Okay, so welcome to the Sidoti January Virtual Microcap Conference, and thank you for joining us today. I'm Anja Soderström, a senior equity analyst here at Sidoti, and it's my pleasure to host DHI Group. It's ticker DHX, and they trade on the New York Stock Exchange, and with me today, I have Art Zeile, the CEO, Greg Schippers, the CFO, and we also have Todd Kehrli. He's the IR consultant with DHI Group, and this will be conducted as a presentation by the management team, and that will be followed by Q&A, and if you would like to participate, you can submit your question at the bottom of your screen, and with that, I'm happy to hand it over to you, Art.
Thank you very much, Anja. Really appreciate that. And obviously, we're going to be going through our investor presentation as it reflects Q3 results, but we have our Q4 Earnings Call scheduled for the 5th of February. We've included our standard forward-looking statements waiver with the normal caveats. As Anja indicated, DHI Group is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol DHX. Our headquarters is located in Denver, Colorado. And our Dice brand actually has been active for upwards of a third of a century at this point in time. So here's a summary overview of our 2023 annual financial performance and our five-year CAGR trends. Greg will be providing quarterly performance for 2024 later in the presentation. In 2023, DHI drove $152 million in revenue and $153 million in bookings. The five-year CAGR for each are 7% and 6%, respectively.
Our adjusted EBITDA was $36 million in 2023, delivering a 24% adjusted EBITDA margin. We delivered $21 million in operating cash flow and spent $20 million in that year on CapEx. Almost all of our CapEx is capitalized labor used in software development, the platforms themselves. Greg will brief you on how we have reduced CapEx significantly this past year in 2024. We have traditionally had a robust share buyback program in place. We suspended it back in the middle of 2023 to focus on debt reduction. As a result, this past quarter and third quarter, we had net debt of less than $30 million, equating to less than one times leverage. We just announced this week that we reinstituted our share buyback program. So that is noteworthy. DHI is a holding company, fundamentally, that is focused on two tech-oriented recruiting platforms named Dice and ClearanceJobs.
We created 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 the candidates in order to succeed. You might think that that 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 tech professionals. First, we have built search algorithms to find candidates based on their tech skills specifically. And secondly, we have spent literally decades attracting the highest quality talent to our platforms. We have roughly nine million tech professionals profiled across both of these brands, representing approximately two-thirds of the total skilled technology professionals in the United States. That's the benefit, effectively, of being around for 34 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. The United States has obviously become a tech-oriented economy and has grown the tech workforce by approximately 3% each year over the past 25 years, consistent with general GDP growth trends. We have a very unique pool of candidates that cannot be found on other career sites. Based on our research, roughly 30% of our candidates can be found on alternative career sites like CareerBuilder, plus Monster, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, or LinkedIn. When they are found on LinkedIn, their profiles are generally out of date and do not include a resume or contact information, additional key differentiators. ClearanceJobs itself is the dominant leader in its market for delivering access to tech professionals with a government clearance.
LinkedIn does not offer a solution to find cleared professionals, 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 for foreign spies. Tech professionals are well compensated. The average salary for a tech worker in the United States was $112,000 last year, whereas the average worker in the United States made approximately $50,000 in terms of salary or compensation. As a company, you have basically two choices when hiring tech workers. You either use a recruiter or you do it yourself. If you do use a recruiter, you generally will be charged anywhere between 20% and 25% of the first year's salary for that position.
The alternative is to pay Dice or ClearanceJobs roughly $8,000-$10,000 for an entry-level year-long subscription and find and engage those tech professionals yourself. Even one hire, obviously, under those economics easily pays for itself compared to paying an external recruiting agency. And we target companies that plan for at least five tech 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 last year 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 not only in the tech industry, but across all industry categories. And this was the Federal Reserve's, obviously, intended result.
But as the famous quote goes, "Every company is now a software company at its heart because of our reliance on tech and automation in general to drive our business models," there is an increasing interest in tech hiring that is forecasted for the future. The 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 all 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 in today's market, the need for ever more data scientists and engineers to implement AI, more cybersecurity engineers to protect us from an ever-increasing threat environment, and a need for armies of software developers to create more code to make our businesses more automated. A focus on skills is an important reason why our two platforms are quite unique. LinkedIn and other career sites create a user profile based on titles, and the concept of skills are soft skills like public speaking. Our special sauce really comes from the way that we have created profiles and searched for candidates.
