thinking about our platform, Dice. They think that we mostly cater to big tech and we definitely have Amazon and Meta and Google and a number of big tech companies as clients. But I would argue that our value proposition is actually more important to less glamorous or less well known companies inside of The United States economy because every single technologist pretty much knows how to find the career page at Amazon or Google, but they don’t know the, you know, career page or the opportunities that are available at Bloomberg or Disney or Montefiore and all these other companies that are part of our 4,400 clients on Dice. So we have a large target addressable market for each one of these platforms. In the case of ClearanceJobs, we have approximately 1,900 clients today that are subscribers.

The government has publicly stated that there are over 10,000 individual companies that are granted a facility clearance, meaning that they have the ability to have a cleared worker in their facilities. So we have a long way to go to get to the full 10,000. There are over a 100 federal agencies that also exist that could be clients of ours. Today, we have the usual suspects, FBI, CIA, NSA, NRO, Department of Navy, multiple laboratories. In the case of Dice, we also have a very large target addressable market.

We have 4,400 subscription clients today, and we know that over many tens of thousands fit our ideal customer profile. Additionally, we have about half of the staffing firms that focus on tech in The United States, but we definitely are focused on the other half that we do not have. So I’ll take a stop here and talk about how we make money before we get into the financial performance. The quick summary is that we have strong visibility into future revenue. Clients pay us for the access to our platforms.

There is no charge today for candidates. But as I indicated earlier, we have a premium candidate subscription that’s coming for clearance jobs. It’s in beta testing right now. We have a one year minimum contract. About 25% of our customers are on two and three year contracts.

So over 90% of our revenue is ultimately recurring in nature. And we shape our contracts based on the number of profile views consume. So if you do a search on our database, you will find multiple candidates for the job posting that you are interested in filling. Each time you double click on a profile, you are charged one individual profile view. And the bottom line is that there are companies like Robert Half, which is one of our largest customers, that have tens of thousands of profile views that are part of its subscription.

But a typical company would have 500 per month because they would have a lot lower need. So we shape the contracts to the number of profile views that are of interest to the companies themselves. So now I’ll take you into our annual performance metrics for DHI group as a whole, but also to Dice and ClearanceJobs. DHI bookings, which represent the value of our contracts to be recognized as revenue within the next twelve months of the contract start date, have risen at a 6% CAGR since 2020, and revenue has also risen at a 6% CAGR over the same time. Again, with over 90% of our bookings as revenue recurring, DHI has a very predictable revenue model and approximately 50% of each year’s revenue already under contract at the start of each year.

DHI adjusted EBITDA margin has expanded since 2019 to 25% more recently. And because of the more difficult market conditions in the last two plus years, we restructured several times over the last two years and have been able to maintain and actually improve those margins. The restructure has delivered a larger amount of profitability that we returned to our investors in the form of that share buyback that I described earlier. We are actually targeting a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin for full year 2025 calendar year. So let’s go to the quarterly performance.

As previously mentioned, it’s been a challenging environment for the tech space, tech hiring specifically, since the interest rates were increased in 2022. However, again, the story behind this chart is much the same. We’ve been able to manage through with adjusted EBITDA margins actually increasing over the course of time. So revenue stability is one of the hallmarks of our business model, given that it’s a subscription based business. This slide depicts on depicts how our committed contracts at the start of 2024, shown as backlog, became revenue over the course of the year and how customers that are up for renewal during the course of the year actually drive revenue in the year as a result as well.

We do have a small amount of transactional revenue. So if you think about cash flow, DHI produces strong operating cash flows with long low points for operating cash flows over the past five years, approximating $20,000,000 and the strong markets in 2021 and 2022, driving operating cash flows to $29,000,000 and $36,000,000 respectively. We capitalized our development costs, which are part of a fixed asset purchases on our cash flow statement, primarily representing the cost of creating new assets in the form of new product innovation for both dice and clearance jobs. So as a result of our restructures, we actually have been able to lower our capitalized expenses this year to the range of about $7,000,000 to $8,000,000 This is an illustration of how DHI group free cash flow comes from adjusted EBITDA. So the bottom line is that our adjusted EBITDA takes down CapEx, small amount of working capital, small amount of interest expense, small amount of income taxes to get to free cash flow.

We target 10% free cash flow as a percentage of revenue each year. In terms of liquidity, as I indicated earlier, we had a share repurchase program pretty much for the entirety of the last six to seven years, but we did suspend it in the 2023 to reduce our debt. Our debt at the 2024 was $32,000,000 resulting in a leverage ratio of 0.9. And we generally have about $2,000,000 of cash on hand because our debt facility acts as a revolver. Here is our buyback history.

