DHI Group at Q3 Investor Summit: Strategic Growth and AI Focus

On Tuesday, 16 September 2025, DHI Group Inc. (NYSE:DHX) presented at the Q3 Investor Summit Group Virtual Conference, delivering a strategic overview of its 2024 financial performance and future plans. CEO Art Zeile and CFO Greg Schippers highlighted the company’s strengths, including its recurring revenue model and market differentiation, while also addressing challenges such as cost management and competitive pressures.

Key Takeaways

• DHI Group reported $142 million in revenue and $141 million in bookings for 2024, with a 6% CAGR over five years.
• The company is targeting a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2025, supported by cost-cutting measures.
• Strategic initiatives include expanding into AI-driven recruiting solutions and acquiring Agile ATS.
• Over 90% of revenue is recurring, thanks to a subscription-based model.
• DHI Group aims to grow its user base through targeted marketing and differentiate itself by focusing on tech skills and cleared professionals.

Financial Results

• 2024 Revenue: $142 million
• 2024 Bookings: $141 million
• Five-year CAGR for Revenue and Bookings: 6%
• 2024 Adjusted EBITDA: $35 million
• 2024 Adjusted EBITDA Margin: 25%
• 2024 Operating Cash Flow: $21 million
• 2024 CapEx: $14 million, mainly for software development
• Net Debt: $28 million, less than one times leverage
• ClearanceJobs 2024 Revenue: $54 million, with a five-year CAGR of 15%
• Dice 2024 Revenue: $88 million, with a five-year CAGR of 2%

Operational Updates

• Restructurings in 2023 and 2024 reduced costs by $35 million.
• Separation of Dice and ClearanceJobs to maximize profitability.
• Acquisition of Agile ATS to enhance product offerings.
• ClearanceJobs renewal rate for Q4: 87%, retention rate: 103%.
• Dice renewal rate for Q2: 75%, retention rate: 102%.
• Dice has updated its code base for a self-service online experience.

Future Outlook

• Revenue guidance for 2025: $126 to $128 million.
• Targeting a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2025.
• Focus on AI-driven recruiting solutions, highlighting AI skills of candidates.
• Planning a marketplace for partner products in Q1 2026 for Dice.
• Expecting tech workforce growth of at least 18% over the next 10 years.

Q&A Highlights

• DHI Group is using targeted marketing to grow its user base, focusing on AI talent.
• Revenue strategies include acquiring Agile ATS and introducing premium subscriptions.
• The company differentiates itself by focusing on tech skills and security clearances for ClearanceJobs.

For a deeper understanding, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Q3 Investor Summit Group Virtual Conference 2025:

Operator: Good day and welcome to Q3 Investor Summit Virtual. We appreciate your participation in today’s virtual event. Up next, we are pleased to introduce DHI Group Inc. If you would like to ask a question during the webcast, you may drop them in the chat box button on the left side of your screen. Please type your question into the box and click "Send" to submit it. At this time, it is my pleasure to hand over the session to Art Zeile, CEO, and Greg Schippers, CFO at DHI Group Inc., who will lead the presentation. Gentlemen, the floor is yours.

Art Zeile, CEO, DHI Group Inc.: Thank you again. I am Art Zeile, and I’m the CEO of DHI Group. With me today is Greg Schippers, our CFO. We’re going to be going through our investor presentation, and then we’re going to be available for Q&A afterwards. We have included our standard forward-looking statements waiver with the normal caveats. Right off the bat, DHI Group is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DHX, and we are headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Our ClearanceJobs and Dice brands are the leading platforms for employers to find and engage with top tech talent. DHI is a holding company for two tech-oriented recruiting platforms named ClearanceJobs and Dice. We create platforms that allow our clients, who are recruiters and hiring managers, to connect with tech candidates. These are two-sided marketplaces that, by definition, serve both the clients and candidates in order to succeed.

You might think that this sounds pretty commonplace with the likes of Indeed and ZipRecruiter constantly advertising on TV, but we have two key differentiators that make us a necessary tool for recruiters and hiring managers looking specifically for technology professionals. First, we have built search algorithms to find candidates based on their tech skills. Secondly, we have spent literally decades attracting the highest quality talent to our platforms. We have 8 million tech professionals profiled on our two brands, representing two-thirds of the total skilled technologists in the U.S. This is the benefit of being around for 35 years. We make money by charging our clients for subscription contracts that allow them to access our platforms. Over 90% of our revenue is recurring as a result. Here is a summary overview of our 2024 annual financial performance and five-year CAGR trends.

