Please stand by. We're about to begin. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the ZipRecruiter Q3 2022 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode, and please be advised that this call is being recorded. After the speakers' prepared remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, simply press star one again. At this time, I'll turn things over to Amy Garefis, Chief Accounting Officer. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you, operator, and good afternoon. Thank you for joining us in our earnings conference call during which we will discuss ZipRecruiter's performance for the quarter ending September 30, 2022, and guidance for the fourth quarter and full year of 2022. Joining me on the call today are Ian Siegel, Co-Founder and CEO, David Travers, President, and Tim Yarbrough, CFO. Before we begin, please be reminded that forward-looking statements made today are subject to risks and uncertainties relating to future events and/or the future financial performance of ZipRecruiter. Actual results could differ materially from those anticipated in these forward-looking statements.
A discussion of some of the risk factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from any forward-looking statements can be found in ZipRecruiter's quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the three months ended September 30, 2022, which is available on our investor website and the SEC's website. The forward-looking statements in this conference call are based on the current expectations as of today, and ZipRecruiter assumes no obligation to update or revise them, whether as a result of new developments or otherwise. In addition, during today's call, we will discuss non-GAAP financial measures.
These non-GAAP financial measures should be considered in addition to, not as a substitute for or an isolation from, GAAP results. Reconciliations of the non-GAAP measures to the nearest GAAP metric are included in ZipRecruiter's shareholder letter and in our Form 10-Q. Now, I will turn the call over to Ian.
Thank you, Amy, and good afternoon to everyone joining us today. Q3 2022 marked another strong quarter for ZipRecruiter. At $227 million, revenue exceeded the high end of our quarterly guidance, representing an increase of 7% from Q3 2021. Adjusted EBITDA of $52 million was also above the high end of our guidance range. This equates to an adjusted EBITDA margin of 23%, which was three percentage points higher than Q3 in the prior year. ZipRecruiter has once again demonstrated that regardless of near-term macroeconomic conditions, we operate a flexible and profitable business model, and that we can thrive in a variety of economic environments. During this past quarter, overall demand for labor in the U.S. eased, continuing the trend that began in Q2 of 2022.
However, we believe that the cooling labor market provides opportunities for us to strengthen our position as an industry leader. First, thanks to the substantial long-term investment we've made and continue to make into job seeker brand marketing, ZipRecruiter's aided brand awareness among job seekers is over 70%. With job opportunities declining, we believe ZipRecruiter's platform will be a top-of-mind solution for a high volume of new job seekers. Those new job seekers will be met by Phil, our AI personal recruiter, who in Q3, continued to improve both his ability to learn who you are and also in the quality of recommendations he makes. Phil is not a single feature that a competitor can easily replicate, but rather an overall job search experience that dynamically tailors itself to an individual's specific preferences.
With Phil as their guide, job seekers who complete over half of their profile are 10 times more likely to be directly contacted by an employer via Invite to Apply. We believe that driving great outcomes like this for job seekers during their time of need will create enduring loyalty to ZipRecruiter. Second, as the labor market rebalances with more talent available, we believe ZipRecruiter is ideally positioned to take advantage of employers' rising candidate quality standards.
Last quarter was replete with significant wins in our AI-driven matching technology, including a major update to the meta-learning model, which suggests lists of potential strong fit job seekers for employers to consider inviting to apply. This update to one of our signature ZipRecruiter features resulted in both an 8% increase in invites sent by the average employer and a 15% increase in the number of responses received.
By persistently retraining our algorithms, ZipRecruiter expands our advantage in delivering quality candidates to employers. Third, thanks to the substantial long-term investments we've been making into integrating with third-party applicant tracking systems, we expect to continue successfully driving adoption amongst enterprise employers. As of Q3, we have now completed integrations with over 140 applicant tracking systems. We believe partnering and integrating with so many third-party systems has at least three benefits. First, it makes it easy for new enterprise customers to activate ZipRecruiter as a recruiting solution. Second, it creates a better experience for job seekers who never need to leave ZipRecruiter to apply to these employers' jobs.
