All right. Welcome, everyone. Hello, and thank you for joining DHI Group's 2022 Virtual Investor Day. I'm Rachel Ceccarelli, Vice President of Engagement, and will be serving as your contact if you have any questions today. All attendees are in a listen-only mode. Throughout today's presentation, there will be several opportunities to ask questions. If you have a question of a presenter, please use the Ask Questions feature. When it is your turn, I will unmute your line to allow you to ask your question. You may need to also use the unmute feature on your own device. You will then be remuted when your question has been answered. With that, I will turn it over to Art Zeile, Chief Executive Officer of DHI Group.
Thank you, Rachel, and once again, welcome everyone. Thank you for attending our second annual Investor Day. We are very excited to tell you more about the DHI story and answer your questions. We, of course, have included our standard forward-looking statements waiver with the normal caveats. Today, you will hear from a number of the members of our senior leadership team. I will kick things off, and then you will hear from Paul Farnsworth, our CTO, Michelle Marian, our Chief Marketing Officer, Evan Lesser, founder and President of our ClearanceJobs brand, Arie Kanofsky, our Chief Revenue Officer, and finally, Kevin Bostick, our CFO. Our agenda really coalesced around the questions our investors have been collectively asking us this year. I'm gonna start off by providing our view of market conditions and our growth strategy.
Paul will then explain how the Dice platform works and what our near-term product roadmap looks like. Michelle will take you through our specific role for marketing and our value proposition and how her team is instrumental to our growth strategy. Evan will then give you an update on the health of ClearanceJobs and the innovation he is currently working on. Arie will explain the levers we are pulling to achieve our 20% growth rate. Finally, Kevin will explain the essentials of a subscription-based software business model and also provide you with an update on our guidance. Each one of these presentations will have a short Q&A afterwards. We will have a longer format Q&A at the very end as well, and any and all questions are always welcome. To start, let me explain who we are. We are a software company and not a recruiting company.
Our clients are recruiters, and with our software tools, they find, attract, and hire tech professionals. We are delivering 20% revenue growth and 20% EBITDA margins, making us a Rule of 40 company, which is a performance standard that is important in the software world. We will talk more about the Rule of 40 later. DHI consists of two brands named Dice and ClearanceJobs. Combined, we profile over six million technologists across the two platforms. As a recruiter, you buy an annual subscription to our software and can have access to those technologists. You can find them and engage them in a career conversation. Our software needs to attend to the needs of both parties who are engaged in the hiring process, both clients and candidates. As we add clients, we increase the number of job opportunities available to our candidates.
As we add candidates, we make the platform more valuable to our clients, completing a virtuous circle. Again, we are not a staffing and recruiting company. We are a software company, a platform and a tool for recruiters to reach out and engage with this community of technologists. We do have clients that are staffing and recruiting agencies, but we also have clients that have their own internal recruiting teams, which we call commercial accounts. We sell access to our platform in a software-as-a-service business model. That means we sign annual or multiyear contracts for recruiter licenses or seats that allow access to our software and our client or our candidates' profiles. Clients pay for our software tools, much like an organization would pay for a Salesforce license. We do not charge candidates or tech professionals for any aspect of their experience on our two platforms.
Creating a profile and searching for jobs are free of charge. Now let's shift over to talk about the problem we solve for our clients. This is a visual depiction of that problem, and it's a big one. Since the dawn of the computer era, there's been an ever-increasing demand for workers with tech skills. Employees with tech skills now comprise about 10% of the total U.S. workforce, and it has been one of the top two occupational growth categories for the last two decades. Here's a chart of the open IT positions from January 2019- July 2022. The data comes from CompTIA, a trade association for the tech workforce. The important takeaway is that just prior to the pandemic, we had about 4,000 open tech positions.
The number dipped during the pandemic but came roaring back, touching almost 700,000 open tech positions in May of this year. This number was about 500,000 for the months of June and July. There has historically been a summer lull each year in hiring tech positions because of vacation activity. The bottom line is that we're at an all-time historical high for tech job postings in 2022. Our Dice figures track to those of CompTIA almost identically. In the first half of 2022, Dice's tech job postings were up 74% year over year. As I mentioned, this is not a one-time phenomenon. The number of technologists has been growing steadily for decades as the United States has become a more digital economy.
CompTIA is on record stating that the projected growth rate for tech jobs over the next decade will be nearly twice the average jobs growth rate. What's causing this surge in demand for technologists? There has been a number of reports that have indicated that companies felt like they were caught behind when the pandemic occurred. They weren't online enough. They weren't digital enough. They couldn't support work from home for their employees the way that they wanted to. Coming out of the pandemic, they are accelerating their digital efforts. A recent study by McKinsey indicated that the average company in the United States has accelerated the timing of their digital initiatives by three-four years. New York City is a microcosm of this phenomenon. As our largest city in the United States, it has a lot to say about the real-time employment trends that are playing out.
Since 2021, New York's tech sector has accounted for almost a quarter of all private sector job creation. Given this acceleration in demand, there is a clear and growing gap between supply and demand. There is a relentless news cycle of articles announcing tech hiring pauses and layoffs. The reality is that CompTIA reported that there were 3.1 million open tech job postings in the first half of 2022, a 49% increase over 2021. At the same time, if you added up all the tech layoffs year to date across the world, the number is 35,000. The layoffs are clearly a drop in the bucket compared to the number of open positions. Layoffs are a very minuscule part of the supply side of the equation.
The real fundamental issue is that we're not creating new technologists fast enough as a country. As a proxy for technologist creation, you can look at the number of new comp sci graduates each year. It took the entire last decade to grow from 50,000 comp sci graduates per year to 100,000 today. This is what is currently happening inside of any average month. Let's start with the approximate number of postings in July this year, not the high point of May. The tech demand was for approximately 500,000 positions. The tech unemployment rate that month was 1.7%. Theoretically, there were 136,000 tech candidates looking for work.
I say theoretically, because many of those counted as unemployed are happy to work on a project or a gig work assignment basis, which are becoming much more popular for the tech sector. If we took all the comp sci graduates in 2022 and apply them to just that one month, which is obviously unrealistic, you gain another 100,000 worth of tech supply. Finally, if all H-1B visa holders were reserved for tech workers and weren't already taken, you would add 85,000 worth of tech supply. We are not achieving anywhere near these numbers of visas right now, by the way, because the backlogs have been created by closure of U.S. consulates during COVID. Even under these stretch assumptions, the demand is still greater than 2x the supply.
That is what an average tech recruiter is dealing with every single day this year. How are recruiters responding to this challenge? They're buying any and all tools that can get them closer to a successful hire. That's where we fit in. We are a software tool that helps a recruiter find, attract, and ultimately hire a tech candidate. Let's bring this back to DHI Group. When I came on board roughly four years ago, I was given one mission by our board: achieve revenue growth while not sacrificing profitability. In a short period of time, we divested our six non-tech brands. Even then, we had to have a plan to successfully grow Dice and ClearanceJobs. Here is the simplistic three-point plan we undertook to drive growth for Dice specifically since ClearanceJobs was already growing.
First, we had to improve the Dice client and candidate experience. Luckily enough, CJ was and is a working prototype of what the ideal user experience should look like. ClearanceJobs features have become the Dice product roadmap. Dice has not fully replicated the ClearanceJobs experience yet, but we are on a path to doing so with the most important features already implemented. Second, we had to make sure that we are pursuing the right customers. Dice had traditionally sold to staffing and recruiting agencies and put little to no effort towards selling into companies that had their own internal recruiting teams. DHI commissioned an independent study and found that any recruiter, whether they work for Adecco or GEICO, finds value in the Dice platform. We created our commercial accounts new business team, which we have steadily added to over the past three years.
It is by far the largest of our new business sales teams. Finally, we are driving better go-to-market execution. We hired a new Chief Revenue Officer, Arie Kanofsky, and a new Chief Marketing Officer, Michelle Marian, both of whom you will meet shortly. They have significantly upgraded large parts of their teams and have created more efficient and scalable sales and marketing processes. When we determined that we could sell to commercial accounts, we also commissioned a study of what the ideal customer profile would look like. Our consultants came back and said that we should be focused on mid-sized tech firms and large-sized non-tech firms with 10 or more open tech positions on their career site. The natural question is, well, how many companies are there in the United States that fit this criteria?
The answer came back 86,803 of the six million businesses in the United States. My big picture view of the Dice commercial accounts total addressable market is this equation. You take our total possible customer base and multiply it by our current average contract value, our ACV. The result is $1.24 billion of TAM. We still have additional TAM associated with ClearanceJobs, and we still intend to sell to the Dice staffing agencies that we don't have as customers today. This analysis gave us a strong confidence that we have a long runway ahead of us for selling Dice to commercial accounts. One of the misperceptions out there is that Dice just sells to tech companies. Remember that the trend is that virtually all companies are embarking on digital initiatives.
Here is a view of our second quarter new business bookings for the Dice commercial accounts team. In the second quarter, only 9% of our bookings were associated with software companies. It was the fourth-largest percentage category for our bookings. We sell Dice across a broad set of business categories. Here are the results of our growth strategy over the past four years. In my first earnings call, DHI reported a revenue decline of 18%. This last quarter, we were up 29%. This happened over the past four years while maintaining an EBITDA margin of approximately 20%. We are committed to maintaining our status of being a Rule of 40 company. This is a common metric for success for software companies. If you're not familiar with this rule, you add the EBITDA margin and the revenue growth rate to get to 40 or more.
We will continue to maintain our commitment to 20% EBITDA margins, so that means our job is to fundamentally maintain 20% or more in revenue growth. You're gonna hear a lot more today about DHI Group. When it comes to our fundamental value proposition itself, here is what I would like you to remember. First, we solely focus on tech. We are not a generalist career site, but go super deep on tech and specifically tech skills. Second, tech is a great area to focus on. It's 10% of the economy, but it's one of the fastest-growing parts of the U.S. workforce. I would argue it's the engine for the future of the United States economy. Third, technologists are highly compensated.
We have published an annual salary survey every January, and this year was the first year the average technologist in the United States has a salary in six figures. It went up 7% over the past year. We sell annual subscription licenses and increasingly multiyear subscription licenses. 90% of our revenue comes from these subscription-based recurring revenue contracts. With our licenses, you have the ability to search our Dice database of over 5.1 million tech candidates in our CJ database of 1.3 million tech candidates with government clearances. These figures represent two-thirds of the skilled technologists in the United States. Here's the punchline. The world needs more technologists, and we are in the business of delivering them. Now let's move to Q&A. We received a couple of questions before the presentation, and I would like to answer those first.
The first question that came in was, in the 10-K management referenced, quote-unquote, "expanding the breadth of services our customers purchase from us." Can management offer any extra context to this? Does this mean more branding, values-based, news-based offerings, et cetera? Or does this mean introducing newer services not currently being offered to customers? My answer is this, the, that we're always looking for logical adjacencies that help recruiters find, attract, and ultimately hire tech talent. Our sourcing services and career events divisions have driven a tremendous amount of value this past year. We plan to expand those two divisions. I do, however, think that the big value driver for 2023 will be our branding services.
We put together a partnership with The Muse to fundamentally understand the best practices in corporate branding, and we spent this entire year basically putting together our product strategy and our engineering efforts dedicated to new branding solutions, and we're gonna be rolling those out at the beginning of 2023. The second question that came in was this one. Even prior to COVID, the metrics for CJ remain extraordinarily strong and consistent, whether it relates to growth in bookings, revenue, number of packaged customers, revenue per customer, and renewal rates. It is clear management made the right decision not to divest this business as it did with the other brands the company previously owned. That said, I believe the market cannot see the value present in this incredibly resilient and niche growth business as it is in the shadow, so to speak, of the larger Dice business.