Greg will be providing quarterly performance later in the presentation. DHI drove $142 million in revenue and $141 million in bookings last year. The five-year CAGR for each are 6% for both measures. Our adjusted EBITDA was $35 million, delivering a 25% adjusted EBITDA margin. We delivered $21 million in operating cash flow and spent $14 million on CapEx last year. Almost all of our CapEx is capitalized labor used in software development. Greg will brief you on how we have reduced CapEx spend significantly this year. We reinstituted our share buyback program in January, which had been suspended since the middle of 2023 to focus on debt reduction. As a result, we ended 2024 with net debt of $28 million, equating to less than one times leverage.

The $2 million of share repurchases indicated here include shares repurchased under both our buyback program and from the net settlement of employee grant vesting. The U.S. has become a tech-oriented economy and has grown the tech workforce by approximately 3% each year over the past 25 years. We have a very unique pool of candidates that cannot be found on other career sites. Based on our research, roughly 20% to 30% of our candidates can be found on alternative career sites like CareerBuilder plus Monster, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and LinkedIn with up-to-date profiles. When they are found on these other platforms, the majority of the profiles are out of date and do not include resume nor contact information. ClearanceJobs is the dominant leader in its market for delivering access to technology professionals with a government clearance. LinkedIn does not offer a solution to find cleared candidates.

A LinkedIn profile has no field for government clearance, and government workers and military contractors are restricted from using the site because it is known to be a target of foreign spies. Tech professionals are well compensated. The average salary for a tech worker in the U.S. was $111,000 last year, whereas the average worker in the U.S. made around $50,000. As a company, you have basically two choices when hiring tech workers. You either use a recruiter or you do it yourself. If you use a recruiter, you will generally be charged between 20% to 25% of the first year’s salary for that individual. The alternative is to pay Dice or ClearanceJobs roughly $8,000 to $15,000 for our entry-level year-long subscriptions and find and engage the tech talent yourself. Even one hire easily pays for itself compared to paying an external recruiting agency.

We target companies that plan for at least five hires over the next year, driving an even more compelling return on investment. Our value to the tech industry was validated by Forbes magazine in July of 2024 when it announced Dice as the number one career site for tech and IT jobs. The elevated interest rate environment has clearly suppressed hiring demand. That was the Federal Reserve’s intended result. As the famous quote goes, every company is a software business now because of our reliance on technology and automation in general to drive our business models. For that reason, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and CompTIA Association forecast that over the next 10 years, the tech workforce will grow by at least 18%, a growth rate that is twice as fast as the overall employment growth rate.

If you see the small point font on the right side of the slide, you will find that the growth is coming from the interest in skills that you would logically suspect, the need for ever more data scientists and engineers to implement and manage AI-related projects, and more cybersecurity engineers to protect us from an ever-increasing threat environment. A focus on skills is an important reason why our two platforms are very unique. LinkedIn and other career sites create a user profile based on titles, and their concept of skills are soft skills like public speaking. Our special sauce comes from the way that we profile and search for candidates. We have spent over a decade perfecting a taxonomy that categorizes over 100,000 different tech skills that candidates identify with their profile. We received a U.S.

patent for skills taxonomy several years ago, and it’s the heart of our value proposition. We win in the market for tech talent because we’re a specialist in technology skills and not a generalist recruiting platform. Here are two case studies of the great relationships we have with our clients on both platforms. Leidos has been a client of ClearanceJobs for over 10 years and has continuously increased its spend with us. Likewise, Montefiore Healthcare System operating in New York City has also been a client of Dice for over 10 years and has more than doubled their spend with us over that time. Montefiore’s case study also illustrates an important point about Dice. Most investors think that we are focused on software and tech clients.

We do have many clients that are large tech companies, but in many cases, our value proposition is actually stronger for companies in other sectors because they are less visible to the tech community. We give them that visibility. We have a very large TAM for each one of our platforms. In the case of ClearanceJobs, we have approximately 1,900 subscriber customers today. The government has publicly stated that there are over 10,000 contractors that hold a facility clearance, allowing them to conduct business with cleared personnel. We also know that there are over 100 government agencies that we can directly contract with as well. For Dice, we have approximately 4,400 subscriber clients and know that tens of thousands more fit our ideal customer profile. There are also thousands of additional staffing and recruiting firms that we can target as well.