Third, it represents an ever-increasing moat to competition, given that implementing so many integrations has taken nearly a decade. As talent becomes more readily available, we expect enterprises who have larger budgets and persistent hiring needs to be even more receptive to the simplicity of ZipRecruiter's tools and comparatively low cost to deliver quality candidates. Now we'll turn it over to our President, Dave Travers, to talk through some of the progress we've made against the three pillars of our marketplace strategy.
Thank you, Ian, and good afternoon, everyone. ZipRecruiter's continued execution against our three strategic pillars keeps us well positioned to win. We made great progress in the third quarter, and I'm excited to share some highlights with you. We will start with our first strategic pillar, which is increasing the number of employers in our marketplace. ZipRecruiter has always provided a streamlined applicant tracking system, or ATS, to small and medium-sized businesses as part of their job posting subscription. In Q3, we redesigned the way in which employers review and manage candidates across all stages of the hiring process. This helps employers manage their candidate pipeline with even greater ease. After only a few short months, over 30% of eligible employers have used the workflow enhancements to manage their applicants. We also made improvements to products geared toward our larger enterprise customers.
Job seekers tell us that applying to jobs can be an arduous process, one filled with multiple applications to submit and profiles to create across different ATSs or career sites. Ian mentioned the integrations with numerous ATSs a moment ago. Our ZipApply product seamlessly connects an employer's external ATS to our marketplace, providing an easier application process for job seekers. ZipApply gives our customers three times higher conversion rates on their jobs. As of Q3, we now have integrations with over 140 applicant tracking systems. Now I'll discuss our second pillar, increasing the number of job seekers in our marketplace. We've been making significant investments in building the job seeker side of our marketplace through both product innovation and brand marketing. We continue to build upon the early success of Phil, our AI-enabled personal recruiter.
In fact, job seekers tell us how they feel about Phil through their actions. New users coming through our Phil-based experience are 2.7x more likely to complete their registration compared to our prior job seeker onboarding experience. Over 50% of new job seekers come to ZipRecruiter not knowing the specific type of job they want. Phil now specifically addresses the unique needs of this group, engaging with those who do not know how to begin their search to better understand the type of work they would prefer. This discovery process opens up the aperture of job recommendations, giving job seekers visibility of roles they may previously not have found. Employers love this feature as well, since their jobs are now exposed to a broader set of qualified candidates.
Fine-tuning job seeker matches comes from a combination of how job seekers react to jobs in our marketplace and from the information we gather in their job seeker profile. While Phil's intuitive conversational approach has been a great way to encourage job seekers to share information, in Q3, we made it possible for job seekers to build and update their profile from their email using AMP technology. With this addition, we have more than doubled the rate at which job seekers complete their profiles. Job seekers completing just over half of their profile are 10 times more likely to receive an invitation to apply for a job. I'll conclude with our progress around our third pillar, making our matching technology smarter over time. We deliver great matches to job seekers by developing a deep understanding of who they are.
We build this understanding through observation of a variety of factors, and job seekers can now actively train ZipRecruiter on the jobs they would prefer by reviewing and providing feedback on a set of potential opportunities. Job seekers completing this calibration process receive two times more invitations to apply to jobs. We also enhance the algorithms which drive our Invite to Apply product. Invite to Apply allows employers to identify strong fit potential candidates and invite them to apply to their job. In Q3, we updated the entire meta-learning model to include an algorithmically-driven prediction of a job seeker's likelihood of applying. This update resulted in both an 8% increase in invites sent by the average employer and a 15% increase in the number of responses received. The progress we made in Q3 gives us greater confidence in our ability to execute going forward.
Now, I'll turn it over to our Chief Financial Officer, Tim Yarbrough, to talk through the third quarter results as well as our updated guidance for the fourth quarter and full year 2022.
Thank you, Dave, and good afternoon, everyone. Our third quarter revenue of $227 million exceeded the high end of the guidance we provided in August. This represents 7% growth year-over-year and is reflective of a cooling hiring environment as well as facing particularly challenging comparisons against Q3 2021, when we grew 107% year-over-year in the post-COVID reopening of the economy. Paid employers were 136,000, representing a 20% decrease versus Q3 2021 and a 13% decrease versus Q2 2022.