We've 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 this skills taxonomy several years ago, and it truly is the heart of our value proposition. So we ultimately win in the market for tech talent because we're a specialist in understanding technology skills and not a generalist recruiting platform. Here are two case studies of great relationships we have had with clients on both platforms. Leidos has been a client of ClearanceJobs for over 10 years and has continuously increased its spend with us. Likewise, the Montefiore Health System, operated in New York City, has been a client of Dice for over 10 years and has more than doubled its spend with us over that time.
Montefiore's case study also illustrates the important point about Dice, being that we are generally associated with tech companies and software companies, but in many cases, our value proposition is actually stronger for those companies in other sectors because they're less visible to the tech community itself. We have a very large TAM, total addressable market, for each of our platforms. In the case of ClearanceJobs, we have 2,000 subscription clients 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 5,000 subscription clients today 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'll 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 the platform. There is no charge for a candidate to register, create a profile, and start using the platform by applying for jobs or responding to recruiters that reach out to them. As I indicated earlier, because we are a subscription-based service with a one-year minimum contract format, over 90% of our revenue is recurring. Over 90% of our contracts include an auto-renewal clause with an automatic price escalator built into the contract.
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 that year. Robert Half, as an example, has a much larger profile view number than a 100-person tech firm. We allow unlimited emails and texts on our platform, which is another key competitive differentiator. We encourage the recruiter and the candidate to engage in a conversation. That's how they both win and a reason for them to come back to our platforms again. So with that, I'd like to introduce Greg Schippers, our CFO, who will take us through the rest of the presentation.
Hello, everyone, and thank you, Art. I'll 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, have risen at a 6% CAGR since 2019, and revenue has risen at a 7% CAGR over the same period. With over 90% of our bookings and revenue recurring, DHI is 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 24% in 2023. Because of the more difficult market condition in 2023 and in 2024, we reduced costs through restructurings in the second quarter of 2023, in the third quarter of 2024, and again earlier this month. Together, these restructurings have reduced our operating costs by approximately $20 million.
The restructure this month also separated our Dice and ClearanceJobs organizations, which is designed to better deliver results for our shareholders, maximize profitability, and provide stronger long-term strategic options. We are targeting a 24% Adjusted EBITDA margin for 2024. As previously mentioned, challenging market conditions in the HR tech space have persisted into 2024, with bookings and revenue declining in the mid to upper single-digit range. We have, however, managed our cost structure to grow our Adjusted EBITDA margin through the first three quarters of 2024. 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 2023, shown as 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 sourcing services product. 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 cost of our internal labor to build the products and features on the Dice and ClearanceJobs sites. With lower internal headcount resulting from the restructurings, capitalized development costs are expected to decline from the 2022 and 2023 amounts and approximate pre-pandemic levels.
By consolidating our tech organization to a smaller number of teams that have subject matter expertise in adjacent areas, we have found that we can accelerate our release schedule. 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 and have focused on paying down debt, targeting less than one times leverage. Our debt at the end of the Q3 was $32 million, resulting in leverage of 0.88 times our adjusted EBITDA levels. We maintain approximately $2 million of cash on hand and utilize our $100 million revolver to manage liquidity.
Since 2019, DHI has repurchased nearly 18 million shares and has reduced shareholder dilution by approximately 7 million shares, or 13%. Earlier this week, we announced a new buyback program, which allows us to repurchase up to $5 million of common stock through February 2026. Our ClearanceJobs brand is a dual-sided marketplace with 2023 revenue of $49 million, comprised of approximately 2,000 clients. The overall market has over 10,000 cleared employers and over 100 government agencies. These logos represent 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 18%, and most recently, Q3 bookings increased 4% year- over- year, with a renewal rate of 91% and a retention rate of 109%.
