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Operator
Good morning, and welcome to the DHI Group, Inc. Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2017 Financial Results Conference Call. (Operator Instructions) Please note, this event is being recorded.
I would now like to turn the conference over to Rachel Ceccarelli, Director of Corporate Communications. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Rachel Ceccarelli - Director of Corporate Communications
Thank you, Keith, and good morning, everyone. With me on the call today is Mike Durney, President and CEO of DHI Group, Inc.; and Luc Grégoire, Chief Financial Officer. This morning, we issued a press release describing the company's results for the fourth quarter and full year for 2017. A copy of that release can be viewed on the company's website at dhigroupinc.com. Please note that the press release can be reviewed -- please note that the presentation which will be posted after this call is also available for corresponding webcast.
Before I hand the call over to Mike, I'd like to note that today's call includes certain forward-looking statements, particularly statements regarding future financial and operating results of the company and its businesses. These statements are based on management's current expectations or beliefs and are subject to uncertainty and certain changes in circumstances. Actual results may vary materially from those expressed or implied in the statements here due to changes in economics, business, competitive, technological and/or regulatory factors and the planned divestitures of our noncore businesses and the possibility that any such divestiture does not occur. The principal risks that could cause our results to differ materially from our current expectations are detailed in the company's SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K to be filed with SEC the next few days and quarterly report Form 10-Q and its sections entitled Risk Factors, Forward-Looking Statements, and Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations. The company is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements except where it is required by federal securities laws. Today's call can also include certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin. For details on these measures including why we use them and reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures, please refer to our earnings release that has been furnished to the SEC on form, which is also available on our website.
And now with that, I will turn the call over to Mike.
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Great. Thanks, Rachel and welcome, everyone, and thanks for joining us this morning. We're incredibly busy in 2017 and the changes we put in place through the year with refocusing our efforts around our tech-first strategy, creating a functionally aligned org structure and having our senior leadership team fully staffed began to show signs of progress in the fourth quarter with a number of accomplishments. We're gaining momentum and although it's fair to say change won't happen overnight, we're seeing a movement in the right direction today.
In the fourth quarter, we took another step towards our tech-first strategy with the sale of Health eCareers. In December, we sold that business for $15 million and recognized a pretax gain of $6.7 million. I'll talk about where we are with the other brands later on. Significantly, we finally had the functional team in place for a full 3 months and the early signs of operating results from the organization working towards common goals and initiatives are very encouraging. Much like the markets we serve, DHI has seen a tremendous amount of change in the past years, particularly in 2017. In May, we realigned our organization to streamline management and decision-making and to focus on tech initiatives. There were certainly challenges as team members became accustomed to a functional structure. We relocated people and we brought on a new head of sales but we made great progress. The new tech-first and functional org structure has brought teams together, helped us focus on initiatives that will move the business forward and created an overall stronger sense of collaboration. We have a clear road map built to pursue projects that matter most. And we've organized these priorities into 3 buckets: quality; relevance; and efficiency, which everyone in the company supports through projects or individual goals. You've heard us refer to efficiency for a long time now, and we added equality and relevance as important areas of distinction. We're executing against these priorities, in many cases, our efforts are already bearing fruit and we're seeing early signs of success. Although we'll take time to drive toward market adoption, but in the last 90 days, we've accomplished a lot. One example of a big win in efficiency area is the migration of our entire infrastructure to the cloud, a 2.5-year project that was completed in the fourth quarter with the migration of Dice. With this migration, all our core brands and corporate systems are now hosted in the cloud. It's a complex behind-the-scenes effort, but we'll see the benefits for customers and professionals with improved site speed and increased responsiveness. We're better able to deploy A/B testing to improve performance and also benefit from improved SEO and site response times globally. It also gives us flexibility to develop innovative applications to source tech talent. I'm proud of the way our teams came together to accomplish this massive project. And in the end, it makes DHI a much more efficient and flexible company. In the last 90 days, we launched a new Dice homepage in beta, new job search and registration on eFinancialCareers, a redesigned homepage on eFinancialCareers and 2 new salary tools for Dice. The Dice homepage has been rolled out to about 20% of our audience to date. We're testing the site to measure important KPIs such as bounce rates, application rates, registrations and more. While it's still early, the optimized user interface and featured editorial content and tools have performed well among beta users, reducing bounce rates by 67% and improving the application rate by 18%. eFinancialCareers officially launched a redesigned and personalized homepage. The new design leverages a relevance engine to serve personalized content to our end-users based on their behavior and use of the website. By showing visitors tailored content, financial professionals are matched with better quality jobs and content, thereby helping them better manage their careers. Through 2017, applications to jobs in the homepage were up 60% compared to 2016 and engagement with our editorial content rose 7%. This is one of the ways we're creating a better