The year-over-year decrease reflects heightened hiring demand last year as employers, and particularly small and medium-sized employers, rushed to keep pace with the reopening of the American economy. The sequential decrease from Q2 to Q3 is due to the macroeconomic cooling Ian discussed earlier, and is consistent with the environment we mentioned during our previous call in August. Continued improvement in ZipRecruiter's employer-focused features and our focus on larger enterprise customers resulted in an all-time high revenue per employer of $1,673 in Q3 2022, up 33% year-over-year. Performance-based revenue, which is driven by our larger enterprise customers, increased by 29% year-over-year. Performance-based revenue in Q3 2022 comprised 23% of total revenue, up from 19% in the prior year.
GAAP net income was $20.6 million in the third quarter of 2022, compared to net income of $13.1 million in Q2 of the current year. Q3 2022 adjusted EBITDA was $51.7 million, equating to a margin of 23%, compared to $42.5 million, a margin of 20% in Q3 2021, and $45.4 million, a margin of 19% in Q2 2022. The adjusted EBITDA margin expansion year-over-year primarily reflects our commitment to prudent capital allocation at all stages of the economic cycle. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities was $669.7 million as of September 30th, 2022, compared to $699.9 million as of June 30th, 2022.
The decrease in cash equivalents, and marketable securities quarter-over-quarter was primarily due to $53.5 million spent on repurchases of 3 million shares of Class A common stock under our share repurchase program during the third quarter. Additionally, we announced that our board of directors has authorized a $200 million increase to the company share repurchase program. This is in addition to the previous authorizations of $250 million in total earlier in 2022. Turning to guidance, our Q4 2022 revenue guidance of $206 million represents a 6% decline year-over-year at the midpoint.
While this reflects our view of a continued softening in the labor market through the end of the year, we also note that the year-over-year revenue growth in the comparable period of Q4 2021 was 93%, accelerated by a rush of hiring activity related to the post-pandemic reopening of the economy. Our Q4 2022 revenue guidance implies full year revenue of $900 million, reflecting 21% year-over-year. Our Q4 2022 Adjusted EBITDA guidance of $42 million equates to 20% Adjusted EBITDA margin at the midpoint. At $176 million, our full year Adjusted EBITDA guidance reflects an Adjusted EBITDA margin of 20% at the midpoint, which is higher both in dollars and as a percentage of revenue than both our prior guidance and our margin in 2021.
The increase in Adjusted EBITDA reflects our dedication to investment discipline in all economic cycles, while still allowing us to maintain significant investments in our product and matching technology. We enjoy the strategic advantage of being nimble in all economic environments. With over $660 million of cash on hand, increasing profitability in 2022, and a flexible operating expense profile, we believe we are well-positioned to judiciously allocate capital in pursuit of high returns on investment. We remain more excited than ever before that ZipRecruiter is at the center of transforming how people find work as we continue to actively connect people to their next great opportunity. With that, we can now open the line for questions. Operator?
Thank you, Mr. Yarbrough. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, any questions, simply press star one. If you do find that your question has already been addressed, you can remove yourself from the queue by pressing star one again. We'll go first this afternoon to Trevor Young of Barclays.
Great, thanks. First one, just on the beat versus the high end of your guide, can you help us understand what the two or three key drivers of that outperformance was relative to your own expectations? Was it QPEs holding up better or the revenue per paid employer, or maybe it was the composition with, you know, performance-based revenues holding up quite a bit better than subscription? Just trying to get a sense as to what drove that outperformance.
Yeah. Hey, Trevor, this is Tim. It really was a combination of both, the number of paid employers in the marketplace as well as the revenue per. The quarter shaped up a little bit better than we had expected when we put out guidance last time around. The win was really kind of multifaceted in terms of better performance both on the SMB as well as the enterprise side.
Got it. That makes sense. Then just as we think about Q4, I know you don't give specific guide on employers versus revenue per, but just in light of the quarter-over-quarter decline in this quarter and kind of normal seasonality, should we think about, you know, Q4 being kind of a similar sequential trajectory to either, you know, this last quarter or even Q4 of last year?
