ZipRecruiter, Inc. Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference 2026
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I think in the interest of time, we're going to get going. I think we're also going to close some of the doors in the back, but people are going to be no doubt milling about. It's great to have ZipRecruiter back at the conference again this year. Ian, thanks so much for taking the time and giving me the opportunity to have the conversation. You've been a very consistent guest for us over the years, and we always appreciate that.
Yeah. Thanks for having us again.
Always good to talk, and I always do like to start with a little bit of, for those who are either listening or in the room and don't know the story as well, you've been on a bit of a journey. I also think one of the most interesting things are you're a company that was talking about AI before anybody was talking about AI, which I always like to give you some credit for.
Oh, thank you. I think that's worthy of some credit because talking about AI is certainly in vogue as opposed to forward-looking.
Talk about the journey the company's been on. You've been through elements of macro cycles, product cycles, platform changes. Bring us up to speed on the journey you've been on.
Yeah. It's like telling the whole story feels like it's getting so long. I feel like I'm going to frame it just in the most recent period. After launching this startup at my kitchen table and after many years of product evolutions where we ultimately got to using AI for the first time ever in the job category, I think we were sort of on the bleeding edge of doing that. The company experienced tremendous success, grew fantastically well. We were delivering quality applicants who turned into hires at record rates for our industry. We were able to ride that momentum into taking the company public in 2021. Everything was going fantastically well until the last 3.5 years when a macro downturn hit the U.S. economy. Hiring effectively went backwards every month for 3.5 years. That's bad if you're a recruiting business.
Fortunately, hiring has stabilized in 2026, albeit at levels we haven't seen for over a decade. In spite of that, the good news is ZipRecruiter is back on a growth trajectory that's coming from product improvements that we have deployed and that I'm sure you're going to ask me a question that gives me an opportunity to talk about.
I will. Let's start with that macro trend first, because obviously what you're seeing in the last most recent periods has been a nice change of pace relative to, as you talked about the last couple of years. How are you thinking about what the drivers could potentially be for a healthier end demand side of the equation for the labor market more broadly? What are you watching for to get increased confidence signal in an upward trend?
This is a great question because we regularly survey both sides of our marketplace, and in the most recent survey where we talked to, I think it was 10,000 businesses, and that ranged in size from very large enterprises to SMBs. What we learned was a bunch of things. We learned that AI is not a boogeyman coming for the labor market, that AI is more likely to be something that creates job opportunities than removes it. Happy to dive into that. More importantly, what we learned is businesses are doing well. Businesses are confident. Many of them are experiencing either record levels of top-line performance or record levels of profitability, which is normally a recipe for businesses to expand and increase their hiring, but they're not doing it.
The reason they're not doing it, and the overwhelming message that we're getting from our customer base is they have anxiety about the economy. They are worried about investing into an economy that may be soft sand underneath them. They're in a wait-and-see mode, which is part of the reason why they're experiencing these record profits, because they're not keeping the investment up with what you would consider the normal healthy rate in order to support the amount of business demand that they're experiencing.
So when does that reach a friction point in your mind where you could only stretch that equation so far in certain pockets of the economy, where you can only extract so much output per unit of labor that you see today as opposed to what it might look like six or 12 months from now?
I'm not a full-time economist, so I may not be fully qualified.
I kicked off this conference by interviewing our economist.
Let's get him in here.
Yeah. He did sound that there is a lot of productivity gains that have come out of the labor force, and that typically is not a long-duration narrative that you can underwrite.
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