ZipRecruiter at William Blair Conference: AI-Driven Growth Focus

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, ZipRecruiter (NYSE:ZIP) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, highlighting its strategic resilience amid a challenging labor market. The company underscored its profitability and robust balance sheet, while also noting the impact of market conditions on revenue. CEO Ian Siegel emphasized ZipRecruiter’s evolution and AI investments, aiming to disrupt the largely offline $300 billion recruiting market.

Key Takeaways

• ZipRecruiter has maintained profitability for 15 years, with a strong balance sheet of $468 million.
• Q1 2025 revenue was $110 million, with an adjusted EBITDA of $5.9 million.
• Revenue per paid employer has grown at an 11% CAGR since 2021.
• The company is focused on disrupting the offline recruiting market with AI-driven solutions.
• ZipRecruiter anticipates a return to year-over-year revenue growth by Q4 2025.

Financial Results

• Q1 2025 Revenue: $110 million
• Q1 2025 Adjusted EBITDA: $5.9 million
• 2024 Revenue: $474 million
• 2024 Adjusted EBITDA: $78 million (16% margin)
• Revenue per paid employer in Q1 2025: $1,734
• Revenue per paid employer CAGR (2021-2025): 11%
• Q1 2025 Paid employers growth: 10% sequentially from Q4 2024

Operational Updates

• ZipRecruiter has been in business for 15 years, maintaining profitability.
• Over $1 billion has been invested in marketing to build brand awareness.
• More than one million employers and 30 million job seekers use ZipRecruiter annually.
• The "Zip Intro" feature aims to enhance hiring speed and efficiency.

Future Outlook

• Sequential revenue growth is anticipated in Q3 2025.
• Year-over-year revenue growth is expected to resume in Q4 2025.
• The company targets mid-single digit EBITDA margins in 2025.
• Focus remains on disrupting the $300 billion offline recruiting market.

Q&A Highlights

• Encouraging trends in December and January led to a 10% sequential growth in paid employers.
• SMBs are quicker to react to macro changes compared to larger enterprises.
• Investments focus on short-term cash payback and long-term value.
• Healthcare remains a strong vertical for the company.
• Overcoming inertia in the offline recruiting market is a key challenge.

In conclusion, ZipRecruiter’s presentation at the conference emphasized its strategic initiatives and growth potential in the evolving recruiting landscape. For further details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Ian Siegel, Founder and CEO, ZipRecruiter: Hello, everyone. My name is Ian, Ian Siegel. As Ralph just told you, I am the founder and CEO of ZipRecruiter. Tim’s gonna be my co presenting partner, and I’m excited to introduce you to the company. So for those that aren’t familiar with our story, I thought I’d start with some highlights.

We’ve been in business for fifteen years. We have been profitable. We have $468,000,000 on the balance sheet. We’re the number one rated employer site for recruiting on g two, and we’ve been the number one rated job search app for more than five years across both the Android and the iOS store. If you look at our job seeker traffic, which is currently growing faster than any of our competitors over the last couple years, It’s really one of the strong indications of the market share that we are gaining.

If you ask how we have achieved this level of success in addition to building great product, we’ve also deployed over a billion dollars in marketing to build the brand. And one of the things we’ll cover today is it’s very important in our category that when someone thinks of the question, where should I post a job, or someone thinks of the question, where where should I search for work, that you are one of the inherent answers that pops into people’s minds. That’s something we’ve managed to accomplish at ZipRecruiter, and it’s been a key part of our ongoing success. And then finally, just to get to practical brass tacks, if you look at the prior year after what has been a unprecedented two and a half year downturn in the labor market, our business has continued to thrive. Last year, we did, over 70,000,000 of adjusted EBITDA, and that was a 16% margin for our business.