CJ revenue has a five-year CAGR of 19%, with the Q3 of 2024 being up 6% year over year. Dice is also a dual-sided marketplace that drove $103 million of revenue in 2023 and is comprised of over 5,000 subscription clients in a market with roughly 100,000 client opportunities between the commercial and SRC accounts. This slide shows a handful of notable Dice customer logos. Our market opportunity in commercial is comprised of companies across various industries, such as Coca-Cola, Disney, and Bank of America, 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, Q3 bookings decreased 15% year- over year as the HR tech hiring environment has remained challenged. Dice revenue has a five-year Kegger of 3%, with the most recent quarter being down 12% year over year. McKinsey and other economists predict tech hiring to grow in double digits over the next 10 years as DHI 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. In summary, DHI is well prepared to capture growth in tech hiring in the coming years. With that, we are happy to take questions.
Okay, thank you so much. It was a good overview. For everyone in the audience, if you want to participate in the Q&A, you can submit your question at the bottom of your screen. We have a couple of questions here that I'm going to kick it off with. The first one, you mentioned your buyback, the reason you have the buyback, but you also had a recent announcement of a strategic reorganization with separating the two brands. Can you just talk about the timing of that and the drivers and goals and the benefits from that?
Absolutely. I could take that one, Anja. So we were asked by numerous investors last year to give more visibility into the profitability, the inherent profitability of both brands. I think that there's a belief that CJ, as an individual platform that has generally grown double-digit rates of revenue, doesn't have any real competition in its marketplace, is pretty profitable as an entity, is very valuable, and people have asked us to essentially restructure so they could do more of a sum of the parts analysis of our valuation. It took several months to essentially enact this plan. We wanted to do so so that we could do so at the beginning of the year so that we could essentially do segment reporting starting in 2025.
Once we moved forward with this idea of a restructure, our Dice tech organization leadership came to me and said, "I think we could be more efficient by virtue of a different composition to our team structure itself." So there was an 8% reduction of the total workforce for DHI Group, but that really was almost entirely centered on our product and development team for Dice. So that was the nature of what drove us to make this decision and to announce that last week.
Okay. And the cost savings, is that purely headcounts or are there any other cuts you are doing within the?
For the most part, it's almost entirely headcount-driven in the sense that it is compensation, but also benefits and the other things that are tied to the people, the personnel themselves.
Okay, thank you. And another question here. Do you foresee AI taking away the need for people to your job websites in the future? And how is AI affecting job searches right now?
Interesting question. Obviously, very relevant to our platform. I would say we've had a continuum of tools in the development space. I was a coder many years ago, leaving the Air Force in 1993. And back then, there were tools that would allow me to essentially edit my code, document my code. I look at this as a progression of a toolset that will make developers more efficient for the future. And ultimately, what we're seeing is that at the beginning of 2024, roughly 10% of our job postings on Dice required AI-related skills. That increased to 30% by the end of the year.
So people always ask us whether or not AI as a trend is a flash in the pan or something that is long-standing. I personally think it is definitely part of our future. And those companies that are not in AI-enabling their business models will be caught behind.
Okay. As a follow-up to that, we'll take the next question about the initial thoughts about the up to $500 billion in AI investments announced by the new president earlier this week. What do you think? How do you think that's going to impact?
Well, so that's a really great question. I think that there was $100 million that were committed by Oracle, OpenAI, as well as SoftBank. And so it could expand to $500 million. I'm sorry, $500 billion, I should say. The whole premise behind that, I believe, is that they are investing in data center infrastructure, which is definitely part of my past experience. I think what that means is it's going to increase the demand for data center technicians.
I did an actual interview with Wall Street Journal earlier in 2024 where they asked, you know, what's going on with this data center market? How does it affect your job postings? And I said, actually, 7% of the Dice job postings at that time were for these data center technicians, which are the folks that are essentially inside of the data center, running the HVAC systems, running the electrical systems, running all of the security systems. I think it will definitely increase the demand for these technicians, but you know, that's just a part of our business.
The majority of our postings today are for developers, and specifically like Java developers, Python developers, and cybersecurity professionals.
Okay. And the bookings have been a little bit challenged for you over the past couple of years, and you seem a little bit more optimistic for 2025. What gives you confidence in that optimism?
I could take that one as well. We feel that there's a couple of signals that are important for our market dynamics. The first and most important signal is the number of new tech job postings each month. And that is reported by CompTIA, which is a tech workforce association. And they generally report within the first week after a month has closed. So we'll see the January new tech job postings the first week of February. We have seen an inflection of those tech job postings.
