ZipRecruiter, Inc. The KeyBanc Technology Leadership Forum 2026
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Right. Good to go? I'm ready.
Let's do it. All right.
Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Justin Patterson. I lead the internet research team at KeyBanc. I'm excited to have Ian Siegel, the CEO of ZipRecruiter, here with us today. Welcome, Ian. Delighted to be here.
Thank you. I'm glad we just escaped the rain from outdoors with smooth sailing there.
To kick things off, for people who aren't familiar with ZipRecruiter, I'd love for you to provide just a brief overview of the business.
Sure. At ZipRecruiter, our mission is to actively connect people to their next great opportunity. We're one of the largest jobs marketplaces in the U.S. We've been around for 15 years. We have the number 1 rated mobile app on both Android and iOS, and have had such for almost a decade. There's over 1 million reviews in there on that app. We have 80% brand awareness on both sides of our marketplace. We span the entirety of the labor market, so we're in every geography, every job category, and we work with businesses of all sizes.
Perfect. There's going to be a lot to unpack there, but I want to start with the macro within there. You mentioned the labor market. That was certainly an atypical labor market even before AI came into play. I'd love to hear just what you see within the labor market today and how you're helping companies really navigate the AI transition.
Yeah. Those are two very big questions. First off, what are we seeing in the labor market? Post-COVID, there was a run-up in the labor market that was historic. Then for the last four years, the labor market has effectively been into a persistent decline. Hiring in America has just been falling until 2026, when we came into our first period of extended stability. In 2026, I would call the labor market stable but subdued.
The reason I use the word subdued is because if you look at every third-party data point, but most of us will go look at the BLS data that's available, you will see that both hires, the absolute number of people who are getting hired in the U.S., and quits, which is the thing that drives hires more than anything else, they're both hovering around the same low levels they were at all the way back in 2015. So while the decline has stabilized, we have not yet returned to either what I would call a normal, healthy labor market, or seen the macro start to improve.
Got it. I think one of the interesting things around AI right now is this whole notion that we're going to vibe cut away some jobs, we're going to have massive layoffs across the board. Yet recently, you published a report that's showing some opposite signals in there. I'd love for you to unpack just what you're actually seeing from the labor demand, even in a subdued environment.
Yeah. We study this question from a number of different angles. But in reference to the survey you're talking about, we recently completed a survey of over 10,000 businesses, and roughly 70% of them were SMBs, and the other 30% were in the enterprise category, or they had 5,000 or more employees, so they were of a larger size. What we discovered was really interesting. So across all those businesses, over 90% of them said they are already using AI in some form or fashion inside of their business. So AI is permeating every size business in America.
But the biggest surprise, at least for me, was that 35% of those businesses say, as a direct result of using AI, they are actually planning to increase hiring and/or have already begun to increase hiring, which is counter to the narrative that AI is coming to destroy the labor market. There are a bunch of other signals you can look at that support this premise that so far, AI is not having a significant negative impact on the labor market. The one I find most interesting, and I will just call this one out, is everyone has predicted that engineering jobs were going to be the first to go, and they were the most at risk from AI disruption. It was the thing that all of these large language model companies were focused on in terms of skills that they have hyper-optimized.
If you just go back to the beginning of when Claude Code was released till now, engineering hiring is now up 10% from that period. So even though we have all marveled at what Claude Code is capable of, it has not decimated, at least, the labor market for engineering.
If anything, it actually seems like it has made the software engineer more accessible to the small business who might have been locked out of paying for that person before.
I get paid to hype the labor market, so when I say things like this, people are like, "Where is your data?" What I would say is that if you go back in history and you look at every major technological breakthrough, it does not matter if you are talking about ATMs and what that did to bank tellers, which was to massively increase them, or if you talk about spreadsheet software and what that did to accountants, which once again massively increased the number of them. Every time you make something easier to do in our society, history tells us we will want to do more of it, not less of it. So yeah, it will change the nature of how those jobs are done. Bank tellers do not do normal standard transactions anymore. They basically upsell you to higher value products.
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