So we have managed to weather the storm with, a hardiness and strength that gives us a lot of confidence in the future in particular as the labor market stabilizes and begins to grow again. For those that haven’t looked at the recruiting category, it’s a big category. Over $300,000,000,000 a year spent on recruiting in The United States. Interestingly, the majority of that spend goes against offline, not online. It’s still the old school recruiting firms that are collecting the bulk of the revenue in our category.

If you add LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, and all the other famous brands that you are aware of, we account for a very small fraction of the overall revenue that is collected inside this category. We are clearly at the precipice of what should be a period of protracted disruption. The technology solutions, the familiarity with those solutions, and the confidence employers have in those solutions, those are all steadily going up and we believe we’re incredibly well positioned for that inevitable disruption. Going back to the beginning, I said I was the founder, ZipRecruiter started with a very simple premise. The idea was that you could push one button and send a job to all the job sites that existed across the web, and all the candidates that came in would come into one easy to review list for vetting said candidates.

That business had tremendous traction from day one. It’s one of those instant product market fit stories that you rarely see with startups. We grew like a weed, and as a result, we were able to bootstrap for the first four and a half years. We got to north of 50,000,000 in revenue with millions in free cash flow before we ever took a dollar. I call that product era one.

That was the volume era where the only thing that mattered was delivering as many candidates as possible to employers, but we quickly realized that, there was a threshold beyond which more candidates was viewed as a negative rather than a positive. No one here who’s done any recruiting is excited to go through a 50 candidates. What they want is 30 candidates with five extraordinarily qualified candidates amongst the bunch. That led to what we think of as era two in our business, which was the quality era. So it was approximately nine years ago, ZipRecruiter went hard after quality until this point.

All, job search sites were using boolean methods to try and do matching is the title of the job that has been posted, matching a job title that a candidate has in their resume. If the two overlap, I will send you that candidate, but when we started experimenting with a variety of techniques and strategies, we quickly found ourselves in the in the realm of what at that time was being called AI, which was machine learning, meta learning, and deep learning. And to find the talent of this bleeding edge emerging category of possible technical innovation, we actually had to build an r and d center in Israel which we staffed with almost a hundred engineers who were specifically focused on applying these techniques to the massive amount of data that we had created through real world interactions between employers and job seekers on the ZipRecruiter site. To give you some sense of perspective, ZipRecruiter has been used by more than a million employers to do their recruiting. It’s used by approximately 30,000,000 job seekers a year who are looking for jobs.

It’s created billions of interactions between those job seekers and employers that is proprietary training data that we were able to effectively deploy against putting these algorithms to work in a way that had never been done before and creating better quality matches than had existed at any point in the history of the labor market. That proprietary data to this day and the technology platform we’ve built to train and retrain said algorithms is a key part of our advantage in terms of delivering a better experience to both sides and explains a lot of the high, five star reviews or the high quality reviews or the million almost a million reviews we received in the App Store on both Android and iOS about why people love the product because they’re getting connected to the right party on the other side and they’re actually having the opportunity to engage with people human to human rather than just sending things through this, digital process that the labor market had been plagued with prior to that. We also introduced roughly eight years ago, way before it was cool, a character named Phil, who is your AI personal recruiter. Now back then, there were no large language models, and when we started experimenting with Phil, we were stunned at the response that we got because by giving a human voice to our software early on, by creating a persona that would engage with you, that was empathic, that was interested in the considerations that you considered most important, we are able to get tremendous increases in engagement.

We’ve experimented with this, as I said, for many years. Large language models have become an icing on top of the cake that we had already baked. But Phil was the beginning of our ushering in of what I call era three, which is the engagement era. You can build the world’s greatest matching algorithms. You can get the right job seeker to apply to the right job.

But if that employer then reaches out to that excellent candidate and the candidate ghost them, does not respond, they hear nothing back, the employer hates that experience. And so the focal point of and the purpose of Phil, and in truth, the majority of the r and d that we do today is specifically designed around driving two people to talk to each other face to face as fast as possible. And so it’s beyond matching, and we have described it as social engineering, and we have also described it as engagement. But now what will define the future most successful companies in our space is gonna be those that have not just the data to train the algorithms, but actually have the insight and the user experiences to drive conversations. I mentioned before that we had spent over a billion dollars building our brand.