Since 2019, we’ve repurchased 19,000,000 shares and have reduced shareholder dilution by approximately 3,000,000 shares or 6%. Again, we reissued our repurchase program at the beginning of this year for a $5,000,000 allocation. So if we think about the individual brand performance, here is the history of ClearanceJobs bookings, five year CAGR of 15%. Even with these, you know, tailwinds associated with the last year of possible government shutdown, now government shutdown, we’ve been able to continuously grow this brand. And it has approximately 47% EBITDA margin as illustrated by this last chart here.

Moving on to Dice. Dice, also a dual sided market, as I indicated, has 4,400 subscriber customers with roughly a 100,000 customers that we believe that are ideal targets in The United States. You can see that they include names such as the one that I’ve illustrated before, Montefiore, but also General Motors, Adecco, Robert Half, truly a large amount of companies that we can go after. Its bookings, as you see in this chart, peaked into 2022, have decreased since then associated with the interest rate environment. I could tell you that the number of tech job postings have actually stabilized and now appear to be moving in the right direction due to the interest in AI.

You can see that revenue follows the trend associated with bookings with $88,000,000 of revenue last year. Our EBITDA margin for Dice was in Q2 approximately 23%. We’re constantly trying to improve that metric for ourselves. We believe that the catalysts for growth moving forward really come down to the hiring environment normalizing for DICE in its particular case. For clearance jobs, there’s no question that the $1,100,000,000,000 defense budget, once it’s reconciled between the two houses and it is passed by the president, will be a significant tailwind for clearance jobs.

We have a number of other product based initiatives also that are important for revenue growth as they always are, including this agile ATS acquisition that we just did approximately two months ago. With that, I’m going to leave you with a final chart and maybe take one or two questions. The reason why we think that we’re a compelling story is that we are a SaaS based business, relatively cheap right now because of the current kind of secular conditions around hiring. We maintain high adjusted EBITDA margins as well as a 10% free cash flow target, have a very predictable business model because it’s 90% plus recurring revenue. And we do believe that over the course of time, that significant demand for AI talent will boost the need for AI related and other tech professionals in The United States.

So with that, I will open it up for a couple of minutes of Q and A if there are questions. Yes, sir? Yeah. I I can give you the bigger picture story. So I would say in 02/2022, obviously, Federal Reserve raised interest rates.

It decreased hiring across the entire United States economy, not just tech positions. So we’ve seen that stabilized. Last month, that was actually delivered in terms of information from the BLS indicated about 210,000 new tech job postings. In a typical year of regular growth, it would be 300,000. So we’re at about 70 of normal for new tech job postings.

So I think that most companies are still cautious in this environment, but there is an upward, I would say, force associated with AI job postings. We saw that at the beginning of 02/2024, so more than a year ago, about 10% of our Dice tech job postings required an AI related skill. As of last month, it was 50%. 50%, half of the job postings on Dice today require an AI skill. And when I say AI AI skill, we have a taxonomy, like I said, of all these different tech skills.

So AI is an umbrella term for 366 specific skills. So it it is real. Like, there are massive armies of people being hired by the consultants, largely folks like Deloitte, Accenture, IBM, Booz Allen Hamilton, and also McKinsey. Because when a new technology hits the consciousness of the business world, they go to consultants first and say, how do you apply this to my business? And so we’re seeing that happen with AI right now.

People are definitely putting engineers to work on AI projects, but we’re in an environment where if you ask their normal typical business, they’d say, I’m worried about tariffs. I’m worried about the economy. I’m worried about what’s gonna happen next year. You know? And that naturally suppresses hiring.

But there is this upward surge below the hood that that indicates that AI is a real trend. Great question. Yes, sir. Can you go back to the the acquisition slide? Yes.

And give us a little rationale behind the deal and how you plan. So this was a purpose built ATS, an applicant tracking system that essentially takes people from clearance jobs that are potential candidates and then it tracks their progress inside of a company to the point where they get an offer letter. So it’s a natural adjacency to clearance jobs. This was built by a company that ultimately, didn’t have any commercial salespeople. They realized that we have 1,900 customers to sell into.

So there’s natural synergies. We bought it for $2,000,000 in total, and we have already, you know, doubled the number of customers that are using it within the last three months. And I know that I’m out of time. I’m getting the bigs. It’s not a small stop sign.

It’s a big stop sign, and there’s a lot of zeros. So, if anybody has additional questions, by all means, happy to answer those questions afterwards or set up a one on one meeting. And Todd Curley is our investor investment relations adviser. We’d love to set up a meeting. Thank you.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.