Yeah. Typically in a typical seasonal quarter in Q4, you would see the total number of paid employers tick down, and it's a function of primarily SMBs stopping their hiring practices throughout the balance of the year as they go into the holiday period, while larger employers are ramping up for the holiday season. On balance, the total number of paid employers usually come down. I think what we'll probably experience is a little bit more of a dampening on that number given the macroeconomic climate that we're in right now. I would expect to see revenue per paid employer tick up, as is pretty consistent within a typical Q4.
Great. Thanks so much.
Thank you. We go next now to Ralph Schackart at William Blair.
Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. The revenue per employer growth was strong, again, I think around 33%, up 33% year-over-year. Maybe just if you could sort of parse out maybe the top one or two factors that are driving that. I know you talked about product improvements, but just any color, just sort of what's driving that strength?
Yep. Hey, Ralph, this is Tim again. Two big things driving revenue per paying employer. You're right, 33% up year-over-year, up sequentially as well. There's two big drivers. One would be, you know, our marketplace fundamentally works like an auction. Employers, especially as they age with us, they tend to spend up over time, and that can show up in a bunch of different ways, but they can post more jobs or broaden their distribution or reach of their job ads over time. That's a trend that we've seen consistently over the many years that we've been doing this. The second big driver is our slow and steady push towards the enterprise side of the business. Zooming way out, you know, we're still getting started on enterprise.
We see it as roughly half of the overall market. We saw the percentage of performance-based revenue, which is a pretty good indication of our enterprise business. We saw that increase to 23% of total revenue versus 19% last year. The total raw dollars increased by 29%. We expect that trend to continue, but as that trend does continue, that'll push up the revenue per employer over time, likely.
Yeah, this is Dave. Just to add on to that, I just want to put a point on it. We are incredibly excited about the enterprise part of our business. It is, as Tim said, half of the market opportunity and well less than half, you know, than our business of our business today. While we grow our marketplace, we are very confident in our ability to, as it grows overall, grow the share of revenue that comes from enterprise. Whereas the SMB part of the business started when the business started over a decade ago. We're just two or three years in to really making a focused effort in our enterprise go-to-market.
We've got a lot of investments in flight and a lot of wood to chop there, but tons of reason for optimism and we see tremendous opportunity there. One of the biggest factors why is because SMB and enterprise customers are similar in a foundational way. They both want great candidates. Our whole strategy around Phil, around Personal Recruiter, around increasing the quality of our algorithms and the quality of our matching, delivering more great candidates faster, that works for enterprises, and we see it working. Fortunately, they have very resilient hiring needs. We expect to see that business do very well.
Great. Thanks. Just one follow-up. I think last quarter you talked about, you saw the sort of pace of hiring start to cool and towards the end of June, if I'm not mistaken. I'm just curious, you know, if you could comment on the pace of that cooling and maybe how that trended this quarter vis-a-vis sort of what you saw last quarter. Thank you.
On the last call, we noted that we saw things start to cool down, specifically in June. What we saw this quarter is that the same cooling generally continued throughout the quarter in Q3.
Okay. Any major pace changes or sort of like the same trend line that you saw last quarter, roughly?
Same trend line.
Okay. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Dave.
No problem.
Thank you. Just a reminder, ladies and gentlemen, star one, please, for any questions. We go next now to Eric Sheridan. We go next now to Doug Anmuth at JP Morgan.
Thanks for taking the question. Can you just talk a little bit more about performance-based revenue? Saw a nice update there in terms of the percentage, and just kind of where you think that can go over time? Thanks.
We're really struggling to hear you there. Can we hear that one more time? Apologies. What was the question?
Just on performance-based revenue, the drivers and where that goes over time?
Performance-based revenue is largely driven by larger employers who have sophisticated applicant tracking systems and a whole HR, you know, tech stack that is driven around driving candidates on a performance basis where they're buying from us on a per click basis for the most part. The driver there is that, you know, A, we're tremendously under-penetrated in that part of the market vis-a-vis the market opportunity. Two, that the our go-to-market there is much more nascent. There are both a bunch of companies, very large companies with very significant hiring needs, where we're still talking to them and signing them up for the first time each quarter.