career management experience for professionals while delivering qualified candidates to customers. Even as careers also release improved job search and registration product based on user feedback. The new functionality improved relevance, enhanced search terms, added a location, keyword and title and create a more prominent place for job orders. The fully responsive platform has so far resulted in an uptick in apply rates, which will help us with better user feedback along with data on usage and metrics to be used in customer reporting down to line. We increased our marketing spend in 2017 to increase awareness and further position us as the place for tech jobs. The tools and improvements to the overall professional experience demonstrate progress in our efforts to deepen engagement with professionals. For example, as finance professionals have engaged with more content, customers have access to a more active and aware audience. In December, Dice released 2 new salary tools, one for tech professionals and one for hiring managers. The Dice salary predictor is available in the U.S. and U.K., leveraging machine learning to estimate salaries based on more than 600,000 data points. The tool ties together a unique combination of skills, title and location to reveal predicted salary. The public-facing tool is used for high-level predictions and a sampling of a robust data that can be available with tech professionals log in to the Dice profile to add skills and receive more detailed estimates. The promotion of this began in January 2018 along with our annual Dice salary survey. We'll update you on key metrics for the tool on our next quarterly call. The salary calculator for hiring managers is available in the U.S. It uses a machine learning algorithm and predictive modeling to calculate tech salaries based on a tailored combination of attributes to help employers set budgets, recruit for candidates and offer pay aligned with experience. Both tools bridge a gap that has long existed in recruiting with pay expectations being out of line with market trends. The on-site tools complement the Dice mobile app, which has over 0.5 million downloads to date. With more users downloading the app, we can leverage feedback to develop faster and better tools to help tech pros manage their careers. The tech unemployment rate continues to dip below 3%, which is considered full employment. And employers continue to pay a premium for highly skilled tech candidates. The underlying macro professionals and fundamentals in tech remain favorable, driving the need for services like ours, which help connect employers with tech talent. The limited supply of talent is even more acute among security clearance candidates. ClearanceJobs' unique position as a matchmaker of companies to candidates with active security clearances is resulting in continued revenue growth and opportunity. The value of the ClearanceJobs business is expected to become even more essential this year as the government takes longer and longer to approve clearances and the backlog for requests continues to grow. As tech professionals and employers continue to engage with our properties, we'll gain better insight into customer behavior and use this information to better advise our clients. Our top company goal for 2017 was to return the Dice business to growth. And with demand for tech growth in our favor, we're seeing some traction in our initiatives but will take more work and more time to stabilize and reinvigorate Dice. The API and ATS integrations are a key area where we can capitalize going forward to improve attribution and solve customer pain points. We're working with a platform which seamlessly submits job applications directly to a partner's ATS. This will increase job applications by making it easy for tech pros to apply using their Dice profile while simplifying clients' workflow and ensuring applicants are attributed to Dice. Thus, improving our clients' return on investment.
Looking forward into the first half of 2018, as we work to reposition Dice as the go-to resource to find and connect with the best talent, we have a variety of initiatives that will drive Dice forward, including ongoing investment in product and marketing to raise brand awareness and deliver innovative tools for customers. We continue to improve the overall tech talent search platform for Dice. Aside from significant user interface improvements, we're making it easier for employers to connect with and engage potential quality tech candidates. Plus we're integrating the search functionality that has proven successful with ClearanceJobs, which allows hiring managers to input full job descriptions rather than keywords in the boolean search to serve up ideal candidates. We'll be rolling out the next version of our talent search in 2018, and a stronger foundation of the Open Web functionality married with the integrated search, will ultimately create a more effective product for recruiters. As we further drive customer performance, the key initiative of relevance positions our brands as the go-to source to find and connect with the best talent. A pool of unique active professionals are just one of the KPIs, which investors can use to gauge the success of our strategy. Others we measure include new professionals using the sites, unique applicants and new clients. We traditionally viewed recruitment package clients as a key metric and still do today. Although as the business shifts and we're testing new pricing models, there are other ways to measure success, which we'll communicate going forward. Every employee at DHI is reminded of these metrics and the purpose they serve in driving performance.
I'm pleased to report that the process of divesting our non-tech brand is progressing. In December, we announced the sale of Health eCareers to Everyday Health for $15 million in cash. It's a great fit for Health eCareers business, which should allow that business to thrive. We also concluded the divestiture process for BioSpace, the life science business by transferring ownership to the managing director of the business while retaining a minority equity stake. BioSpace will operate as a stand-alone entity, separate from DHI going forward. We're close to concluding a sale transaction for the data services division of the Rigzone business. However, we have decided that a transaction for the career side of the business no longer makes sense given the improving business metrics, especially in North America. Rigzone careers will remain a part of DHI after the sale process for data services. There is currently strong interest in our Hcareers business, and we hope to find a good home to support that brand in the near future. But if we don't, we're prepared to keep the business to generate significant contribution margins.