Looking at the current EV to revenue multiples the market is placing on the same HCM companies that the CFO used in his comparable analysis at last year's investors day, even taking a conservative multiple of 5x, which is justified given the quality and resilience of the business, and applying it to just CJ's trailing 12-month revenue, will demonstrate how mispriced and undervalued the two brands that comprise DHI Group continue to be. I would be interested to hear management's thoughts on unlocking this value, given the decent equity exposure management themselves maintain, which is a positive in itself. Great question, and here is my answer.
If you take CJ's second quarter revenue run rate, which is obviously better than the trailing twelve-month revenue that is referenced in the question, and you multiply it by five, you get roughly $200 million worth of value. I do agree that CJ is undervalued, but I would also point out that both Dice and CJ are seeing the same growth and retention metrics, and we believe that both brands and DHI Group itself are undervalued right now. Kevin will take you through a pretty thorough analysis of how we look at our peer group today, and we will address this question in more detail. We fundamentally agree with the thesis behind this question, which is we have a lot more to do to unlock the value of DHI Group, given the growth that we are seeing across both brands.
with that, I wanted to answer those two questions because they came in before our presentation, but we are open for additional questions you might have at this point.
Okay, Art, we don't have any additional questions that have come in during this part of the presentation.
Well, just know that if you have additional questions, we have a much larger format Q&A session at the very end of all of the presentations given by the individuals today. We will make sure that we answer any and all questions. Thank you. I'd like to now introduce you to Paul Farnsworth, our Chief Technology Officer.
Thank you, Art. Hello, I'm Paul Farnsworth, the CTO at DHI. The Dice platform is a modern marketplace that consists of technologists on one side and clients on the other. Our goal for technologists is to be the first choice single destination for all technology opportunities in the market, and a trusted, personalized, easy and dependable resource to help technologists grow their careers. For clients, it's to be the first choice single destination for recruiters to reliably and easily discover all technologists in the market with personalized search, match, insights, and connections with the highest quality candidates, helping companies to advance their mission. Let's look at the experience of technologists who are using Dice. There are two primary ways that technologists access the Dice marketplace. Through the web interface at dice.com and our mobile application. We have approximately 1.6 million visits monthly.
Technologists' primary activity on our site is, of course, looking for jobs. We currently have about 300,000 unique jobs live available on our site over the course of a month. We also provide information about companies and recruiters offering jobs on the site, as well as specifics about location and culture of jobs advertised. To allow technologists to easily connect with recruiters, we also provide a number of tools which facilitate direct communication via our platform. Dice.com also provides extensive insights on both the job market, skills in demand, tips for resume writing, job seeking, and interview preparation. On the other side of our marketplace are recruiters seeking talent. For their companies, we support over 30,000 recruiters from staffing, recruiting, and consulting clients, and from our commercial account clients.
To give you an idea of the activity on our site on a monthly basis, technologists engage in about 1.5 million job searches, and we send back 25 million job alerts to active candidates seeking opportunities. We facilitate about 600,000 job applies. Private email is used 2.6 million times a month, and 12,000 direct messages are sent directly between candidates and recruiters. Let's talk about what technologists care about the most. They come to Dice to find opportunities and ways to advance their career. Technologists want an easy experience, which is why we've made investments in our user interface and user design. We've created automated job alerts that actively monitor our site for newly posted opportunities and push those directly to technologists. We recently redesigned our apply flow to create less friction for technologists who want to submit an application for a job.
Jobs shown on our site need to have the right amount of information to accurately match for location, skills, and culture. We've innovated here recently by allowing both candidates and recruiters to be more specific about time zones for employment opportunities. Lastly, we're a trusted source for guidance, particularly those early in their career. We provide evergreen content which contains tips about job searching, the state of the market, resume writing, and interview skills. We're investing now in a redesign of our jobs detail page. This will allow us to improve our ranking on dominant search engines and also provide technologists with easier access to company information, branding, and our tools. We're taking what we've learned from providing a match score for talent search and applying it to jobs.
This will allow technologists to easily rank opportunities based on how well those jobs match with their skills and backgrounds. As we see more technologists and recruiters communicate on our platform, we continue to enhance our direct messaging and alerting capabilities. Now let's look at the client side and how our recruiters use our platform every day. There are three primary methods that our recruiters use to access the technologists on our site. There are approximately five million profile views via TalentSearch directly on our website, and about three million profile views where clients use their own applicant tracking systems that we are integrated to with Dice or via our API services. Recruiters are, of course, after information about technologists, and we provide enriched profiles including skills, job history, preferred location, and culture preferences.
Just like the technologist side, recruiters can connect with technologists directly through our Connections platform. We also provide insights into the job market, salary expectations, and evergreen content to help recruiters find technologists efficiently. Technologist profiles come from two primary sources. Firstly, 5.1 million technologists are directly registered on Dice. We enhance these profiles with social data. We also aggregate clean and dedup social profiles. This allows recruiters to find passive candidates with targeted skills in their target market, and we currently have 43 million social profiles available through TalentSearch. To give you an idea of monthly activity, recruiters query TalentSearch about 11 million times and send about 2.6 million private emails monthly. When recruiters use our platform, they're there to find the best technologists for critical roles within their company or for clients.
We've invested heavily in our IntelliSearch feature, which allows accurate matches of technologists with a drag and a drop of a job description. We've also developed an industry-leading platform called Pages for social data profile aggregation and enhancement, which is integrated into our TalentSearch product and offers significant value. We continue to develop new applicant tracking system integrations that allow recruiters to work efficiently in their most common tools. We also facilitate job posting syndication for better visibility to candidates. As the market for technologists becomes increasingly competitive, we have a suite of products that allow companies to advertise, market, and brand their job opportunities, helping to increase application rates. Next, for our recruiters is continued investment in making IntelliSearch and workflow easier. We've added IntelliSearch talent alerts to proactively notify recruiters of lists of suitable technologists.
Recruiters have asked for a better way to organize their talent, their searches, and so we developed projects and pipelines which will be valuable, particularly for recruiters that lack applicant tracking systems. Finally, the communication enhancements we're developing that benefit both recruiters and technologists, allowing recruiters to quickly contact newly visible technologists in the competitive hiring environment. Now I've mentioned IntelliSearch quite a few times and thought it would be worth taking a minute to give you a little bit more detail. One of our biggest differentiators is IntelliSearch. Like many disciplines, technology recruiting is all about understanding the unique skills required for a position and understanding what is described in the candidate's profile. We spent the last nine years creating a data model which captures the relationship between 100,000+ tech skills and using machine learning to constantly improve our search capabilities within IntelliSearch.
None of our competitors bring the same depth of expertise, match, and quality for technology candidate searches. We were recently awarded a patent for the skills taxonomy and knowledge graph that powers our fast and accurate matching. With all of these enhancements that we've made, what difference do you get with Dice? First, with everything we do, we have a deep understanding of tech, from tech skills and occupations to our understanding of the factors involved in a technologist's career. We distill our deep understanding of tech into actionable signals for employers. We take tech candidate quality very seriously. Ultimately, it's our goal to have the most comprehensive technologist profile possible. Featuring resumes, job profiles, contact methods, and more.
Few notable features that contribute to this include our data quality for inclusion, our uniqueness in depth, breadth and quality of technologists, and our automated processes to ensure candidate qualities remain high. Next, we utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning throughout multiple aspects of the Dice experience, but specifically in connecting employers with the most relevant and active candidates. Last is our match and personalization capabilities. We create an employer and technologist experience deeply rooted in match and personalization, going beyond title matches and using advanced matching backed by our patented knowledge graph to help make valuable connections. We also personalize recommendations for recruiters and for technologists. I'll pause for Q&A before I hand over to Michelle Marian, our Chief Marketing Officer. We did receive a question in advance of today's presentation, so I'll answer that one first.
The question was, "Describe how the upcoming product enhancements will make them more valuable such that they should gain market share." I think the answer to that really is that our Dice roadmap, as Art mentioned at the beginning, is fast following CJ's features. While we've got some of the core pieces in there, we believe that there's still room to grow there. It gives us confidence that Dice will see similar results in terms of metrics that we've seen on the CJ side. Rachel, I'll see if there's any additional questions.
Yes. Hi, Paul. We do have another question that's just come in. It's from Will Hamilton, and the question is, "Why are profile views lower through ATS platforms via Dice.com? How has that been trending, or do you see that trending?
Profile views through Dice.com. Let me answer that a little bit. As we work more with commercial accounts, it's our expectation that those commercial accounts will want to see more integrations through their ATS systems. Recruiters in particular, as we talked about, in the competitive market we're in, are wanting to use all the tools they can to find tech candidates, and we are happy to help integrate into those tools, single source tools, which will mean that we expect to see over time a growth in talent search, particularly through those ATS systems. And probably less on, directly on the Dice.com site.
Okay. Thank you. Our next question comes from Anja Söderström . Anja, I'm going to unmute your line to ask your question. You are now unmuted.
Thank you for taking my question. Yes. Hi, Paul. Can you just talk a little bit about how your tech solution differs from other solutions that's in the market and how you win with your solutions?
Sure. Thanks for the question. You know, not to repeat some of the content before, you know, it really does come down to focusing very much on technologists, in particular, being a trusted place for technologists to come to seek advice. Once we've taken the registration of those technologists onto our site, we really do leverage that knowledge graph that I've talked about. In particular, if you think about the problems of recruiting inside a commercial accounts business, for example, where you have recruiters that might be recruiting across a broad set of disciplines, they may not understand fully that one particular technology equates to the same kind of technology, they just have different names. That knowledge graph that we've brought out enables us to actually tie those things together.
If you're looking for a candidate with container experience, you may not realize. If they've got Kubernetes as a skill, it's the same thing. By bringing that all together in that knowledge graph, we're able to help recruiters find much more capable, much more relevant candidates than you would on the more generalist sites, I think, that specifically don't have that focus around making sure that we're tying all that together.
Okay. Thank you. That was helpful.
You're welcome.
All right, Paul. We do have another question, and this one is from Will Hamilton. Will, I'm going to unmute your line, so that you can ask that question. Will, you are now unmuted on my end.
All right. Can you hear me?
Yeah. Hi, Will.
Great. I just had this follow-up related to the question I asked before is whether there are more ATS integrations that are in the pipeline. Any, like, big ones that you haven't done so far that, you know, would make your enterprise clients or prospective clients, you know, more functional with that?
We can provide a kind of a list of ATS platforms that we would target after the call. Specifically, we are continuing to build out ATS integration. We are represented on some big platforms right now. We continue to build out that. The other piece of work that we're doing that I think is relevant to integration, in particular, is we've matured our API services quite a bit in the last two years. We're now able both to have the ability to talent search through the API, so look for candidates. We also allow direct apply through our APIs as well now, which means that we give a much more consistent experience to candidates.
One of the biggest complaints on the technology side or the candidate side is, you know, you hear this all the time, "I apply into a black hole and don't receive feedback." It gives us the ability to actually manage that a little bit better. As we continue to grow those APIs out, we should expect to see kind of, I think, more stickiness from that activity.
Thanks.
All right, Paul, we don't have any other questions at this time.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Rachel. I'll hand over now to Michelle Marian, who is our Chief Marketing Officer.
Thank you, Paul. Hello, I'm Michelle Marian, and I'll be discussing how Dice marketing supports sales through thought leadership and leads, how we build brand awareness across our audiences, and engagement with and within our platforms. Audience understanding is critical to any marketing strategy, and Dice's audience development is based on quantitative and qualitative research. Our audiences include technologists at every stage of their career journey and the organizations hiring those technologists, which include human resource teams at companies hiring technologists and recruiters sourcing technologist talent. Each segment that I'll review has unique needs. Let's start with the three main technologist segments: go-getters, impact seekers, and skillful balancers. The go-getters are technologists with zero-three years of experience are focused on breaking into tech, landing their first roles, and beginning to build up their skill set for their dream tech careers.
