: ZipRecruiter: Employers slow down hiring, hitting January revenue

Shares of ZipRecruiter Inc. ZIP fell nearly 12% in the extended session Tuesday after the jobs platform beat Wall Street estimates for its fourth quarter but said employers have slowed down their hiring, cutting down on the company’s January revenue. ZipRecruiter earned $19.4 million, or 17 cents a share, in the quarter, compared with $20 million, or 16 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter. Revenue fell 4% to $210.5 million, the company said. Analysts polled by FactSet expected the company to report EPS of 9 cents a share on sales of $206 million. “With an increasingly uncertain macroeconomic backdrop, employers have moderated their hiring plans and reduced their recruitment budgets in the first weeks of this year,” the company said in a letter to shareholders. “Online job postings in our marketplace remained in line with the low point of the 2022 holiday season, rather than following the longstanding seasonal pattern of beginning a run-up in January.” That weakness is more pronounced among small- and medium businesses, ZipRecruiter said. “As a result, January’s revenue was down 15% year-over-year,” the company said. ZipRecruiter guided for first-quarter revenue between $176 million and $182 million, down between 23% and 20% year-on-year. For all of 2023, the company guided for revenue between $770 million and $790 million, which would be down between 15% and 13% from 2022. Shares of ZipRecruiter ended the regular trading day down 2.4%.

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