Now that we've refined our business to its tech-focused core and have the organization in place, we believe the execution of our strategy will continue to improve.
Before I turn it over to Luc, I want to give a quick update on the CEO search process. The board appointed a 4-person committee and retained Heidrick & Struggles in the fall. The committee has been meeting each week with Heidrick and has met a number of potential candidates, several of whom the committee remains actively engaged with. The committee members are optimistic and enthusiastic about the quality of the candidates and are making good progress on identifying the next CEO. Our leadership team has been in place for a quarter and we're seeing great things by coming together to build great things. A highly engaged team is critical to how we operate as a business, and I want to thank all of our 600-plus team members around the world for their dedication and their hard work to make the business go.
And with that, I'll turn it over to Luc.
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
Well, thank you, Mike, and good morning, everybody. Today, I'll review the key points of our fourth quarter financial performance and comment on our expectations for 2018. But before I get into our operational review, let me quickly review a number of unusual items that impacted us this quarter. The sale of Health eCareers on December 4 for $15 million and the gain of $6.7 million, which we included in other income. And this period's results includes 1 less month of Health eCareers than last year's call. Also included in other income is a $3.3 million restitution award in the Oilpro-related legal matter. We incurred this quarter, $2.5 million in disposition and other related costs related to our ongoing divestiture process and the implementation of our strategy. We had many discrete items that significantly impacted and reduced our income tax rate during the quarter, including a lower taxable gain on disposition, research credits and the reversal of tax uncertainties. My commentary today regarding year-over-year performance will exclude these items, which impact comparability with prior period results.
Now onto our business review. For the fourth quarter, results were consistent with our 2017 outlook that trends would improve towards the end of the year. Total revenue of $50.9 million declined 7% against last year or 4% on a comparable basis when you exclude the impact of the sale of Health eCareers in early December. Our tech-focused segment revenue declined 5% and corporate and other revenue declined 3%. Exchange rates benefited both total company and tech-focused revenue by 1 percentage point this quarter. Billings for the quarter declined 1% for tech-focused and 3% for our corporate and other segment. The improvement to the rate of decline compared to earlier quarters is a combination of performance and early timing of contract renewals. Exchange had a positive impact of 1% on billings growth. Within our tech-focused segment, Dice U.S. saw improvement to its billing trends, down 8% against last year as compared to double-digit declines that we'd seen in earlier quarters. ClearanceJobs had a strong finish this quarter with 25% billings growth. The billings trend also improved in eFinancialCareers with growth of 13% or 7%, excluding exchange, driven by growth in Asia and the EU regions while the U.K. was slightly lower than the prior year. On revenue, Dice U.S. declined 10% with recruitment package customers at 6,450. The renewal rate of annual recruitment package customers remain at 65%. However, our dollar retention rate among renewing customers improved this quarter to a level that we haven't seen in 6 quarters. Average monthly revenue per customer was $1,115 and 96% of our contracts were annual. Both of these in line with recent trends. Dice customers with Open Web access grew 51% over last year, reaching 39% penetration rate.
Search API integrations increased 50% year-over-year to over 950. As Mike mentioned, we're progressing well in our product development road map and starting to put out some new features on Dice. While it's still early, initial results seem to be confirming we're on the right path.
Moving to eFinancialCareers. Revenue was flat versus prior year but down 5%, excluding foreign exchange. We saw continued Brexit-related softness in the U.K., albeit not as much as anticipated and had improved trends in the EU and Asia. ClearanceJobs completed a very successful year, finishing strong with Q4 revenues growing 23% year-over-year as our value proposition continues to be compelling in that very tight market. Prior to its sale, Health eCareers results for October and November were in line with the same period last year. In the other businesses, revenue declined 3% with 2% growth for Hospitality careers and partially offsetting a high single-digit decline at Rigzone, which is showing signs of stabilization, particularly North America, which experienced 25% billings growth year-on-year this quarter. Operating expenses before depreciation, amortization, stock-based compensation and disposition-related and other costs increased 1%, even as we continue to invest in marketing and product development. We continue to find efficiencies in our business, stemming from simplified structure, productivity initiatives such as our cloud migration project and from discontinuing unprofitable ventures like getTalent and our local China presence. These efficiencies have supported our increased marketing and development without unduly impairing our margins. Adjusted EBITDA of $11.4 million for the quarter included the restitution award of $3.3 million in the Oilpro-related legal matter and $1.5 million of our disposition-related costs. Excluding those items, our adjusted EBITDA margin was 19%.