Before I transition to Greg, I will leave you with this quick summary of how we make money and have strong visibility into future revenue. First and foremost, clients pay for the opportunity to access each platform. There is no charge for a candidate to register, create a profile, and start using the platform by searching for jobs. As I indicated earlier, because we are a subscription-based business with a one-year minimum contract, over 90% of our revenue is recurring in nature. Over 90% of our contracts also include an auto-renewal clause with an automatic price escalator. We cap the number of profile views for each subscription contract based on the number of recruiters in that company that intend to use it and the number of tech professionals the company intends to hire in the next year.

Robert Half has a much larger profile view number than a typical 100-person tech firm that we might support. We also allow unlimited emails and texts on our platforms, which is another key competitive differentiator. We encourage the recruiter and the candidate to engage in conversations. That’s how they both win, and a reason for them to come back time and time again to our platforms. With that, I’d like to introduce Greg, who will take you through the rest of the presentation.

Greg Schippers, CFO, DHI Group Inc.: Good afternoon, and thank you, Art. I will share some additional financial data and insights. DHI bookings, which represent the value of our contracts that will be recognized as revenue within 12 months of the contract start date, has risen at a 6% CAGR since 2020, and revenue has also risen at a 6% CAGR over the same period. With over 90% of our bookings and revenue recurring, DHI has a very predictable revenue model with 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% in 2024. Because of the more difficult market conditions in the last two plus years, we reduced costs through restructurings in the second quarter of 2023, in the third quarter of 2024, and in January and June of this year.

Together, these restructurings have reduced our operating costs by approximately $35 million. The restructure earlier this year also separated our Dice and ClearanceJobs organization, which is designed to better deliver results for our shareholders, maximize profitability, and provide stronger long-term strategic options. We are targeting a 26% adjusted EBITDA margin for 2025. As previously mentioned, challenging market conditions in the HR tech space have persisted in 2025, with bookings and revenue declining on a year-over-year basis. We have, however, managed our cost structure to grow our adjusted EBITDA margin to 25% in 2024, and we are projecting 26% for 2025. Our subscription-based business creates predictable revenue, with revenue generally being recognized ratably over the annual contract term as services are delivered to our customers.

This slide depicts how our committed contracts at the start of 2024, shown in the backlog, become revenue over the year, and then how our customers up for renewal during the year drive revenue as the year progresses. The remainder of our revenue comes from our new business efforts and transactional business, which primarily includes short-term job postings, career events, and our talent sourcing products. DHI produces strong operating cash flows with the low points for operating cash flows over the past five years, approximating $20 million, and the strong markets in 2021 and 2022 driving operating cash flows to $29 million and $36 million, respectively. DHI’s capitalized development costs, which are part of fixed asset purchases in our cash flow statement, primarily represent the costs of our internal labor to build the products and features on the ClearanceJobs and Dice sites.

With lower internal headcount resulting from the restructuring, capitalized development costs are expected to be $7 to $8 million in 2025 as compared to $12 million in 2024. DHI’s free cash flow, which is operating cash flows, less capital expenditures, is driven by adjusted EBITDA levels and capitalized development costs. Over time, we are targeting free cash flow at 10% of revenue. As Art mentioned, we suspended our share repurchase program in the middle of 2023 to focus on paying down debt. Our debt at the end of 2024 was $32 million, resulting in leverage at 0.91 times our adjusted EBITDA levels. We generally maintain approximately $2 million of cash on hand and utilize our $100 million revolver to manage liquidity. Since 2019, DHI has repurchased nearly 19 million shares and has reduced shareholder dilution by approximately 3 million shares, or 6%.

Earlier this year, we announced a new buyback program, which allows us to repurchase up to $5 million of common stock through February 2026. Our ClearanceJobs brand operates in the govtech space in a dual-sided marketplace with 2024 revenue of $54 million, comprised of 1,900 clients. The overall market has over 10,000 cleared employers and over 100 government agencies. These logos represent a sampling of our CJ customer base. CJ’s quarterly bookings have seasonality, with the first quarter being the largest of the year. CJ bookings have a five-year CAGR of 15%, and most recently, Q2 bookings were flat year over year as DOGE and uncertainty surrounding the defense budget impeded CJ bookings in the second quarter. Even with these headwinds, CJ’s renewal rate for the fourth quarter was 87%, and its retention rate was 103%.

CJ revenue has a five-year CAGR of 16%, with the second quarter of 2025 being up 1% year over year. CJ is very profitable with adjusted EBITDA margin above 40% and low spend on capitalized development. Dice is also a dual-sided marketplace that drove $88 million of revenue in 2024 and is comprised of 4,400 subscription clients in a market with roughly 100,000 client opportunities between the commercial and SRC accounts. The slide shows a handful of notable Dice customer logos. Our market opportunity in commercial is comprised of companies across various industries such as General Motors, Vitus Healthcare, the CIA, and Capital One, who aren’t traditionally tech companies but certainly hire many tech professionals every year and leverage our platform for their tech hiring needs. Dice’s quarterly bookings also have seasonality, with the first quarter being the largest of the year.