They want to learn about different opportunities available in tech, both at the job and career level, and what they need to do to succeed in the workplace. Impact seekers are technologists with four-10 years of experience who have settled into their careers. They're looking for ways to build the right skills to move into higher level roles and beginning to review their career progress relative to their goals. In addition, they're starting to make decisions on whether to move into a tech leadership track or remain as individual contributors, as well as learning new skills where they may not have as much knowledge. Finally, the skillful balancers with 11-20 years of experience are the veteran technologists who have honed their craft and are likely well ingrained within their organizations.
Many are already in managerial roles and looking at high-level tech leadership positions, while others have become master specialists in their specific fields. Their interest lies in being paid what they're worth and having the tools and knowledge they need to continue to move up in their career journey. Dice client audiences include staffing and recruiting and commercial accounts in tech hiring growth industries such as manufacturing, software, finance, education, engineering, and retail. As Art noted, our primary area of focus right now is on mid-market tech companies and on large enterprise companies with greater than 10 tech job postings and who are outside of the traditional tech industry. As our data shows, there are quite a few organizations who fall into this category.
You'll note in my review that I'll discuss how we engage and connect with our buyers and prospective buyers or clients, and what we do to engage and connect with the technologists who use the Dice platform to find their next tech job and to build the tech career of their dreams. What's important to our business success is the marketing team's ability to drive audience acquisition, engagement, and retention. Starting with the employer recruiter audience, marketing's role is to drive growth, and that means supporting the sales team in meeting and exceeding their goals. We use digital ads and content to drive prospects to our site to complete a contact us form. The digital ad on the left, Where Tech Connects you with the best technologists at every level, lands users on our recruitment services or lead gen form.
The traditional marketing funnel is relevant for all of our audiences, beginning with awareness. Starting at the top, from digital marketing ads, content and webinars, site and email engagement, and other intent signals, these all contribute to generating prospective customers for sales as these prospects have raised their hand to have a conversation with sales. Marketing qualified leads, or MQLs, are comprised of prospective clients who provided their contact information through our web forms and chatbot experience, and companies researching tech recruitment and engaging with Dice via content, our site, and email. Our goal, marketing's goal is to deliver at least 40% of bookings driven by marketing qualified leads. Marketing provides leads to sales by using our audience understanding to develop campaigns that will resonate with each audience based on their most critical needs and pain points.
For all of our clients and prospects, the biggest pain point is the increased competition for technologist talent and the supply not keeping up with the demand. Specific to the commercial accounts audience or recruiters and HR decision-makers at organizations hiring technologists, they need to know how to build a brand and culture that's attractive to the technologists they need for their organizations. These organizations are also hyper-focused on establishing more diverse workforces and need Dice's help to do so. For our staffing and recruiting audience or third-party recruiters supporting companies looking to hire technologists, their needs are slightly different. For them, it's about finding the right technologist as quickly as possible while not sacrificing quality. They also need to be able to discover and connect with technologists at scale to support their many clients quickly. Our marketplace ecosystem is defined by the connections and engagement across technologists and clients.
One of the most critical components of the value we provide our clients is our database of qualified technologists. Increased unique technologists and technologist engagement, such as connections, content, and applying to a job, drives increased clients, resulting in more jobs to our site and driving more technologists to our site. We currently have more than five million technologists on the Dice platform. The more we grow that number and the more of those technologists that continue to engage with us, the more value we bring to every client we partner with. That brings us to how we build our technologist audience. How do we find these technologists? For our technologist audience, I wanted to share our recently launched campaign called Keys to Tech. This campaign was developed to communicate tech specialization, impact and problem-solving, and empowerment.
The concept is based on bolder messaging and also on technologists' affinity with their work environments. For technologists, their keyboards and work environment are an extension of themselves and something they rely on every day. In addition, technologists frequently use keyboard shortcuts for coding, so this is a way to communicate directly with developers and engineers. Using this passion for environment and coding expertise, we transformed our creative into a powerful campaign that is already resonating with early in-career technologists. This slide shows the ad campaign saying, "Take command of your tech career." We have a few digital ads that we'd love to show you. We'll roll those on the next slide. From a targeting perspective, we're focused on growing our awareness and consideration with earlier in-career audiences while maintaining our extremely strong position with technologists of 10 years of experience or more.
Our awareness campaigns feature digital media and an influencer program. We target our audiences where they are, which could mean a tech-specific site like Stack Overflow or a non-tech specific site such as Meta or YouTube, which serves the ad while technologists are engaging in social media and other online activities. We are always testing new placements on tech sites, such as technologists discussing new coding languages and those that provide forums where technologists engage with one another. Our influencer program has had great success in driving awareness. The campaign is called #WhereTechConnects. The influencers we're partnered with are technologists with a following on platforms such as TikTok or Instagram. Through these programs, we've been able to get important messages around diversity, equity, and inclusion in tech. These campaigns have increased aided awareness and driven more direct and organic traffic to Dice.com.
By combining digital advertising and influencer programs, we expand our reach and ability to introduce the Dice brand to earlier in-career technologists. We measure our performance through Dice-registered users, which is 5.1 million technologists and drives 1.6 million monthly average visits. We view content as a differentiator for Dice, as it is an opportunity to showcase our deep understanding of technology recruiting. Dice is a platform to help solve the problems of tech and careers, and that's what we want to be known for. Our content is one of the most important mechanisms to help us do that. More so than other mediums, content allows us to move individuals in our primary audiences from awareness to trust, and building and keeping trust is a key to brand success.
For the technologist audience, that means providing a trusted destination where every technologist can access the information and resources they need to make every big decision in their tech career, and a place where they can feel understood, respected, and welcomed. For employer recruiter audiences, it means providing them with the original research, analysis, and insights they need to navigate the ever-changing and competitive world of discovering, hiring, and retaining the right technologists for their most important roles. I've included a few examples of our content, including the annual Dice Tech Salary Report, which Art discussed, featuring annual salaries and more, the Dice Equality in Tech Report, which is focused on diversity, and the Dice Tech Jobs Report, which we released just a few weeks ago, which focuses on the recent trends by location, occupation, and skill.
Our content includes a blog and recently launched podcast, Tech Connects, featuring discussions on trending topics in the tech career space. To close, DHI Group has continued to make investments in marketing from awareness, consideration, conversion to loyalty, supporting our brand, content, digital, and engagement channels. These investments are paying dividends and driving both client growth and increased usage of our platform by technologists. Thank you for your time today, and I'd be happy to answer any of your questions.
All right. Thank you, Michelle. We do have a question that has come in from Jamie Capello. Jamie, I'm going to unmute your line and allow you to ask your question now. Jamie, you are unmuted.
Oh, there you go. Can you hear me?
Hi, Jamie. Yes.
Hey, Michelle. In terms of targeting, how come you guys do not target large enterprises within the tech sector?
What we do with our targeting is we, as we talked about the tech mid-market and the large enterprise, we also, with our targeting, we look at the industries that are recruiting and also where we're driving bookings and revenue through with our sales organization. We also partner really closely with sales. We target those specifically. It could potentially be an enterprise with tech, and it could also be an enterprise non-tech. We are actually looking for those who are recruiting technologists.
Is Microsoft a customer in Cisco?
Cisco definitely, and Microsoft I'd have to confirm on that one. We can definitely get back to you on that, and I'm sure Arie can answer that when he jumps in.
Great. Thanks, Michelle.
Yep. Thank you very much.
Hey, Michelle, we don't have any other questions at this time.
Thank you very much. Well, I would love to introduce Evan Lesser, who is the Founder and President of ClearanceJobs.
Excellent. Thank you so much, Michelle. Well, hi there, folks, and thanks so much for joining us today. Again, my name is Evan Lesser. I'm the founder and president of ClearanceJobs. I joined DHI in 2004. Happy to have an 18-year legacy with DHI on the senior leadership team. Today, you're gonna gain insight into the ClearanceJobs business, our marketplace dynamics, and how we've dominated our niche of defense industry employment for over 20 years. In addition, as Art mentioned at the beginning of the call, I'll show you why and how ClearanceJobs serves DHI as a test bed for new and innovative ideas, which have resulted in revenue growth for ClearanceJobs every year of our existence. We'll start with a very brief overview of security clearances.
Having a security clearance means the U.S. federal government has cleared you to either access certain classified information relating to national security or for you to work in close proximity to such information. Now, when you have a clearance, you don't have access to all classified information, rather only what you need to do your assigned job. Once you have a clearance for your work, you'll maintain it until you no longer have a job that requires access to classified information. The three basic levels of clearance are confidential at the lowest, secret in the middle, top secret at the end. The higher the level, the more scarce the number of workers who have that designation. Every U.S. citizen requiring a clearance for their job will undergo a deep background investigation, which is paid for by the government. Here's a few fast facts about ClearanceJobs.
As I mentioned, ClearanceJobs was launched in 2002, and we celebrated our twentieth birthday in July. We serve three important industries in the United States, defense, intelligence, and homeland security. I'll talk more in a moment about the strength of those industries and the market resiliency they offer. ClearanceJobs is the largest online career resource for our niche, hands down. We've registered over 1.4 million security-cleared U.S. citizens and are happy to have 2,000 subscription customers. Most of our customers are defense contracting firms. Some you're likely familiar with are employers like Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman. We also work with a number of tech firms that have government contracts, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Dell, and HP. ClearanceJobs additionally helps staffing and recruiting firms in our industry.
Last but not least, we have a number of government agencies that utilize ClearanceJobs to hire, including the FBI, NSA, the U.S. Space Force, Department of Homeland Security, and others. Recently, we've been averaging around 74 security-cleared jobs listed on ClearanceJobs at any given time, with the majority of those roles being in tech and engineering with lots of demand. Now, one of the reasons that ClearanceJobs has shown bookings and revenue growth for each of our 20 years is due to the resiliency in the market we serve. As I noted previously, ClearanceJobs serves the U.S. defense, intelligence, and homeland security markets. The U.S. Department of Defense is the nation's largest employer, and the Pentagon is the largest office building on the planet. In each annual government budget, the DoD makes up the largest share of expenditures.
In 2022, the U.S. DoD budget was north of $778 billion. Similarly, the U.S. intel agencies and their contractors and subcontractors are all in the security-cleared space and prime ClearanceJobs clients. The world of intelligence is inherently high tech, and many of the innovations in tech, engineering, cybersecurity, and communications originated from the intel agencies. A $67 billion budget request has been positioned for 2023, keeping this industry well-funded. Last but not least, Homeland Security is a U.S. umbrella agency and incorporates many pieces of our government, including Customs and Border Protection, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, other agencies like the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Transportation Security Administration, and more. DHS is home to over 250,000 employees, all with some level of clearance.
An important thing to note about these three is that the work in defense, intelligence, and homeland security goes on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and 365 days a year. It doesn't stop for recessions, pandemics, politics, or any other reason, and they're all constantly hiring. ClearanceJobs serves them all. This makes ClearanceJobs a uniquely well-positioned and extremely resilient business. I wanna take a moment to further explain DHI's strategy around our platforms. Now, no doubt you've heard the terms job board, marketplace, and community in other businesses you follow. For DHI, both Dice and ClearanceJobs started off historically as job boards. Job boards are very transactional. They focus solely on active job seekers, and there's not much communication between employers and candidates going on in them. Candidates submit job applications, and they wait to hear back from employers.