Several of our existing enterprise customers, you know, when we get in, we get in with them and start out, you know, maybe with just one division or one set of jobs as opposed to getting all their jobs and then increasing the share of their overall budget each passing month and each passing quarter as we prove value. Over and over again with customers of all sizes, but especially sophisticated enterprises, we've seen that as we deliver more value, customers are willing to pay us more to get even more from our marketplace, and that's how our marketplace works. When you pay more, you get more, and enterprises are sophisticated and set up to invest behind success like that.
Thank you, David.
Thank you. Just a reminder, star one for any questions. We go next now to Eric Sheridan of Goldman Sachs.
Thanks so much for taking the questions. Maybe a two-parter. You know, you guys have experimented a lot with continuing to push elements of the marketing dynamic and raise awareness of the platform overall in the last 12, 18 months. Any thoughts about key learnings from that marketing, those marketing initiatives and how we should be thinking about that setting up the platform over the medium to long term. As you get elements of a dislocation in the labor market with layoffs in certain areas of weakness, are there any plans to necessarily lean in on the candidate side to make sure people are aware of the platform, just in terms of maybe possibly sort of capturing some market share dynamics on the candidate side of the equation looking out into next year? Thanks so much.
This is Ian. I'll take the first stab at this question. For a long time internally, when we talk about winning, we say winning is becoming synonymous with the idea of the activity that the either job seeker or the employer is going to perform. So on the job seeker side, when they say, "I need to go find work," we don't want them to go to Google and do a search to find which job site they want to use. We want them to think, "I just go to ZipRecruiter, and that's where I'm gonna be able to find a job." That's why for the past couple years, and last year, in particular, we ramped up spend so dramatically in anticipation of this moment.
We expected that there would be a cooling in the number of jobs that would be open and available for job seekers, at which time you would see a larger pool of people coming and searching for work on job sites again. We think of that as a leveling of the labor market. For the last couple years, there's definitely been a big advantage for job seekers. It's been very easy to find a job. Well, now it's gonna get a little bit more complicated. To your point, as job search intensifies, as the number of job seekers goes up, and as their activity goes up, marketing will prove more effective.
We have been laying that groundwork, though, so that they are already aware of who we are, and we think this is gonna drive a higher ROI, and it's gonna bring more job seekers to us as this period unfolds. This has been a calculated strategy, a multi-year strategy, and certainly we feel like it was a worthwhile investment, as we are already seeing increases in job seeker activity, in part from the macroeconomic backdrop, but also thanks to the persistent work and investment we've been doing on our product. When you look at our AI personal recruiter, Phil, the impact he has on every part of our product where we introduce him is profound.
If you look at onboarding users, the number of job seekers who get through that process is 2.7x s higher with Phil than it was prior to that. If you look at the number of people completing their profile, it's up basically double. If you look at the impact of those job seekers having a profile, it makes them an order of magnitude more likely to get directly recruited by an employer through the form of being invited to apply. That's the best experience we can provide to job seekers, and we think that as we go through this period where the need of job seekers is gonna become more intense, giving them an extraordinary experience is something that's gonna create long-lasting brand loyalty to ZipRecruiter.
Mr. Sheridan, did you have anything further today, sir?
No, thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Sheridan. We'll take our last question this afternoon from Mark Mahaney of Evercore.
Thanks. I wanted to try a left field question, which is I think we're likely to see a fair number of layoffs from, you know, sectors of the economy that there were a few of them that really benefited from the COVID crisis. I'm thinking about online advertising and online retail, maybe some subscription businesses. Then that's where you're gonna start seeing, you know, pretty material layoffs. I think today's news from Facebook is just an example of that. I think we're gonna see more of that. Could you just talk about that? I'm trying to figure out what that means for ZipRecruiter. Your exposure to that on the job seeker side, I think that'd be really positive. I don't know what your enterprise exposure is on the employer side.
That dynamic, just talk about if that's material to your business, and then I can't tell whether it's materially positive or negative.