Dice bookings have a five-year CAGR of 2%, and most recently, Q2 bookings decreased 16% year over year as the HR tech hiring environment has remained challenged. Dice’s renewal rate for the second quarter was 75%, while its retention rate was 102%, demonstrating the continuing need of Dice’s services by its core customers. Dice revenue has a five-year CAGR of 2%, with the most recent quarter being down 18%. Dice’s adjusted EBITDA margin has been approximately 20%, with the most recent quarter at 23%. Dice’s capitalized development costs have steadily decreased since Q2 of last year. McKinsey and other economists predict tech hiring to grow in double digits over the next 10 years, and DHI Group Inc. is at the intersection of fueling the tech economy. Our pool of millions of candidate profiles, coupled with our platform-enabled proprietary matching algorithms, allow for efficient and effective identification of talent and hiring.

Agile ATS is an applicant tracking system built specifically for recruiting and hiring cleared professionals in the govtech space. We continue to look for M&A opportunities adjacent to ClearanceJobs. In summary, DHI Group Inc. is well prepared to capture growth in tech hiring in the coming years. With that, we are happy to take questions.

Art Zeile, CEO, DHI Group Inc.: I know that there are several questions that are in the chat screen, so I will read them off, Greg, if that sounds good to you, and then we could decide how to answer them. The first question came in asking, how is DHI Group Inc. planning to grow its user base of both job seekers and recruiters, particularly in a competitive recruiting tech market? I will answer that by saying that we have marketing campaigns that are constantly going out to both candidates and clients on both platforms. I would say in today’s economy, which is a little bit more strained than we’ve seen it since 2022 as an example, there is a lot of just inherent attraction to both platforms from a candidate perspective. Candidates are definitely looking. They’re determining whether or not they need to have a plan B or a plan C.

Nevertheless, we spend a lot of money on paid search campaigns, on campaigns that go out to a number of different platforms that are social in orientation, even TikTok and Instagram, to make sure that candidates know how to find both Dice and ClearanceJobs. For our clients, we’re leaning in very heavily on the fact that we have a real pool of talent associated with artificial intelligence. We have literally hundreds of thousands of engineers that have artificial intelligence skills. That’s very important in today’s context. I tell people the story that at the beginning of 2024, about 10% of our jobs on the Dice platform required an AI skill. That number is now 40%. That just tells you the demand that is existing right now by companies that want to AI-enable their business models, and they need engineers to do so.

Again, the majority of our client-side campaigns and sales activities, go-to-market activities, and campaigns are associated with our AI focus. The second question is, what is the outlook for revenue growth, EBITDA margins, and free cash flow over the next few years?

Greg Schippers, CFO, DHI Group Inc.: Yeah, I can jump in on that, Art. We presented this in our Q2 earnings release in late July or early August. For the full year, we have revenue guidance of $126 to $128 million for 2025 and a margin of 26%. At this time, we are unfortunately not providing long-term revenue guidance or margin guidance past 2025. With our restructurings and other projects we have underway, we certainly have a lot of confidence in our ability to grow the business over time profitably.

Art Zeile, CEO, DHI Group Inc.: Thank you, Greg. Third question that came in was, what are the company’s strategies to increase revenue beyond its traditional subscription model, i.e., through AI-driven recruiting, partnerships, or expanding into adjacent markets? I’ll answer that once again for both ClearanceJobs and Dice separately. If you saw a press release that we issued about a month ago, you will see that we acquired an applicant tracking system called Agile ATS. That was an adjacency and very much a part of the toolkit of what most recruiters use on their desktop every single day. If you watched a recruiter that was trying to hire cleared professionals, on one side of their laptop, they would be looking through the profiles associated with ClearanceJobs. On the other side, they would be taking the interesting candidates and loading them into their applicant tracking system. Applicant tracking is exactly what it sounds like.

Once you identify a candidate of interest, you email them, you call them, and you move them forward in a funnel until the point that you actually offer them an offer letter. We think that that’s going to be very important to us because it allows us to essentially deliver a new product, a new revenue line. There’s a tremendous total addressable market associated with the applicant tracking system platform. I would tell you that all things considered, Agile ATS is one of a kind. It is unique in that it is focused on government contracting, government hiring, and is compliant to a number of different government obligations, regulations. In addition to that, I’m personally very excited about the fact that we’re working on our premium candidate subscription for ClearanceJobs. That is going to be another unique product, another unique new revenue line item for us.