Now, while both Dice and ClearanceJobs have job postings currently listed on our sites, we've both pivoted to being online marketplaces for the industries we serve. Now, unlike transactional job boards, career marketplaces are more similar to other marketplaces on the web like Amazon, Yelp, Uber, Airbnb, and that there are buyers and sellers, candidates and employers, and each side has an important stake in presenting opportunities and establishing communication with the other side. Now, in a career marketplace, employers look for candidate leads, and they strive to warm them up and convert them to be active job seekers. With tech and security-cleared unemployment at record lows, the career marketplace model is focused on employed passive candidates. Our marketplace tools and features enable two-way communication where employers and candidates can talk, build trust, and explore opportunities.
Lastly, a career community serves both active job seekers and passive candidates with a key focus on user engagement. When candidates can talk to recruiters and other candidates, new possibilities really open for how users receive information and gain value from the platform. These are the three stages, and each is additive onto the previous stage. You can see the evolution here. You can see where we're at and where we're heading, and hopefully, this helps you understand DHI's products. Pardon me. That brings us to ClearanceJobs. Back in 2010, ClearanceJobs pivoted from job board to career marketplace. For the last 12 years, we've operated our career marketplace and are now just entering the community part of the maturity model. Our evolution has become the North Star for Dice, and many early ClearanceJobs learnings have made their way onto Dice.
It's important to note that the primary way that ClearanceJobs has dominated our niche for the last 20 years is through product innovation. We launched our V1 career marketplace over 12 years ago and have iterated ever since. Now, our customers have access to not only the largest database of security-cleared professionals available anywhere, but a robust feature set to find, engage, and hire those workers. Dice is similarly well on their way to rich marketplace functionality with lots of room to grow. Today, ClearanceJobs features live chat with candidates, instant messaging, bulk communications, workflow automation, full talent pipelining capabilities for recruiters, user groups, and so much more. Shortly, I'll show you some upcoming innovations we've got in the works that's gonna further increase the ROI that our clients and candidates get from ClearanceJobs. One of the keys to ClearanceJobs' success is our candidate relationship management model.
Now, just like Salesforce does for sales professionals, ClearanceJobs does for recruiters. Our SaaS platform lets employers find, organize, and engage, and hire candidates by moving them down a funnel from top to bottom, from cold to warm, from many to few. This is a tried and true proven method and absolutely required in a market where worker unemployment is so low and most candidates are passive and employed. Recruiters must warm up talent. They must nurture their candidate prospects and push employer branding to get passive candidates interested in making a career change. Our platform and our model does that. Here's two upcoming product updates that are gonna further strengthen the strong ClearanceJobs business. We're doubling down on employer branding because all the research shows that you can't convert passive candidates into active job seekers without a strong, robust, and convincing presence in front of your audience.
We've got new employer profile coming that is simple to update, contains unlimited content, and full flexibility on layout. Whatever type of content an employer thinks will warm up their candidate prospects, they'll be able to add to their profile quickly and easily. This will be a paid product, and we're gonna be pitching it to 100% of our clients when it's launched later this year. Next, for candidates, we've got our first-ever ClearanceJobs candidate mobile app, and it's been in development for the last year. We're gonna launch it in late 2022 and are really excited to see what it does for candidate-to-employer engagement. This feature set is specifically designed and tuned to facilitate discovery of opportunities and real-time communications between employers and candidates. To close, I'll briefly talk about some of the growth opportunities we're seizing.
We believe that better customer segmentation with appropriate pricing and packaging will allow more employers into ClearanceJobs. We also know that while we presently service most of the top 100 contracting firms in the government, there are 10,000 cleared employers in the US, all appropriate for ClearanceJobs when they need to hire. Lastly, we've made great strides into selling directly to the federal government over the last few years. There's plenty of room to expand those accounts and add new agencies. The government's hiring challenges are pretty similar to industry, and we've got a proven track record of success in helping government agencies hire and spread their hiring messages. We're awfully proud of the strong, innovative, and indispensable career marketplace we've built.
ClearanceJobs is the leader in our industry, and our dominating presence and innovative product strategy has positioned the business as a world-class entity that has no viable alternatives. With that, I'm happy to take any questions that you might have. All right. Yeah, Rachel, I see one question that came in, what's the breakdown on potential business opportunities between government agencies and government contractors? Really, you know, we believe that the direct government agency sales opportunity to direct to government is $5 million-$10 million in revenue over time. But we still believe that capturing those 10,000 employers with facility clearance is the bigger opportunity we have in front of us, and that's why we continue to add to our new business team that attends to that particular customer segment.
All right. Thank you, Evan. We have another question in, but it is, I think it was intended for Michelle, and so I'm gonna hold that question until we have the broader Q&A section at the end. John, we'll get to your question at that time. I'm gonna pause for one second to see if there's any other questions for Evan here. We do. This question is from Bill Dezellem. Bill, I am going to unmute your line, and you'll be able to ask your question. Bill, you are now unmuted.
Thank you. Evan, are either candidates or employers requesting the mobile app, or is this an evolution that you believe that once you put in place, the little field of dreams that build it and they will come?
Candidates have been requesting the mobile app for some years. I realize that, you know, 2022 is very late to be creating a mobile app. What we found on ClearanceJobs with candidate traffic is a lot of candidates are working in secure facilities, sometimes called SCIFs, and they were not able to bring their phones into work. Only really recently in the last 12 months have we seen more than 50% of candidate traffic coming on a mobile device. We really had never had a need for a mobile app with so much candidate traffic, the majority coming in on a desktop. Now that it's over 50%, we've decided that the mobile app was really a prime opportunity for us.
Again, we're not making the mobile app to directly copy everything on the desktop site. We're focusing the mobile app on those things that revolve around engagement. Messaging, viewing jobs, applying for jobs, live chat with recruiters, instant messaging with recruiters. Really focusing the app on that engagement.
Great. Thank you.
All right, Evan, we don't have any other questions for you at this time, but we do have that Q&A at the end as well.
Great. I'm happy to introduce Arie Kanofsky, DHI's Chief Revenue Officer.
Thanks, Evan. Hello, everybody. Before I jump into my briefing, I just wanted to answer, Jamie Capello's question about Microsoft. Jamie, the answer is absolutely yes, they are a customer. I can certainly also expand to say that many big tech names like Amazon, too, Facebook, among many others, are also clients, as are other enterprise customers in various industries. Hopefully that answers your question, and certainly happy to answer anything else at the end of my briefing. That said, hi, everybody. My name is Arie Kanofsky, and I am DHI's Chief Revenue Officer. It's a pleasure to get the opportunity to present our growth strategy today. You've already heard from Art about our continued QoQ growth. You've heard about our best-in-class products and our roadmap for the future.
You still may be wondering, why invest now? Just how far can this team take DHI? Before I answer that question and dive into our continued strategy for growth, I thought it would be even more impactful to give you all a glimpse of where the revenue team was just a short time ago, 'cause I really believe it's going to demonstrate just how far we've not only come, so you can clearly begin to see, that DHI is poised for continued growth. When I joined the company in late 2019, it was evident from day one that a significant gap existed from people, lack of overall process, accountability, sales automation, that not only impeded DHI's progress in the past, but also showed me there was an incredible opportunity here.
In early 2020, we assembled a new leadership team that began the journey of reimagining the entire revenue function. Believe it or not, there were over 30 major initiatives that the team accomplished that year, from a new sales process, significant headcount changes, new levels of accountability, reporting, metrics, forecasting to training certifications, quarterly business reviews. We even reengineered the entire client onboarding process and what we measure to ensure we have great customer relationships. In June 2021, nearly a year and a half later, a very, very large transformation complete, we came out with a significantly better team, a better go-to-market, and achieved significantly better results across all our major KPIs for both new business and account management. To me, that's where our story really started. Fast-forward to where we are today.
There are five strategic initiatives that the team has been executing on since 2021, all of which are the foundation of DHI's revenue growth strategy and all key drivers to increase average deal size, client retention, and customer spend. I'll highlight these during the remainder of my briefing 'cause they're all catalysts to attacking the multibillion-dollar addressable market opportunity that Art mentioned is certainly in front of us. Our first strategic lever is to continue executing on our baseline strategy of selling multi-year contracts. This year, we've added an emphasis on contracts with YoY price increases. Since the initiative's launch, we've really seen a significant velocity with multi-year contracts, where to date the team has locked up approximately 17% of all customers for two or more years.
At this point, 95% of all customers have accepted a contract with an auto-renewal clause, which is a significant uptick to where we were just last year. Speaking of customers, last year we launched a white glove customer experience team that we call New Account Special Handling. It's a team that has a singular focus on ensuring our first-year customers have an amazing experience, which to me is critical. As we all know, when a customer remains with DHI for two or more years, our renewal rates are significantly higher. We now not only have a seamless handoff between sales and account management, we also understand why our customers are buying. We understand what their challenges are, their implementation requirements, all of which result in a far better experience for our customers and a far better ROI for them.
As you can see, early signs of the NASH team are incredibly positive. We've not only achieved a heightened customer experience, but a significant uptick in renewal and retention rates from just a year ago. The third lever focuses on our continued evolution into a solution-oriented and strategically focused sales team that leads its process with branding, and we are gaining momentum. In Q2, we saw nearly a 180% increase in branded bookings from just a year ago. We're also seeing a similar story with career events and sourcing, where in events we saw a 36% increase in sourcing, nearly a 90% YoY increase in bookings. Obviously, these services also significantly contribute to our strategy of growing average deal size that will be much more meaningful as we continue to develop best-in-class products for our customers.
The fourth strategic initiative is to continue to add headcount to the new business teams and attack the tremendous amount of prospective customers that sit in the billion-dollar-plus total available market for both the Dice and CJ business teams, with the specific goal of broadening our customer base with quality clients. In partnership with Michelle in marketing, which as she explained during her briefing, that drives quality leads to our new business teams of prospective customers that have essentially raised their hands to have a conversation about Dice and CJ's products and services. As Michelle also noted, MQLs routinely contribute to 40% of our team's new business booking targets.
As we add customers, we want to ensure that our client engagement teams are balanced from a customer load perspective, so our team has ample time to proactively meet with their customers and continue to provide a great experience for them so they achieve a consistent return on their investment with us. Our last strategic lever really ties everything together, and that's to continuously train, continuously coach, and mentor our reps, as in my opinion, our people are our number one asset. Over the last couple of years, we've built a best-in-class learning and development organization that has the specific focus of making our people better each and every day. They developed a full curriculum that begins on a team member's first day with us and continues every single month to ensure our reps are ramped effectively and are producing at their highest ability.
As a result, last year, nearly 75% of all reps either met or exceeded their sales targets. Fast-forward a year since I've had the opportunity to present to all of you, and five strategic initiatives that the team is executing on day after day and quarter over quarter. We're not just talking about results, we're actually seeing them. We're looking at a much different team than I inherited in 2019. We're looking at a team that's stronger and getting stronger every single day, and one that has a significantly better go-to-market strategy and a team that's also far better engaged with our customers than ever before. As a result, we are achieving the world-class results that you can see here. What's next?
In order to continue driving results like the ones I just shared, outside of our five strategic levers, which I consider foundational, there are a few additional initiatives that the team will be focusing on in 2023. The first, we will continue to focus on our customers, ensuring that all of them have a great experience and get an equally greater return on their investment, so they increase their spend and they stay with us because we become an irreplaceable, trusted partner. With the incredible untapped billion-dollar opportunity that sits in front of us, we will further expand our new business teams, especially in the commercial space. Third, we will look to create an effective low touch digital strategy for our smallest of customers, which will enable us to provide a great experience for them without the added headcount.
Finally, by having a maniacal focus on what got us here in the first place, and that's to continue to expand our customer portfolio of services, continuing to drive increases in average deal size and ensuring we build amazing relationships with our customers, so we increase the number of repeat ones and grow our overall customer base. Before I introduce Kevin Bostick, that's really it for me. Who has the first question?