Yeah. I think the answer to that question is similar to the answer to the previous question in that, you know, we're entering a period of labor market rebalance. Basically at the onset of COVID, when the economy reopened shortly thereafter and all these businesses had to hire back up, there was an abundance of jobs and very few skilled job seekers available to do the work. It was a golden age for job seekers, and it was very tough to find talent. Now we're entering a period where there's gonna be less jobs, and it's gonna happen across a number of skilled categories as well as a number of unskilled categories. Effectively, every sector of the economy is gonna feel the pain, as it were, from a job seeker perspective.
For sites like ZipRecruiter, this is actually, in some ways, a silver lining boon because what it does is it puts more talent into our marketplace, which really lets the algorithms that we have been training and retraining and optimizing really flex what they're capable of. 'Cause fundamentally what our service is a matchmaker. The more inventory it has to match for employers, the more opportunities it has to bring the right employer together with the right job seeker, the more it can strut its stuff. We feel really good about the awareness we've created with job seekers over the last couple years, again, over 70% awareness, which puts us in rare air with the elites inside of the category.
We think there's gonna be a pretty sizable wave of increased job seeker activity over the next 18 months, and we expect to be one of the recipients of that.
Yeah. Just to add on there, Mark.
Specifically, how does, you know, tech layoffs impact our business? Our business looks like the U.S. economy, both on a geographic basis, on industry basis, on a job skill level basis, so we have a good mix. Tech is a good size chunk, but so is healthcare, so is travel and leisure, construction, et cetera. What we see right now already at this phase of the cycle is that tech is a little weaker than, you know, healthcare, as an example, which is a little stronger in the current environment. Will we feel a little bit of that from a revenue standpoint on the tech side? Yes. Do we have a disproportionate, you know, impact from that? No.
There's no one single industry that we have a disproportionate, you know, sort of exposure to that we'll be especially sensitive to.
Okay. Then Dave, if I could do one quick follow-on question on the sales and marketing expense line. I'm sorry if you already covered this earlier. You described it in the press release, what's happened there. We've had a couple of quarters now of nice leverage on a year-over-year basis after what was deleverage for several quarters. How should we think about that going forward? I think it's partly 'cause you're pulling back on media marketing. I can't tell whether that's just a reflection of maybe media marketing is cheaper now for economic reasons, or you just had a cycle where you have less need to do that. Just walk through what.
How to think about that particular line, you know, over the next year or so.
Yeah. Thanks, Mark. This is Tim. So generally speaking, what you're seeing is more so the latter of the two options that you gave, where we're bringing down spend a little bit as we see overall demand on the employer side start to wane a little bit. That's consistent with our playbook. You know, we maintain a very highly flexible cost structure. So that means that we can pivot up or down based on demand, so that we can pursue the best ROIs. You know, that said, I know you asked specifically about sales marketing, but we're continuing to increase our investment on the products and technology side. We see that as our way of building a better and stronger moat around our business.
Specifically on sales and marketing, as we see specific ROIs in our marketing acquisition channels start to come down a little bit, we're gonna conserve capital.
This is Dave. Just to add on to that. You know, so a couple things. One, to answer the one part of that question, you know, we don't see price dropping on media as a major driver of what you're seeing in our P&L at this point, so that's not something that has been a significant mover at this point. Zooming out from the specifics of this quarter, next quarter, or anything like that, we remain extremely confident in our ability to get operating leverage over time to our 30% long-term EBITDA margin target.
The reason is principally sales and marketing, we are gonna be able to grow the business faster than we need to grow sales and marketing because we are already reaching such a high percentage of both employers and job seekers in the market as sort of proven by the fact we have over 70% brand awareness among job seekers and over 80% brand awareness among employers. We're reaching them. We wanna stay top of mind. We wanna tell them even more about the latest product innovation, how ZipRecruiter is better than they've ever experienced before as our product continues to get better. We just won't need to grow that over time at the same rate, even if there's quarter to quarter variations as we see opportunistic moments to spend up or spend down a little bit.
Okay. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Tim. Thanks, Ian.
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, that will bring us to the end of ZipRecruiter's Q3 2022 earnings conference call. We would like to thank you all so much for joining us this afternoon, and wish you all a great remainder of your day. Goodbye.