It’s a it has been a long journey, and we have experimented in every form of media and still have a diverse multichannel media strategy where we run television ads, radio ads, satellite, radio ads, podcasts. You may have heard our ads on podcast, direct mail. We do every form of advertising imaginable, and, we still deploy 9 figures against advertising every year. It’s one of the, superpowers that got us to the place where when you think of, like, where should I go search for work? ZipRecruiter pops into your head.

It’s one of the reasons we wound up in the zeitgeist. It’s we were we were named in a Jimmy Fallon, opening monologue last week. We were the answer to a question, a Will Short’s crossword puzzle in a Sunday edition. A couple months back, ZipRecruiter has entered the overall zeitgeist, as I said, and that’s important. You wanna be the answer to that question because you don’t want people to be forced to go to Google to find you over and over again.

Part of the reason why we have thrived in this two and a half year downturn in this industry is because they come to us organically. The both sides of our marketplace, the job seekers and the employers come to us both from previous positive experience they’ve had with it, also from the evangelism of these individuals who are giving us these strong reviews on both sides. But also because of all the marketing we’ve done, we’re just an answer to the question of where should I go. Within that marketing mix, where we are so sophisticated, there is tremendous flexibility. We’ve done this long enough and we’re smart enough that we have, made very few long term commitments, which gives us the opportunity to lever our spend up or down, and we get signal quickly on what is happening in the market, not in terms of the number of hires that are being made, but literally in terms of like the number of job postings that are being deployed.

So it’s a very early indicator that we have access to, and we’ve been able to use that to manage our business to be efficient in every form of economy, and here’s a look at our cohorts going back to 02/2019, and I would just highlight to you that if you look at the starting point of every year, you can see that the average revenue per employer is starting at a higher value in terms of where the cohorts begin, and then if you look at 02/2019, which is the longest line on that chart at the bottom there, you’ll see that over, a period of eight years, it increased by nearly four x from where it started in terms of the contributions. All cohorts were growing. Last couple years are a little wonky. As I said, historic downturn, truly the longest downturn any of us have seen, in our lifetimes. And but in spite of that, the business continues to charge ahead, continues to grow the cohort value.

And I think to put a finer point on this, I’ll turn it over to my CFO presenting partner who can walk you through some of the actual numbers. Thank you. Thank you, Ian. Good to see everybody.

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: Alright. Okay. So a couple of KPIs just at a high level to orient everybody to the size of the of the business roughly. Q one revenue of a hundred $10,000,000 and adjusted EBITDA of 5,900,000.0, and that is coming on the heels of 2024 where the business returned $78,000,000 in EBITDA or 16% margin off of $474,000,000 in in revenue, and I’ll give some sequential trend commentary in a little bit. The last KPI in here is our revenue per paid employer, so that is the the quarterly amalgamation of the slide that Ian just presented.

So we we collect in revenue 1,734 per employer per quarter, and that was in the last quarter. And if you zoom out and look at that number over time, that’s been growing consistently at roughly 11% compounded annual growth rate since 2021. So, that’s one of the big growth levers of the business over time. We’re getting better and better at monetizing our business. So I’ll I’ll show you some, revenue charts here.

So if you look at, the trends, we’ve been in a very unique hiring environment over the last couple years. And so if you look pre COVID through the middle of twenty twenty two, that’s when Merico is hiring at a white hot pace, and you see us take advantage of that hiring opportunity. We invested heavily into it and then reap the benefits from that. We’ve really been in prolonged downturn since the middle of twenty two, and by many measures, this is the longest that we’ve seen in in quite some time. However, if you look at the last couple months, when we went to December and into January, we noticed that things were looking a little bit differently.