All right, Arie, I'm pausing for just a second to see if any questions come in. We do. This question is from Kevin Liu. Kevin, I'm going to unmute your line so that you can ask Arie your question.
Hi, Kevin.
All right, Kevin, you're unmuted.
Thanks for taking the question here. I guess, you know, the commercial opportunity is obviously big. The macro backdrop with the tight labor market seems to be in your favor. I'm wondering what you see as kind of the gating factors to growing even faster, on the commercial side of things right now.
Can you repeat that one more time? I missed the last piece, Kevin.
Just wondering, you know, if there are any gating factors that you would call out that preclude you from growing even faster, on the commercial side of things, you know, given how massive the opportunity is and kind of the favorable backdrop you guys have currently. Is it more reps that you would need to bring in the field, more marketing leads? I'm just wondering, you know.
Yeah.
What would help accelerate that?
Gotcha. It's really a combination of everything. We absolutely believe that the wind is at our backs, and we have a great opportunity for sure. I believe we can continue to scale the team, and resources to continue the momentum and make us continually successful. That's a combination of MQLs to adding new reps, SDRs, certainly doubling down on training to make sure our team is the best of their ability. We believe we can absolutely scale the organization, as we are today.
Got it. If I could add just one on the retention side. Obviously, you guys have done extremely well there of late. What is it that you're adding to the deals at the time of renewal to get your retention rate north of 100% currently? Just in general, if you could talk to some of the drivers of that you guys are putting in place to make sure your deal sizes are continuing to grow.
Sure. I think it really all starts with leadership. We hired an exceptional leader that I've worked with for years, a gal named Amanda Schaefer, who has instituted many things on the account management side, from automated systems with our reps, where they can ensure that they understand what the client health is, well before renewal, but also significant process from a much better onboarding. Obviously, the NASH team that I mentioned a moment ago is under her guidance, and has done a tremendous job for first year customer renewals and retention to just the engagement that we have with our customers from QBRs, day-to-day touch points, data, insights, et cetera, et cetera.
Overall, all of this, we're able to really provide our customers a much, much greater experience than we've had in the past, which I believe will allow us to sustain this level of performance in the future.
Thank you for taking the question.
Thank you. My pleasure.
All right, Ari, we do have another question, and this one is from John Basler. John, I'm going to unmute your line to ask your question. John, you are now unmuted.
Hi, can you hear me?
Hi, John.
Hi.
Hi.
Thanks for the presentation. It's great. Can you parse out the inflection in growth driven by the record high tech openings that Art talked about versus executing on the strategic objectives?
When you say the inflection point, you mean?
Your growth has obviously turned around and, you know, you showed that there was sort of an inflection since you joined and started these initiatives. I'm just wondering if you're able to parse out how much is just from the record job openings or tightness in labor market versus, you know, those strategic initiatives being executed.
Gotcha. Well, it certainly was a favor to us in terms of the tightening of the market. That has absolutely helped. I will definitely say that the things that we put together over the last year and a half in terms of the processes, bringing in new leadership to accountability and just an overall greater go-to-market strategy, again, from multiyear contracts to auto renewals to just the touch points with our customers, has really created that inflection point.
That's great. Yeah. If I could just sneak in one more. Some of, you know, my diligence has suggested LinkedIn over the past couple of years has taken, you know, increasing mind share. It's kind of obvious in hindsight. Mind share and wallet, I guess, for recruiters and the recruits. I'm just wondering what your biggest differentiators are and sort of the strategy there, right, to continue to differentiate from LinkedIn.
Sure. So as Paul mentioned before, I think hit the nail on the head, and this is for everybody on the call, is that we are. We've been at this for 32 years, and looking at all of our competitors, that's, you know, in terms of technology, we're the only ones that focus on technology, and we've been at this game almost twice as long as every single one of our competitors. But having a single-threaded focus on technologists from giving them the tools that they need to connect with employers and creating a marketplace, I think has a significant advantage to LinkedIn and every other competitor that we have. Does that answer your question?
Yeah, I think so. Thank you.
Okay.
All right. Ari, we don't have any other questions for you at this time.
All right. Well, that said, thank you, everybody, for your time. Obviously, I'm free at the end for Q&A as well. At this point, I'd like to introduce Kevin Bostick, our CFO.
Thank you, Arie. I'm going to spend the next couple minutes going through the economics of the DHI model and then how we view our valuation in the broader HR technology and application software space. Finally, I'll be updating our revenue guidance for the full year 2022. First, let me discuss the core products and how the contracted value of products you heard about today translates into revenue. Both our commercial accounts and our staffing and recruiting customers purchase annual licenses that grant them access to our platform. The actual value of the contract is based on the number of licenses that a customer buys, as well as the unit volume of either profile views or job postings. These annual contracts or subscription agreements represent about 90% of our total bookings and therefore revenue. These agreements are typically annual or multi-year contracts.
Currently, 17% of our contracts are for two or more years, and 95% of our contracts have auto-renewal features, which will often include a 5%-10% annual price increase. As you can see by the percentages just noted, many customers that signed a multi-year contract also will have an auto-renewal clause. In addition to selling annual subscriptions, we sell transactional products such as branding, advertising, sourcing services, and virtual career events. These contracts are included in bookings in the period that the contract commences and then is recognized as revenue as the services are provided. With these agreements, bookings is still the total revenue expected to be recognized within the next 12 months, though the recognition period is often less than 12 months, which I will explain in a moment.
Before we go into the specifics about the business, I'd like to go through reporting metrics we disclose each quarter in connection with our revenue and customer activity. When we use the term bookings, that is the annual contract value of those customer agreements that go into service during the period being reported. As an example, if we have a $24,000 two-year subscription contract sold in December 2022 with a service start date of January 2023, we will recognize $12,000 in bookings in Q1 2023. Then on the anniversary date in Q1 2024, we will recognize another $12,000 of bookings. Under GAAP, we will recognize revenue of $1,000 per month for those 24 months. Next is renewal on customer count.
This percentage represents the number of customers that renewed their annual recruitment package contract out of the total number of customers whose contracts were up for renewal. This is purely a customer count metric and is independent of contract value. Revenue retention is a metric we use specific to those customers that renewed their annual recruitment package contract during the reported period. This percentage represents the total contract value of the new agreements relative to the total contract value of the prior agreements. Again, this is only for customers that renewed during the period. Revenue renewal is a combination of renewal on count and revenue retention. This illustrates the total dollar value of revenue renewed as a % of revenue up for renewal during that period.
It should be noted that while bookings is inclusive of all products that we sell, when we discuss renewal on count, revenue retention, and revenue renewal, these are all based on annual recruitment packages only and exclude transactional products and non-annual subscription contracts. Lastly, we also disclose annual recurring revenue. This percentage represents the total revenue during a period that is generated from annual recruitment package contracts. The percentage of revenue that is not part of annual recurring revenue represents the revenue from transactional products and any non-annual subscriptions. This diagram shows how revenue is recognized for three different products based on the booking amounts and periods in which the service is delivered. An annual subscription agreement for $100,000 will be recognized as revenue of $25,000 per quarter over that year. Sourcing, however, is recognized over the project period.
If there is a two-month sourcing contract for $20,000, revenue will be recognized at $10,000 a month for those two months. Career event agreements will often have specific dates for events. When DHI hosts each of those events, the pro-rata portion of that booking will be recognized as revenue in the period the event occurs. Now let me quickly turn to how bookings translates into revenue when there are changes in bookings. In this example, you can see we have a consistent level of bookings throughout year one, and therefore there is a consistent level of revenue being recognized as well. In year two, when bookings increase 10% for the period shown, initially, we see a smaller percentage in the increase in YoY revenue because you are still amortizing the lower bookings from the previous periods.
In fact, you can see in this example, with a 10% increase in bookings each quarter, it takes a full four quarters to recognize that same 10% increase YoY in revenue. On an annual basis, even with an increase of 10% in bookings, there is only a 6.3% increase in revenue for the calendar year. Art and I are often asked how we view the trade-off between revenue growth and EBITDA margin, or more broadly, profitability. Let me start by saying that we maintain the view that the rule of 40 is an appropriate metric to evaluate our business. As a reminder, the rule of 40 is the summation of percentage revenue growth during a period, plus the EBITDA margin in that same period. The sum of those two numbers should be at or exceed 40%.
The tenet for the Rule of 40 is that investors are comfortable with lower margins if revenue growth remains high. If revenue growth slows down, then margins should begin to expand. Ultimately, the Rule of 40 is intended to balance revenue and EBITDA, where each part is weighted equally. However, within the HR technology space, the equity markets reward revenue growth more so than profitability, as they would like to see margin expansion occur at the highest level of revenue as possible. Specific to our space, the market is more highly correlated to 3GP, where growth, the G, is valued at three times that of margin, in this case, profit or P. While no specific calculation is used like the Rule of 40, a regression model of stock multiples show a very high correlation between G3GP and both revenue and EBITDA multiples.
This leads us to focus on driving revenue growth because that will drive long-term equity value creation. However, we believe maintaining a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin is good for the business as it creates significant cash flow that we can invest in CapEx, continue our share repurchase program, or look at other opportunities for inorganic growth. This slide shows the benefits of focusing on revenue growth while still within the confines of the Rule of 40. I want to note this is an example of the trade-off between growth and profitability and is not specific to DHI or our out year guidance. In the first example, you can see there's a bias towards expanding EBITDA margins, which therefore limits revenue growth. In this scenario, we start with an 18% annual revenue growth rate, which slows to a 10% annual growth rate by year five.
On a basis of $100 of revenue to start, revenue at year five would be $192. The chart on the right shows the benefit of continuing to invest in sales and marketing to drive revenue while maintaining margins at 20%. In this scenario, annual revenue growth is 20% in years one through three, then tapers down in years four and five. You can see the same $100 of revenue in the base year will be $234 in year five. Using a constant revenue multiple, this would drive over a 22% increase in enterprise value. In addition, even with a lower EBITDA margin, EBITDA on a dollar basis would be higher in the second example in year five. This illustrates why DHI remains focused on driving revenue growth in lieu of margin expansion.
Now let me turn specifically to our comps in the public equity markets. In conjunction with our bankers, we came up with two comparable groups that we use to analyze our enterprise valuation relative to others in the capital markets. The first group represents companies focused on the talent acquisition space. These companies specifically sell a solution to recruiting managers, whether staffing and recruiting or commercial accounts. The second group of comparables are in the application software space. While they may not sell directly to recruiting managers, the economics of their subscription-based software model are very similar to DHI's SaaS model, notably selling their software solutions to businesses. As I said, these tables were put together in conjunction with our various banking relationships. These next two pages are based on closing stock prices on Tuesday, September sixth.
First, let's look at the revenue growth, which is the focus of our industry. We're at nearly a 22% revenue growth rate, which is higher than both the mean and the median for both talent acquisition and application software comps. Now, as you look down at the valuation charts below each revenue growth chart, you can see that our valuation is significantly below both talent acquisition and application software as a multiple of revenue. Specific to talent acquisition, we're at a roughly 45% discount, and to application software, our trading levels as a multiple of revenue are at nearly a 50% discount. These revenue multiples lead us to believe that our stock is undervalued, and there is significant opportunity to see share price appreciation. The next set of charts show the same analysis using EBITDA margins and enterprise value as a multiple of EBITDA.
As you can see within the talent acquisition space, our 21% margin is above the median margin of 19.1% and also above the 15% margins in the application software space. Yet while DHI is above both of those comparable sets on margin, we are trading at a discount of roughly 15% to the talent acquisition comps and a 55% discount to the application software comps. Again, by using this analysis, we believe our stock is undervalued, and there is a significant price appreciation opportunity. This view that our stock is undervalued is also a key reason why we have remained active in buying back our shares in the public markets.