They're nowhere near what they should be in a normal environment. And we always benchmark 2019 as the last normal year. But in a normal year like 2019, we had about 300,000 new tech job postings each month. During the course of 2024, we got up to about 230,000 new tech job postings at kind of the peak month. So we're about 70% of what constitutes normal, but it's getting better. The other really important, I'd say, green shoot for us is the forecast by the Staffing Industry Analysts, SIA, which is an industry group for the staffing and recruiting industry itself. They are predicting an inflection of tech staffing where we declined 7% in 2024. They're predicting 5% growth this year. And that's a lot of growth for the staffing industry and specifically the tech staffing industry.
It usually grows at about GDP level of growth as well, 3%. So 5% rebound, if it happens, will be very good for us.
Okay. Sounds good. And another question. Are there any client industry verticals which appear primed to lead spending growth this year?
Yes. I think that we have seen several verticals that are relatively recession resistant, and they're more bullish about their prospects for the future. I always say that those are business consulting, healthcare, financial services, aerospace and defense, and education. We've seen an elevated amount of tech job postings in all of those five verticals in 2024. I think specifically business consulting is going to lead us into the future.
If you looked at the companies that are hiring literally armies of AI engineers, it's folks like Deloitte and IBM and McKinsey because they realize that everybody is experimenting with how AI will affect their business model for the future.
Okay. And have you seen any shifts in the return to office activity or mandates? And how do you think that's going to impact DHI Group?
So I would say that that number of new tech job postings that I referred to earlier is really derived from two different effects. Companies have growth initiatives, and they need people to essentially affect the growth initiatives. And then the second real reason why there's an elevated number of tech job postings is because of movement inside of the tech workforce.
So, people resigning and moving to a new opportunity, the company that loses that particular person has to decide how to essentially fill the hole. So, we have seen kind of a whipsaw of an effect over the last several years where there was a great resignation in 2022. And now we call last year the great stay, where there was not a lot of people moving inside of the tech workforce. I think that the return to office mandates are going to create a lot of attrition, meaning people deciding that they're going to leave their current position that's no longer available to them remotely and find something new. So, I think that that has a net benefit for DHI Group, but we'll have to see.
Okay. And also another question here. Can you continue to expand profitability? And what is a reasonable long-term target for the business?
Yeah, I can take that one, Art. So you know we do have a target of 24% Adjusted EBITDA margin. And then you know our other major component of cash flow then would be our capitalized development costs. And our capitalized development costs have been trending down. And these restructures are part of the reason roughly half of our tech workforce contributes to that capitalized development, so 50% of their wage. And so that with headcount reductions, that will trend a little bit lower over time here. And we'll continue to be in that low- to mid-20th percentile range of Adjusted EBITDA margin. So 24% for this year, and we're still evaluating our budget for next year.
Okay. And I'm going to squeeze in a couple of more questions here. Given your niche, your marketplaces would appear to attract strategic interest from larger platforms such as LinkedIn. Is the company open to considering strategic alternatives, or is it strictly focused on organic growth at this point?
I'd say that you know our board has a fiduciary responsibility to consider any kind of an offer if it was presented to us, for sure. We don't have any particular targets that we're looking on at for the horizon. We would be dedicated to organic growth at this point in time ourselves from an M&A perspective.
Okay. And one last question here. Can you speak to the current balance sheet and any future capital needs?
Yeah, sure. I can take that one. We target one-times leverage. We've communicated that, I think, over the past several quarters. We have achieved that. And as a result, you know we're comfortable with where our leverage is now. We, as we just released earlier this week, entered into a share repurchase program that runs roughly over the next 12 months. So in the near term, we'll allocate our cash between investments and our growth and share repurchases for our excess cash flow.
Okay. Time is up. I want to thank you, Art and Greg and DHI Group for joining us today and everyone in the audience who participated. I'm going to hand it over to you, Art, for some closing remarks. But first, I'm going to say, I know you have a pretty full one-on-one schedule, but if anyone would like to catch up with the management team following this presentation that doesn't have anything scheduled already, you can reach out to us or to Todd Kehrli or the management team directly.
And with that, I'll hand it over to you, Art, for some closing remarks.
I just want to say thank you very much to everybody for participating in today's briefing and our presentation. And as Anja indicated, if you're interested in having another meeting, we would invite you to contact Todd Kehrli. We'd love to talk with you one-on-one. So thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.