So we we saw that the paid employer trends in our marketplace were quite a bit more favorable than the last couple years. And if you look at the sequential growth in revenue or trends in revenue from q four to q one in ’20 ’5, roughly flat on a quarter over quarter basis, and that’s in stark contrast to the negative 10 and negative 13% trends that we’ve seen in last two years. So on the heels of the election and coming in through the beginning of the year, it looks like things were moving in the right direction. And so that’s also informing our Q2 guidance, which again is here in the slide of being up very slightly in Q2 twenty five. Again, right now we’re looking at the trends right now.

Things are appearing to be much healthier than they have been in the past and as we look towards the future based on everything we’re seeing now, we still see that, you know, growing sequentially again in q three and returning to year over year growth in q four as being a likely scenario. Again, we’ve got a lot of uncertainty out there, but based on what we’re seeing today, we’re we’re feeling good about this year. Now, so that’s top line, let’s talk about bottom line. So even though we’ve been in this trend where revenue has been in a decline, we’ve remained comfortably profitable, and Ian mentioned this already, but we are highly flexible in our operating expenses. When we deploy marketing, as an example, we do so scientifically.

We’re looking at the returns at the end of that dollar, and if there is return to be had, we will spend it. And if there is no return to be had, we will conserve it. And so that means that as the hiring market overall has been in a chillier state over the last couple years, we’ve been able to contract and remain flexible and still retain profitability over time. So even as we’re going into this time in q one q two, you see in the chart where EBITDA is is a bit lower than it was in the calendar year for ’24, we’re seeing you’re seeing us lean into the strength that we’ve been seeing in q one q two, and so in that scenario that I presented before where we’re returning to year over year growth in q four, we think that mid single digit EBITDA is the the right level of investment for us. This is not a decision that Ian or I make from a top down perspective, but something that we do on a bottoms up perspective looking at the returns at the end of that dollar.

And as we as we lean in, margins would come down to the mid single digits in 2025 as as we achieve year over year growth in revenue for ’24 or for year ’25. Alright. I’ll wrap up just with a couple of the highlights that Ian and I have both hit it on. So the TAM overall is much larger than I think most people would possibly assume at at the start. So at $300,000,000,000 in TAM, this is still a part of the world where software has not yet taken over.

And we are a part of that much smaller but faster growing part of the TAM, where over time, we believe that the winners of this overall market is gonna go to those that are deploying the cutting edge cutting edge technology that we have. The second pillar relates to why we have that unfair advantage. We have not only the AI that is needed to draw the right matches between job seekers and employers, but we have the data that the AI needs in order to reach those conclusions. We have a large proprietary set of data. We capture all the interactions between job seekers and employers within our closed marketplace, which gives us that unfair advantage to make better matching over time.

We’re doing that and we’re surfacing those matches through the best apps in both iOS and Android and the best job the best best employment site that Ian already talked about as well. And because we’ve been at this for quite some time, we’ve done the hard work of capturing brand recognition on both sides of the marketplace, both with job seekers and employers. So now we enjoy 80 plus percent aided brand awareness on both sides, and that’s important. So that’s been a big part of the reason why we’ve been able to weather the storm over the last two and a half years so well because we know that when it is time to hire, employers will come back. They’ll come back without us having to market to them.

Same thing with job seekers as well. And lastly, as a strategic imperative, we kept our operating expense structure very flexible so that we can manage up, manage down as the the needs of the the market dictate. So overall, we’re feeling very good. We’re in a great position, well capitalized. We can own our own destiny.

Alright. Great. I think that’s it for us.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Maybe just kick things off. Tim, you touched on it, during the presentation, but on the q four call, I think you talked about seeing some stabilization trends in December and in January. And then on the q one call, there might have been some maybe some change in behavior that might been observing. Can you kinda walk us through, that trend line and maybe give us sort of an update of what you’re currently seeing sort of across ZipRecruiter and maybe any specific verticals you call out of strengths or weaknesses.