Since the beginning of 2020, we have purchased approximately 9.4 million shares, which represent 19% of our currently outstanding shares of 48.5 million as of June 30, 2022. Lastly, I want to address our business outlook as we continue to see very strong performance across all of our sales organization. For the third quarter of 2022, we are maintaining our guidance of a 21%-23% YoY revenue growth rate while maintaining our 20% margins. For the full year, we are increasing our guidance to $148-$149 million in revenue based on the continued strong performance of our sales organization and the associated KPIs that we're currently experiencing with our renewal book. As we look at the long-term prospects for DHI, we believe there's still significant opportunities for growth based on our under-penetrated TAMs.
We will continue to invest in both our sales organization and our third-party marketing spend to drive bookings and revenue growth. We will stay within the Rule of 40. However, we will have that bias towards driving top-line growth that I spoke about a few minutes ago. With that, we have visibility into approximately 20% revenue growth for the next several years while maintaining our adjusted EBITDA margins near 20%. Again, this is all with the intent of maintaining that Rule of 40 standard. Like my colleagues, I also received questions in advance that were primarily focused on how DHI thinks about the trade-off between revenue growth and EBITDA and how that impacts valuation. Hopefully, we collectively address those questions in all of our prepared remarks, notably understanding the large opportunity for growth in front of us.
I am happy to expand on that topic or take any other questions. With that, I also wanna quickly address Kevin's question to Arie about the investment, a more aggressive investment in sales and marketing. Kevin, as I just discussed, we're still governed a bit by the Rule of 40 and that EBITDA margin of 20%. There may be opportunities to accelerate our growth, but that would require us to go below that 20% adjusted EBITDA margin, and that's just a floor that we've generally committed to both our board and to our investors. With that, I'm happy to take any other questions.
Okay. Kevin, we do have a question from Zach Cummins. Zach, I am going to unmute your line so that you can ask the question to Kevin.
Great. Thanks for the presentation today. Really helpful, obviously to see all the metrics and then the roadmap going forward. Kevin, my question is really geared towards the ability to sustain a 20%+ growth trajectory going forward. It seems like we saw a lot of the positive bookings momentum really show itself here in 2022, but as you start to comp against what was pretty strong performance from this year, what gives you the confidence that there's still an opportunity to sustain this sort of growth level moving forward?
Sure. For us, as we think about Arie's organization and the marketing performance, it's very metric-based. It's very scientifically based. As we look at specifically the performance of Arie's organization, and I'll break it down between account management and new business. On the account management side, we continue to see very strong KPIs broadly on our all of our renewal statistics. We're seeing revenue renewal rates of 95%, 96%, mid-upper 90s. That means that the revenue we have in one year will convert at a very high clip to revenue the next year. Nearly 100%, slightly below. That gives us confidence that as Arie grows the new business team, the preponderance of that growth, 90% of the bookings will actually become net new bookings versus, you know, the gross bookings being absorbed by churn.
Now, specific to the KPIs we look at in sales, Zach, we look at this every month, every quarter, how are the new business teams performing? As we bring new business reps on board, are they following a ramp pattern consistent with what we expect? Are they hitting their quota? Are they all achieving that new bookings target from a dollar basis and a customer basis that would lead us to believe that adding new reps can have those same KPIs, can have that same performance versus seeing, you know, performance start to dwindle as we add more reps. The reality is, we continue to see new business reps achieving the same KPIs as the reps who have been with us for a year to three years.
That gives us confidence that really it comes down to adding new reps in Arie's organization in a well-thought-out manner. We believe the total addressable market is still there to achieve. I think on commercial, we're, you know, less than 10% of the addressable market. That gives us great confidence that we can continue to see that 20% growth rate. In the outer years, you know, three, four, five, six, seven, the comparables become tough. At least in the near term, we still feel very confident with, you know, approaching achieving that 20% revenue growth.
Understood. That's helpful. This might be a question geared towards either you, Kevin or Arie, but I know you've consistently looked to expand the new business team capacity by about 20%, throughout this year and continue to execute well against that. As we think about capacity needs going forward, is it still going to require that sort of investment to be able to sustain this 20%-ish sort of growth target that you're targeting over the coming years?
I would say I'll answer that first, but I'll ask both Arie and maybe Kevin to follow that up. My view is that we actually have three components of growing our bookings and therefore revenue. We're certainly adding people to the team. We are actually also increasing pricing, and we do have additional services that we wanna essentially upsell into our customer base on a subscription basis. I touched on it very briefly, Zach, during the course of my presentation, but we really do believe that branding is an incredibly important aspect of how our clients should be connecting with candidates right now. It actually is a pretty substantial increase to the average contract value when you add a company page and other branding elements. We think that is gonna be a very important part of our future.
Maybe let's go with Kevin first, and then Arie can give his view as well.
Yeah, I agree completely with that. As I was thinking about it, clearly the preponderance of growth is gonna be new logos. It's gonna be the success of the new business team, and maybe that's two-thirds of that growth. We do, to Art's point, and I was gonna hit on this, we still have the opportunity to see growth through pricing as our product becomes more valuable and then truly on product expansions. I don't know the exact ratio, Zach. Is it two-thirds new logos, you know, one-sixth pricing, one-sixth additional products? It's probably somewhere in that type of ratio as far as what will drive that, you know, approaching or at 20% revenue growth.
I'll just add that, you know, I do believe we have pricing power, especially, you know, to Kevin's point, to Art's point, as the product portfolio grows, right? You know, we've also been able to insert an escalator, if you will, of approximately 10% into our contracts, on a YoY basis. We're averaging about 5% now. We believe we can get closer to 10% over time. In terms of branding, we believe obviously that that's going to be a really significant growth opportunity for us. The new company branding page will be released in 2023, which I truly believe will allow us to significantly increase our annual contract value.
Understood. That's extremely helpful. Well, thanks again for taking my questions.
Thank you, Zach.
All right. Our next question is from Anja Söderström . Anja, I'm going to unmute your line. You are now unmuted.
Okay. Hey, everyone, and thank you again for taking my question. I just had a follow-up first on the quota-bearing reps discussion. You said that the new reps were as efficient as your senior reps. Could that mean that you could potentially accelerate that 20% attainment rate to adding new headcount this year? How are you thinking about that?
I'll answer that again first and then maybe hand it off to Arie next. I would say that Arie is eager to add more reps. We are bounded by that promise to essentially maintain 20% EBITDA margins. That's really the gating feature associated with growth at this point in time. There is additional marketing spend. There's a very astute question that was asked earlier on in the presentation about whether or not there are different components of spend that are necessary to support growth. The way that we look at it is every single time we add a new rep, we have to make sure that we have the marketing qualified lead budget that essentially supports that new rep, that provides leads that make them successful in part.
As Michelle indicated about, we expect that 40% of a new business rep's book of business, their bookings should come from marketing qualified leads provided by marketing. There's more to it than that. We also believe that when we expand the number of clients, we need to expand the number of candidates. There's marketing spend also to increase the traffic to the site, which essentially means more candidate activity, which is harmonious with that idea of adding more clients.
Again, there's a little bit more to it than just adding reps, but we are bounded by that notion of making sure that we maintain our 20% EBITDA margin, which has kind of been an ironclad commitment over the last four years as we've gone through this period of essentially righting the ship and putting us in the right direction for revenue growth. Arie, I don't know if you have additional color on your view of adding reps and how that actually mechanically even happens.
Sure
in our teams.
Yep. As Art said, I'm always in favor of adding reps to the teams for sure, especially in new business, especially in commercial. I mean, everybody has seen the, you know, the billion-dollar TAM that's in front of us. There's a lot to tackle, but you have to do it correctly, right? As Art said, there has to be certain amount of MQLs and even SDRs and support for every single sales rep that we bring on, because the idea is not to throw bodies at it's to throw bodies at them correctly.
Over the last couple of years, we've built a really terrific, and I would almost say, best-in-class, learning and development organization that ensures our folks are, ramping, fast, and ramping faster, and more importantly, producing at their highest capability. As a matter of fact, we've seen our ramp significantly improve over time. You know, we're really excited about that.
Okay. Thank you. Another question was, Kevin, you noted that you're looking to potentially, in the future, have about 30% EBITDA margin. What is the sort of timeframe for that?
You think a lot of that, Anja, is dictated by, again, hitting these metrics around new business growth and MQLs. To the extent we can continue to invest and maintain a 20% margin, we will do that to drive, you know, higher, faster bookings and revenue growth. That said, you know, is that two years, three years out that we start to see that transition where the economies of scale of our platform are just so overwhelming that more of that incremental revenue drops to EBITDA? It you know, it's something we look at frequently. I don't have a specific answer. Is it year four or five? Yes, we start to achieve mid-20s%, higher 20s% in that kind of timeframe.
I do wanna note, though, that as we look across our business and we look across the people side of our business, excluding sales, and we think about our platform costs, so Paul's organization and the fact that we're built on the AWS platform, we absolutely have operating leverage. We don't need to increase any headcount other than sales. We don't need to increase our spend materially with an AWS or other providers of services on our platform. There is significant operating leverage that I think simply will. You know, the benefits of that are so overwhelming at some point that you will start to see a lot of that revenue drop to EBITDA. I think for us, given how significant the TAM is, it's hard for us to pinpoint any quarter or any year currently.
It's just such a great opportunity for growth.
Okay. Thank you. That was all for me for now. I'll jump back in the queue.
Thank you, Anja.
We do have a question for Kevin from James Hall. James doesn't have a microphone, so I'm gonna read the question to you, Kevin.
Okay.
The question is, great presentation. Price escalators, the increases between 5%-10%. Are these increases tailored to each customer? In general, how aggressive can you push these escalators without compromising the stickiness of the customers? What type of customer is accepting a 10% increase?
Yeah, I appreciate the question is to me. I think Arie is actually in a better position-
Sure
to answer that question.
We're talking about contracts with auto renewal. As I mentioned before, 95% of our customer base, our entire customer base have accepted a contract that has auto renewal with price escalators in upwards of 10%.
The question is, I think more nuanced in the sense that it's asking, when do you see the full 10% and, you know, what are the other kind of alternative scenarios? As I've described it in the past, well, at least this last year, where we really saw the preponderance of these discussions that focus on the fact that we've had this auto renewal in place, we generally approach the customer and say, "What are your needs for the next 12 months? Let's talk about that first." It's kind of a foot in the door to be able to have that kind of very lucid discussion. Sometimes that yields a 5% escalator rather than the full 10%.
Quite frankly, my view as the CEO is that we get the full 10% when the customer says, "I'm good. No need to have a discussion," and it just automatically triggers the contract provision. Most of the time, we're using it as a wedge to basically say, "Let's talk and make sure that we really understand your needs. We wanna be your partners. We wanna make sure that we understand how this contract best fits you." I mean, there is a range, and as Arie indicated, you know, 95% of our contracts today include that provision. I don't know if you wanna give any more color, Ari, on, you know, kind of the types of discussions that take place and what results they ultimately yield.
Yeah. Again, I would say on average, we're about 5% YoY in terms of some of these discussions. Again, to Art's, you know, point, it really gives us a, you know, a point to discuss. I would also say on the reverse side, the idea of contracts with auto renewal that are, you know, up to 10% is really offering our customers price protection as well. I think a lot of them really appreciate that.
If I can add one data point, and this is something my organization and Ari's team talk about frequently, we're only getting 18%-22% of our customers who have an auto renewal clause actually have the auto renewal trigger. It truly is an opportunity to talk to our customer, and that discussion around solving their problems with our solutions is much more valuable than worrying about, is it a 5% increase versus maybe contractually 7? We'd rather get that 5% increase knowing they will be a long-term customer versus just auto triggering a 7% increase.
Precisely.