Folks should understand that while LinkedIn is generally associated with recruiting and they drive a certain amount of revenue from recruitment, a full third of their revenue comes today from selling their LinkedIn candidate subscription. We’re going to pattern match that for ClearanceJobs. In the case of Dice, we’ve spent the last two years rewriting our code base to allow for an online experience that is self-service in orientation. We believe that there’s going to be an opportunity to allow customers to essentially upsell themselves on that platform. It just rolled out about a month ago. We’re going to be adding a marketplace where we’re going to be selling partner products first quarter of 2026. There are adjacencies. There are opportunities for new revenue lines that we’re adding to both brands. The next question that came in, number four, I believe, is how is DHI Group Inc.

balancing investments in product and technology, i.e., AI tools for recruiters, with the need to maintain profitability and return capital to shareholders? I’ll kick off an answer by saying we talk about the optimal organization structure all the time. We’ve obviously gone through two restructures this year, and we believe we’re at the right place for the number of teams that are attending to our product roadmap on both Dice and ClearanceJobs. We really do believe that with a leaner and meaner team specifically for Dice, we actually have been able to accelerate our product roadmap in terms of the features that we’re delivering. Greg, do you have additional thoughts on that as well?

Greg Schippers, CFO, DHI Group Inc.: Yeah, yeah. I mean, we do, as Art mentioned, consistently look at our capital allocation and balancing between, as noted in the question, return of capital to shareholders versus investments into the business. I believe it came out in the commentary, but we have a share repurchase plan in place, a $5 million plan that runs through February of next year. We have a general target of one-time leverage for our debt levels, and we invest in the business as appropriate where we see return on that investment, you know, to support it. That’s our general thought process around capital allocation.

Art Zeile, CEO, DHI Group Inc.: Fantastic. Thank you, Greg. The last question that came in is how does DHI differentiate itself from larger players like LinkedIn, Indeed, and niche recruiting platforms? First and foremost, you should understand that we rarely really bump into Indeed or ZipRecruiter because they’re associated with more, I would say, high-volume blue-collar positions, and the tech community is just in a different stratosphere of compensation. I would put them into a separate category. We do compete with LinkedIn because LinkedIn is pretty much ubiquitous, and a lot of CFOs believe that once you have the LinkedIn profile platform, you could use it for tech hiring. It is not efficient, more effective for tech hiring. There are a lot of different ways that we differentiate ourselves from LinkedIn. The first and foremost way is that our profiles illustrate tech skills.

When you think about a career in technology, a software developer doesn’t think of titles. They might have the same title for virtually their entire career. They might be a Senior Software Engineer for 20 or 30 years. A title doesn’t mean much to them. What they do believe in is the importance of aggregating skills and making sure that those skills are relevant. What I mean by that is that I started programming in Fortran. We have very few positions that are associated with Fortran on either site today. A tech professional is constantly trying to keep up with the latest, greatest skills.

If you ever see their resume or their profile on Dice, you’d see that they’d be illustrating that they have 10 to 20 to sometimes 50 or more skills because that is what is of interest to a CTO or a CIO, the skills that that person has and what they bring to the team. Our profiles are based on this skill basis, whereas LinkedIn doesn’t have that same paradigm. LinkedIn also does not have the ability to track when a technology candidate or any candidate has been on the platform. We allow our clients to see the number of days since the candidate has been on the platform. Why is that important? If you were on the platform within the last week, within the last month, it illustrates that you’re very interested in finding a new opportunity.

That is a key signal for recruiters as they think about who they’re going to engage with to try to bring in the right number of candidates to a job search. There are a number of different differentiations between LinkedIn, but again, the other platforms are less relevant in terms of their competitive nature with both Dice and ClearanceJobs. When I talked about LinkedIn, it really is a competitor for Dice, not for ClearanceJobs, because LinkedIn doesn’t have a field for clearance. As I indicated in my part of the conversation, there is a prohibition on using LinkedIn if you have a clearance in the U.S. because it’s known to be a place where a lot of foreign spies and bad actors might be trying to find and create relationships with the U.S. members that do have clearance.

That’s the end of the Q&A as we receive the questions in the chat area, and I think we are also at the end of our time. I would love to offer everybody that is interested the opportunity to engage with Greg and I on a separate side conversation basis. Please approach Todd Kehrli at Pondell if you are interested in making that meeting happen. Thanks very much for everybody’s time today.

Greg Schippers, CFO, DHI Group Inc.: Thank you.

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