Yeah.

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: Absolutely. So, like I said during the presentation, what we saw from December through, through the end of q one was meaningfully different than what we had seen in the previous two years. And you see that in the results when we disclose our paid employer number, that was up 10% sequentially from q four to q one, which is substantial. And if you look at interesting metrics such as the NFIB’s SMB optimism index, that also shot up significantly especially after the election. And then in April April second, after the the new tariff regime was rolled out, we saw basically the the the water cooler chatter changed a little bit, whereas before that, things were much more optimistic among SMBs in particular, and then and the hiring behavior reflected that.

After April 2, we saw we still saw healthy trends in hiring, but the the water cooler chat was a little different. The vibes were a little different for lack of a better word. But generally speaking, we have not seen the the change in temperature reflect into hiring. Things are still remaining steady. You see that embedded in our sequential guidance being up very modestly from q one to q two.

As far as areas of strength are concerned, the generally speaking, health care has been quite healthy and, you know, retail has been up or down over the last couple of years, but or the last couple of quarters, but generally down this last time around, but health care has been kind of where we’ve seen the most strength.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And then generally speaking, you’ll see the most sort of dramatic movements with SMBs both in your industry and I cover a lot of digital ad companies where you see, tends to be more volatile with SMBs. But maybe give us an update on what you’re seeing with SMBs and maybe how that compares or contrasts with enterprises.

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: Yeah. So our paid employer number that you see overwhelmingly biased towards SMBs. And so you see when you see that number move up significantly, that’s that’s what you’re looking at, the the the number of SMBs. And what we’ve learned from them is that they tend to react much more quickly, to macro changes, both good and bad, than enterprises overall. However, the strength that, we saw, at the start of the year was reflective on both sides of our our customer segments.

Great. And then

Unidentified speaker: one question I received last call is, you know, what if if the market’s sort of volatile, why is what signals is ZipRecruiter seeing or calling out that gives them sort of the optimism to invest for growth? So historically, when things are bouncing around and being choppy, companies will pull back what you did, but there was a noticeable shift where you lean into sort of an investment mode. So if you could sort of expand on what you’re seeing and what gives you that confidence to sort of reinvest in

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: the business. Yeah. We make decisions based on what we see in our marketplace. And what we saw in our marketplace starting in December encouraged us. And so that’s why we leaned in through q one, and that’s why you’re seeing our embedded 6% EBITDA margin being what it is in q two just because the the paid employer activity, that’s including not just the number of new entrants into the marketplace, but also those that are recurring or reactivating has remained at a as a at a city clip that warranted such investment.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Can you maybe sort of double click on that and perhaps be a little bit more specific where those investments are going? Give us a sense between brand spend and or performance.

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: Sure. Yeah. We we think of our our sales and marketing spend as as a unified bucket. So we don’t necessarily differentiate between brand and performance because we expect both from all the dollars that we’re spending. When we’re deploying capital, we’re doing so with a lens a couple different lenses.

One is more of a shorter term kind of cash on cash payback window, much more performance oriented. Relatedly, we look at a longer term return when because we’ve been at this for quite some time now. We can we have the benefit of being able to accurately predict how an employer cohort that we bring in will mature with us over time. Ian showed you a couple charts that to that very point. And so we’re looking at a a longer lifetime value versus the acquisition costs that we’re deploying.

And then lastly, we’re staring at that 8080% branded aided brand awareness that I mentioned before and making sure that all of these things are working towards increasing or supporting that metric as well.

Unidentified speaker: Maybe shifting gears to products, Ian. When you built this business, you know, when we had legacy AI pattern recognition, ML, etcetera. Maybe give us a sense of what Gen AI brings on the product set both from innovation, products to market, and then also internally, you know, how you’re able to leverage the technology.