Okay. We have the next question is from Eric Martinuzzi. Eric, I'm going to unmute your line now. Go ahead.
Yeah. I wanted to specifically address just the last 30 days. Obviously, I'm a big fan of upward guidance revisions here. I'm curious to know if today's action on raising the year, is this it? Was there something incrementally more positive just since August 3? Or is this kind of a continuation of the trends that you talked about back on this Q2 earnings call?
I'll address that. Truthfully, it's the continued trends. I addressed this couple questions ago, a little bit in my presentation. We look at the sales KPIs every way possible. Arie's organization looks at them, my organization looks at them, and we continue to just simply see KPIs that give us confidence in the ability to hit bookings numbers and revenue numbers, Eric. You know, I think we were probably a hint conservative, you know, 45 days ago, and now we're just continuing to feel very confident. We're starting to see the impacts of, you know, some companies are kind of going through this economic fluctuation, and we just continue to see very good performance across the board.
Yeah. I would agree with that completely, what Kevin just said, Eric. We did know that we had this opportunity in the middle of this quarter, towards the end of the quarter actually, to essentially underpromise and overdeliver. We are seeing the continuation of that bookings trend that we saw even through the end of Q2.
Okay. Then one more question, if I might. I think this one's probably pointed at Ari, but I'll let you determine, Art. In looking at the renewal rate count, which I understand is the number of accounts that are renewing in a given period as opposed to the revenue associated with those accounts. I saw a substantial step up between January 20th to kind of June 2021 timeframe, where, you know, it goes up by 22%, to 84%. Just in the past year, it goes to 85%. Help me understand, you know, the big leap in kind of the first 18 months and then maybe just the incremental progress. Was it COVID related? Was it a mix shift in the customer base?
Arie, do you wanna take that one?
Sure. You know, I think it gets back to what I mentioned before, where the team is simply just better. You know, leadership across the board, from our highest levels to our frontline managers, are engaging with our customers in a better way than ever before. Our systems are automated versus, you know, where they used to be. We offer a significantly better onboarding experience with our customers. I'm a big believer, you know, first impressions are everything, right? The NASH team, which is the New Account Special Handling team, that really has a focus on our first-year customers, has done an incredible job.
In terms of the double digit, you know, growth and renewal and retention that you've seen, I think really made a significant difference to our performance. I hope that answers your question.
Yeah, that covers it. Thank you.
Thanks, Eric.
Okay. The next question comes from Kevin Liu. All right, Kevin, you're unmuted.
Okay, great. Just had a couple of questions around, kind of candidate pool and how you can grow that overall candidate profile base, that you guys have for both Dice and ClearanceJobs. Maybe at a very basic level, you know.
Do you guys offer any sort of incentives to get candidates to create a profile? Or is it mostly when they're looking for a job that they're coming to you? How do you ensure that they keep those profiles updated so as new skill sets are attained and the like, you know, you can improve that matching with open job positions?
Very excellent question, Kevin, and I'm gonna allow Michelle to take that one.
Excellent question. Thank you. The campaign that I just showcased was our awareness campaign for technologists. It's a really important part of our marketing strategy to drive growth and reach of these technologist candidates. We've actually been very, very successful this year, and we've seen a significant increase in bringing new candidates to our site through the traffic that I shared. We're looking at an increase in traffic for direct and organic, which we've also seen.
More specifically around getting them to make their profiles visible, we have marketing campaigns to engage with the technologists, to encourage them to do so, to talk about the benefits of being visible because it allows them to engage directly with the recruiters, which we also know is something that technologists are very much interested in doing so. We have a lot of marketing campaigns and activities to define the benefits of what those activities are. I'm just gonna address another question that came in around the KPIs that we use to measure engagement. We look at applies on a monthly basis. We look at repeat visitors. We look at visible profiles, as I just mentioned.
Those visible profiles allow a recruiter to engage directly with a technologist. The applies are. It's an application for a job. We have a unique metric that we've created that looks at applications, visible profiles, and then direct engagement with recruiters through instant messaging and private email. That metric is our own defined engagement metric for technologists, which is actually up 20% year to date. In terms of driving both new technologist growth, it's through our awareness campaign, and then we have actively trying to get them to engage with us through marketing and product activities as well. Thanks for the question. I hope that answers it.
It does. If I could just ask a quick follow-up to that. I mean, obviously there are a lot of open job positions out there today in the technology world. Do you feel like you need to attract a certain profile of candidate in order to have higher success for your customers to fill those positions? You know, if in doing so, would that accelerate kind of uptake of Dice and ClearanceJobs?
Well, we have a lot of, you know, I mean, we focus on technology, right? Within technology, it's things like cybersecurity and software developers and project managers and product managers. We have all that data, and that's again, you know, tying into our value proposition to having a deeper understanding of exactly what those skill sets are and those occupations and the needs and even by location. That's, you know, based on what the needs of our audiences are, we tie that into our acquisition and our retention efforts.
Great. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Kevin.
Our next question comes from David Dye, and his question is related to ClearanceJobs. David, I'm going to unmute your line. All right, you're unmuted.
Thanks for taking my question. I have a two-parter on ClearanceJobs. I think Evan mentioned that there's 10,000 ClearanceJobs employers. Just curious, from your perspective, how many of that 10,000 will, quote, unquote, "never use" ClearanceJobs for whatever reason? The second part, for those employers that you've targeted with the offering, those who have not signed up, what have been common reasons that they have not? Thank you.
Great questions. Evan, over to you.
Sure. Yeah. Yeah. The 10,000 number came out last year from the government. They have not really ever published a total number of employers that had a facility clearance. When we look at employers that we wanna bring on to ClearanceJobs as clients, a facility clearance is a 100% factor that we look at because it says that they are appropriate for ClearanceJobs. If a company is hiring cleared people, they're gonna have a facility clearance, and that's why we look at that as our key factor. The 10,000 number came out last year, and when you think about the 10,000, not all of those companies are equal.
In fact, when you take a look at government contracts awarded, roughly the top 200-300 companies get the lion's share of government dollars. The vast majority of those 10,000 get very small pieces of the defense intelligence and homeland security budgets. We'll take any of them on ClearanceJobs if they're hiring, but we tend to focus on the larger entities, the ones that have the hiring needs right now. David, are you gonna remind me about the second part of your question?
The ClearanceJobs employers that you approach that are not using Dice today, why have they passed up on using Dice? I'm sorry, ClearanceJobs.
It's just like what's the rationale for closed loss-
Yeah.
in our pipeline?
Yeah. Honestly, the number one reason that someone comes to us and inquires, and they decide not to purchase is due to price. ClearanceJobs, being the leader in our niche is a very expensive tool. You definitely get what you pay for. There's quite a lot of functionality built in. We have a fair number of rules and restrictions in place in terms of who can come on. ClearanceJobs does not have a web store. We don't allow for a single job posting. The barrier of entry is fairly high.
If a new client wants to get on board, we'll typically be pitching them on, at a very minimum, a single user to access the site, at a minimum five job postings that they can rotate in and out of slots and in an annual contract. If a company has maybe one or two needs, we're gonna try to get them in for the long haul. That said, it kinda goes back to the previous conversation that I had earlier, is that if we could do a little bit better job of segmenting our customer base and try to package for those entry-level customers, we might be able to bring more folks into the fold. If we can get them successful, we might be able to look at an annual agreement. Their success might turn into ours.
Sorry, long-winded way of saying, yeah, the number one reason that they don't sign up, closed/lost would be due to price.
Can I ask a follow-up, or do I have to hop into the queue?
No, no, please ask the follow-up. Absolutely.
Given that the top 200, 300 companies get the lion's share of dollars in spend and thus can afford the pricing that you just mentioned, growth for ClearanceJobs, is it just more dependent on expanding the product suite rather than new logos?
New logos are definitely important, but we find the vast majority of our higher retention rate due to adding additional recruiters to the platform from companies. If they this year have six recruiters, next year, if they up to eight, that's the primary one that we would be doing in terms of increase in contract value. Solution selling and taking a look at those non-core products that Arie mentioned is really critical for ClearanceJobs. In Dice, you've got a fairly low unemployment rate on ClearanceJobs exacerbated very much so. It's very few candidates that are looking for jobs, and that requires employers to really work hard to move candidates down that funnel. Branding is a big piece of it.
Events are a big piece of it. Getting the recruiters engaged with the platform. The more recruiters they have, the more engagement they have. It's really all about expanding beyond our core and adding users.
Thank you.
Thank you for the question.
All right, our next question is coming from Lars Munson. Go ahead, Lars. Okay, Lars, I'm gonna remute you, and we'll come back if you would still have your question. I see your hand is raised. The next question comes from, excuse me, Bill Beglam. Bill, let me go and unmute your line for you. All right, go ahead, Bill.
Thank you. First question would be for Paul. Which competitors are closing the capability gap, specifically relative to Dice, or would you characterize Dice as widening the gap relative to each and every competitor out there?
Yeah, it's a good question. I think, given our focus on tech, we're continuing to widen the gap. That focus on understanding skills in depth, understanding career progression for technologists, there's some nuance there, which the broader platforms, while they focus on scaling out, we're continuing to focus on making sure that we're offering the best experience possible for technologists. You know, we don't see, for example, clients swapping us for other tools. We're additive because the market's so competitive, there's an opportunity for us to just continue to kind of grow apart from competitors for that specific reason. Yeah.
Would you say that your answer holds also for CJ or would you say there's some nuances there that should be explored?
I think Evan can comment as well. What's interesting about CJ is, part of what we have to do as we help the industry is understand, as CJ's experience has been, as the market's so constrained, that it actually is about employers doing more to sell themselves to candidates than it is for technologists selling themselves to companies that wanna attract. Part of this, and this is why the company branding starts to become really important for, particularly for Dice and expanding our capabilities there is, candidates are looking for, is it a cultural fit? Do I understand the technology stack that's being used? Am I interested in the technology? Is there education expansion for me as an individual inside those companies? The broader we make that, the better.
One thing I will add, and then I'll let Evan chat, is the other thing that we've heard from technologists in particular, that we continue to expand capabilities around, where I think some of our competitors are loosening a little, is our ability to manage the communication to an individual. With the introduction of private email, for example, you as a technologist have the ability to mute certain audiences contacting you, and this is something that Evan's been working on for a while.
You know, I know that each of you experience that LinkedIn, hey, you know, I'm trying to sell you things and I'm selling on the platform. We're making sure that we're creating a really good experience for technologists to keep them engaged because the one thing that turns them off is, you know, getting bombarded and leaving. I'll pass to you Evan, if you wanna expand on that.
Yeah. I think the only other thing I can add in is for ClearanceJobs specifically, sometimes we call ClearanceJobs a trust platform because the employers that work with us, they really don't have much trouble finding the right candidate. Where they have difficulty is getting the candidate to respond and react to them and respond to their messaging and inquiries. Really, we've built our platform all around making sure that the employers, the recruiters that we work with are as open and transparent as possible. Because when they do that, when they're able to communicate with the candidate, a candidate can really see who that recruiter is and what company they work for and all the details, they're much more likely to open and respond.
In an industry where candidates are inherently security conscious, it's extremely important for us to continue that idea of a trust platform.
Yeah. Thank you both. Michelle, I'd like to ask you a question. Relative to the top of the funnel, the marketing qualified leads, what are the negating factors to increasing the number of qualified leads for Dice?
We keep increasing them. We keep focusing on increasing them. The gating factors are, you know, again, Art had showed what the potential TAM is and the potential number of companies that are hiring technologists. We've, you know, we continue to invest there. We do need investment. We have a cost per marketing qualified lead, but we continue to increase our investment, and we continue to drive increased marketing qualified leads, and quality MQLs for Arie and the sales organization as they continue to grow their sales team.