Ian Siegel, Founder and CEO, ZipRecruiter: I think a lot of people when they think about large language models and its opportunity for disruption, presume it’s gonna be in the front end interface where it’s how users will engage with a system or software, and they’ll be able to talk to it in a natural language fashion. That is an that is an unproven thesis within the job category at this point. The second you put one of the chat interfaces in front of a job seeker, it actually take them much longer to get to the jobs. And in many cases, when we make the process take longer, we see that there is drop off in terms of those who successfully get to the outcome they’re looking for. But where large language models have been really helpful is they are very good in a generalized way at extracting information from a document, so whether it be things like a job description or it be a resume, it is better than any parser that has ever been built in the past at not just extracting information today, but adapting to variable formats without needing specific heuristics written.

The better the information that goes in, the better the training you can do on the matching algorithms that you produce. So it has been a tremendous boon in terms of building a training and retraining pipeline for the algorithms that do the real heavy lifting which is the picking of jobs or the picking of job seekers.

Unidentified speaker: Great. And we got time, about four minutes here. So if there’s any, any questions in the audience? Afternoon. I’ve retired.

Alright. Maybe just and during the downturn as more peep as you’ve acquired more on the demand side of the marketplace and the job seeker side, maybe if you sort of give us a sense of how that tees you up for eventual recovery and sort of your thoughts on how the platform, you know, sort of grows coming out of it.

Ian Siegel, Founder and CEO, ZipRecruiter: I mean, the product ultimately that we sell as job seekers, they are the product. So the more job seekers we have on the platform, the more we can demonstrate and flex capabilities of the matching algorithms we’ve built, the more we can prove out the engagement features that we’ve been imposing into the site. In the past year, we launched what was sort of the pinnacle of our innovation attempts in a product called Zip Intro which to simplify for you guys is just speed dating for hiring. And so an employer now can post a job on ZipRecruiter, pick a time the following day that they want to meet with candidates, and we will bring a slate of candidates who meet the qualifications for what they have just posted that they can back to back interview over video to very quickly get to a short list of candidates. Response to that has been tremendous and it’s an example of how we’re what we’re trying to focus on is not just matching innovation, but experience innovation to try and bring the two sides together to actually speak human to human, and that has proven to be our most complimented, most raved about feature when we deploy it in such a fashion.

So I think the more job seekers we have and where the market will go is, very much indicated by whoever is gaining market share amongst job seekers. So the question was what are the biggest hurdles to penetrating the offline opportunity? And I think the, greatest challenge we face is overcoming inertia and the way things have always been done. It’s a old school industry that feels pretty good about the way it’s been operating for many years, and there is a baked in economy around the cost of recruiting that’s understood and accepted. And this the claims we can make are fantastical.

We can get you talking to candidates in twenty four hours who are as qualified as what any offline recruiter has ever produced. We can bring you a high volume of candidates so that if you need to staff a call center or you need to staff your frontline workers at whatever your entity is, we can do that in a tenth of the time it has previously taken these offline organizations to do it. And when you make claims like that, you know, you you face both entrenched behavior and disbelief. And so it’s just a process to build reputation over time, but I think, you know, tipping points are coming in specific verticals within the offline world are more saleable than others because of the urgency, particularly now when every part of the labor market is becoming more cost sensitive, to go look for efficiency solutions.

Tim, CFO, ZipRecruiter: Not only can we bring that solution at a fraction of the time, but at a fraction of the cost as well. So I I showed you the 1,700 plus, revenue per employer per quarter. That is in stark contrast to the 20 to sometimes 30% of first year salary that a lot of the offline recruiters are charging. So we’re talking about a significant difference in cost as well.

Ian Siegel, Founder and CEO, ZipRecruiter: And I just wanna say, because I know where that leads, we don’t have to charge less for that because the solutions we bring allow the companies that are engaged in this type of recruiting to have much less people. So the software value is a premium value because it allows you to manage costs within your organization.

Unidentified speaker: Great. Thank you. Unfortunately, we’re out of time. Ian, Tim, thanks for attending, and thanks for your interest in

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