Yeah. I don't think we're hitting any kind of natural constraints at this point in time. We're still optimizing for cost. There is seasonality, like for example, when we do these campaigns during the summertime, there are not as many eyeballs that are available to communicate with because it's obviously a vacation season. Same with kind of towards the end of the year. We feel like we can sustainably grow the number of MQLs by, you know, 20%, which is our goal associated with obviously our bookings track over the course of time. We haven't seen anything that is a hard ceiling for us.
Our MQLs are up YoY i n excess of 50%, so we have opportunity to continue to grow those.
Okay. Since the goal is 20 and you're up 50+, let me just facetiously or kind of just openly ask, what would allow you to continue to grow, let's say, a greater than 30% lead growth rate?
I think Michelle would probably just say budget. We're... You know, we do still have that constraint of maintaining our 20% EBITDA margin, so we're always thinking about additive new business reps to Ari's organization as well as additive budget for Michelle to support them with MQLs and additive branding budget to make sure that the marketplace itself or marketplaces, plural, are balanced.
A question of ignorance here. If you were to be successful continuing to grow the leads 50%, but growing the sales teams at the rate that you have been, can the salespeople take all those leads and deal with them effectively, or would that be overwhelming the sales team? You just would need more people?
The key to the leads are quality, I think, more than anything, right? As we continue to grow the volume of leads, we wanna ensure that, you know, we score the leads that go to the sales organization and it is likely that as we grow that volume, that potentially conversion rates could decline. We wanna make sure that that quality is there. But I would say where we are now in terms of leads, the sales team says, you know, "Keep them coming." I think we're in a great shape now, and I know that if we were to grow another 30% or 50%, and we're continuing to grow the sales organization, we just see the growth potential ahead of us and not the limitations yet.
That's really helpful. Then one additional question. I think in the past you all have mentioned that the candidate awareness campaigns that you've been doing is really to attract the new the new technologists with less experience. At what point do you want to increase the number of candidates with experience, whether it be that middle category or the aged category, shall we say?
Yeah. Because Dice is a 32-year-old brand, that's part of the reason why we have excellent penetration with those that are more mature in their career, the skillful balancers. But we certainly. It's a strength of ours, right? We wanna continue to invest in that strength. Also, I would say, you know, Art joined the organization four and a half years ago. I joined about four years ago. Only in the last year did we start increasing our investment around awareness to attract those earlier in career, the go-getters and impact seekers. We wanna have a. Really, it's important for us to help technologists throughout the arc of their career, early in their career and sophisticated as well. We'll...
Our reach goes to all of those, and we do some targeting to make sure we're reaching those. But because we hadn't done awareness more recently, those early in career have not been as familiar with our brand. Also, you know, we had a lower penetration there, and that's why we're actively driving that reach and engagement with earlier in career. But all of those three segments are critical to our success. That is part of why our strategy is as it is to ensure that we've got excellent reach across and engagement across all those three targets.
Excellent. Thank you all for taking the questions.
Thank you.
All right, our next question comes from Will Hamilton. Go ahead, Will.
Hi. Just a question for Evan as well. We've been hearing from some of the defense contractors that they've had trouble completing projects because they don't have enough security clearance people, which I would imagine favors your business. But it also, I think, speaks to the fact they just haven't cleared as many in recent years or that, you know, the population hasn't grown quite as much as the need. Can you just speak to that and then what you're seeing in terms of the government's efforts to improve or fast-track some of that? Are you seeing any of that and how that might help the business as well?
Sure. Interestingly, the total number of people with security clearance is actually back up to 4.6 million DoD cleared. For many years, really from 2013 to about 2020, the total number of people went down from 4.6 to roughly 3.2 million DoD cleared, and it's actually gone back up. The reason that it's gone back up is because the government has kind of redone the clearance investigation process. If you look at the timelines on how long it takes to get someone a top-secret clearance, for instance, it used to be well over 300 days, which is completely untenable. It's now down to about 150 days, which is still long, but some employers are willing to stick it out.
That said, you're correct in the fact that a lot of government projects are being held up due to staffing of cleared personnel. The government actually has, over the last roughly two years, increased the total number of people with clearance. There are signs that the 4.6 million DoD cleared is gonna actually continue to rise. We're waiting on the latest numbers from government. The more candidates in the system, the better. What we have seen, though, is that the demand is outpacing the supply. Even though the supply is increasing, we're seeing the number of people that are needed for cleared projects far outpace the supply. The supply and demand is still fairly out of whack.
Until they get more even, you know, we may see a shift in our business at that point, but we anticipate supply and demand to be very far, you know, out of sync for probably at least the next two or free years.
Maybe they just haven't been made aware of ClearanceJobs.
Government potentially.
Last question, just separate. I don't know if I missed this, but Art, maybe you could update us on M&A, any changes, developments or new-
Oh, that's not a question.
-thought process.
We still believe that the private market valuations are substantially higher than the public market valuations, which would really put a lot of pressure on us not to make any kind of move in M&A. I would say that there hasn't been a book that has crossed our desk that has shown both the combination of being the right attractive valuation and being very, if not exclusively, tech-focused. There's nothing that is on our radar screen for M&A for the foreseeable future.
Got it. Well, we can keep buying back the stock then. All right. Thank you.
That's exactly right.
Okay, this next question is gonna come from Lars. Lars, I'm going to unmute you, and you should be able to ask your question now.
Hi. Can you hear me now?
Yes. Absolutely.
Great. Yeah, I had the same question, that last one that was asked of Michelle about the brand attributes of Dice in the eyes of the candidates themselves. I guess you sort of answered it, but do you have any data or research on things like aided or unaided brand awareness of Dice, and just how relevant the brand is? When I survey my IT friends, admittedly a wildly unscientific survey, yeah, I often hear, "Oh, yeah. Dice has been around for a long time. That's where I used to go for a job when I was an entry-level programmer. But now that I'm a middle-level manager, I just go to LinkedIn." That doesn't really link up with your description earlier. So any reaction to that two-part question would be helpful.
Yeah. I might need you to repeat the two-part, but we do have data. We have what we put in market called a brand tracker, and we have our aided awareness and usage that we track semiannually. It's actually in field right now, we have the spring one. It does the aided awareness and the usage does tie to what I mentioned before of skillful balancers, those more mature in their career versus the early in career. Both the aided awareness and the usage is much higher with those later in career.
We know that's part of the reason why we have the awareness campaign in market is to reinforce Dice being out there because, again, we hadn't done awareness for quite some time, and so we need to get that message out there more broadly. Could you talk to the second part of your question then?
Yeah. I was just saying that when I unscientifically survey my IT friends, I hear the exact opposite dynamic. Oh, yeah, Dice is a brand I've known since the beginning of my career. When I was an entry-level programmer, that's where I went to get a job. Now that I'm a middle-level manager at Accenture or something, I just use LinkedIn to find jobs. It sounds like that's not describing what your experience has been.
You know, certainly LinkedIn is a competitor and one that is used by technologists. We believe that the important, you know, as we grow our technology, the feature capability and the engagement with the recruiters, and we build more of that awareness, we anticipate that LinkedIn is, you know, becomes less of a threat.
Right.
Certainly LinkedIn is out there, right?
Okay.
Let me give you a couple more thoughts because I think it frames out kind of the situation that you're experiencing. Coming on board 4+ years ago, Dice was definitely a job board. There was no communication tools that allowed a recruiter and an actual candidate to engage. We've changed that over the course of time. Much like the situation we find ourselves with customers as well as the candidates, which you're describing, a lot of people's mentality of Dice is basically stuck in time.
Yes
Based on the last time that they used it.
Right.
Part of our job today is just basically telling customers there's a new Dice experience, telling candidates there's a new Dice experience. They're going to LinkedIn in many cases because they're using InMail, and they're trying to network with these people. We have those tools now, a multitude of tools with private email as well as messaging on Dice, and it's more of our job at this point to.
Right
Help people to re-experience a brand new Dice, much more engaging experience. I think your point is valid for a certain segment of our candidates. We rolled out the brand awareness campaigns literally one year ago in September 2021.
Yeah.
I hope that over the course of time, people come back and realize there's much more to the Dice experience than they last experienced.
Yeah. Very helpful. Thank you.
I'll just add one more thing, 'cause I'm also a technology manager, so I sit in both worlds. You know, the quality of the content assets that Michelle shared is pretty high. You know, the tech report of where jobs are, it's a super helpful tool if you're a manager because it's actually helping make strategic decisions to guide kind of how you grow and manage your technology organization. I think as we continue to make those available broadly, and they become part of what you look at, that just helps reinforce everything Art said around kind of, you know, re-engaging with that tier of technologists.
Makes sense. Thank you.
Thanks for the question, Lars.
All right, we have one final question, and it's from James, who has no microphone, so I'll read James' question on his behalf. The question is additionally, the business is now generating nice cash. Can you talk more about uses of cash? And secondly, is the announced TAM maybe even conservative?
How about if Kevin answers the first part of that question, and then I'll come back to the second.
Sure. We have a specific capital allocation committee kind of thinking process for what we do with the cash flow that we generate. Really, there's several buckets that we look at, and we prioritize where we put our cash based on the ROI and broadly, the value that it's gonna bring to DHI. As we generate free cash flow, we look at incremental CapEx and will that drive higher revenue growth, higher EBITDA, et cetera. We look at that. In fact, this past year, we've expanded our CapEx program a little bit. We've stated we'll be probably closer to $17-$18 million, and we were $15 million or so last year. We also look at paying back debt.
Currently, we're at less than 3% interest, so we don't think it makes a lot of sense to worry about delevering, especially when we're at less than one times leverage or at about one times leverage. Thirdly, we look at investments, and I would say inorganic growth opportunities. Art alluded to that with M&A. We haven't found anything that has that value accretive nature, specifically in the technology space. Lastly, we look at our share buyback program. Right now, we believe the share buyback program is the highest ROI for the majority of our free cash flow that we generate. That's why we had a $20 million program last year. We have a $15 million program this year. We think, you know, looking across all the uses of cash, that has the highest return on investment, so we'll continue that.
We actively look at all four of those categories and say, "Where is the best use of our cash? What is the ROI on this?" So that's really how we think about capital allocation and why currently we're prioritizing our share buyback program.
Great answer, Kevin. I just wanted to attend to number two, which is the TAM discussion during the course of my presentation. I wanted to make sure that everybody understood that, from a very simplistic perspective, we are putting most of our new business resources towards commercial accounts and why. If you think about Dice has two distinct segments that we attach or that we attend to, and we have two separate teams for that matter. One is staffing recruiting as a segment, and the other is commercial accounts. Commercial accounts has numerically 86,000 clients that we could attend to. We know that in the staffing recruiting industry, we have about 18,000 total staffing recruiting firms, of which we have about 4,000 today.
Numerically, we are better suited to essentially go after that larger TAM associated with commercial accounts. It is absolutely rightful to say that there is more TAM associated with moving from 4,000 staffing recruiting firms to 18,000. Then there's also CJ, which has roughly 2,000 customers today, but could have upwards of 10,000 in the future. I just wanted to give a simplistic view as to why the majority of new business reps that we're hiring are going into commercial accounts. It's because it's the largest TAM by far. There is more than $1.24 billion worth of TAM because we have those extra TAMs associated with Dice, staffing, recruiting, and commercial, and ClearanceJobs as its own brand. Great question.
All right. Art, we don't have any other questions at this time.
Well, we really appreciate the engagement and the questions that did come in, and we wanted to make sure that everybody knew that we are available, the entire team for that matter, for additional questions that you might have. We could set up separate meetings, and you could always get ahold of us by approaching Todd Kehrli, at this particular address, and we'll make sure that we arrange for that meeting. Thank you very much for the time today. Really appreciate it. Bye, everyone.
Thanks, everybody.