Depreciation and amortization expense declined $400,000 from last year, mainly due to discontinuing getTalent and some intangibles having become fully amortized. Stock-based compensation was down 3% due to forfeitures and lower grant values. Interest expense declined 25% compared to the last year due to lower debt, which finished the year at half of last year's level. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was minus 4% and plus 18% for the year.
This favorable rate was affected by the many discrete items in the quarter, which I listed earlier. The enactment of U.S. tax reform did not significantly impact our 2017 tax rate as the applicable rate to the deemed repatriation or the applicable tax to the deemed repatriation of overseas earnings was offset by the reduction of our deferred tax liabilities for the lower future tax rates. Net income for the quarter was $11.8 million or $0.24 a share, with a favorable impact of $0.18 from the items affecting comparability.
We generated $7.2 million operating cash flow in the fourth quarter compared to $8 million last year. The operating cash for this quarter includes $3.3 million of restitution awards. This, along with proceeds from the Health eCareers sale and repatriation of $8 million of overseas cash enabled us to reduce our revolver by $27 million this quarter, down to $42 million. Deferred revenue at the end of the year was $84 million, which is down $1 million from the prior year but up nearly $2 million, excluding the impact of the Health eCareers divestiture as longer average contract terms mitigated the impact of slightly lower billings.
Looking ahead at 2018, we anticipate continued strength in the tech recruiting market with similar competitive dynamics. We're still assessing the impact of a new revenue recognition accounting principles but don't expect this to significantly impact the results upon adoption this year, either for reported revenues or the requirement to capitalize a portion of our commission expenses. We'll be providing more detail on this transition in our upcoming Form 10-K filing.
We've begun 2018 with a more focused organization and clarity of mission to develop solutions that addresses the unmet needs of the tech professionals and recruiters. The early results are encouraging, and continued development, together with sustained marketing and an intensified sales effort should start showing improvements in our trends later this year. Based on what we're currently seeing, we expect modest improvement to the Dice U.S. rate of revenue decline as experienced in the fourth quarter of 2017. Billings trends should start improving later in the year and continue through 2019. We expect ClearanceJobs customers will continue to value our product in the very tight clear professional market and are planning on continued revenue growth, although not at the current level of over 20%.
For eFinancialCareers, we expect revenues to be in line with 2017 as Brexit headwinds are offset by opportunities we see for growth in Asia and the EU. Excluding items that impact comparability, we expect to hold 2018 adjusted EBITDA margin percentages in line with 2017 while maintaining our current marketing and product development intensity and focusing on efficiency and simplifying our organization. Using our fourth quarter 2017 expenses as a baseline adjusted for the divestitures, we expect a double-digit percentage increase in product development and to maintain sales and marketing flat against 2017.
Cost of revenue and general administrative cost will decline in 2018, driven by efficiencies that we are achieving in those areas. And please refer to our Investor Relations website for historical P&Ls for the divested businesses of Health eCareers and BioSpace.
Below the line, depreciation and amortization should decrease modestly as the impact of implementing our product road map is offset by reduced capital spending to cloud migration, getTalent and divested non-tech businesses. Interest expense should also decline due to a lower average debt balance and continued pay-down of our revolver. The tax rate should be approximately 25%, benefiting from the 14 percentage point reduction coming from tax reform. Share count should increase a few percentage points during the year from employee stock compensation.
In the near term, we plan to continue applying free cash flow to reduce our revolving debt, maintaining our liquidity reserves as we continue to position ourselves for reducing -- for returning the business to growth. We'll continue to evaluate this policy as we progress down our strategic path. To recap, we started seeing some improvement on the top line rate of declines through the second half of 2017. And based on what we're currently seeing, 2018 top line trends should be similar to the fourth quarter of '17. While we have conviction that our strategic initiatives will be effective, we remain prudent in our capital allocation. We're already seeing progress along our tech-focused strategy, and we're keenly focused on preserving profitability.
As always, I thank you for your interest, and I will turn the call back over to Mike.
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Okay. Thanks, Luc, and thanks again to everybody for listening. I know I said earlier that we have the team in place. And I think given the performance of the business at the end of last year, we're having a senior team in place and credit to the employees who have worked on the businesses that we have been divesting to continue those business going and the employees in the tech-focused business, many of them have new roles in the organization. I think the fruits of that in the fourth quarter and at the beginning of 2018 have been pretty significant. And I think the team is excited about where we're headed.
And so with that, we'll turn it over to questions.
Operator
(Operator Instructions) And the first question comes from Kara Anderson with B. Riley FBR.
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
Just a little housekeeping. Did you say what the revenue decline looks like excluding Healthcare and FX?
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
The revenue decline, excluding -- yes, I did. It was 1 point coming off of...
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
Sorry. That was 1 point for the FX? And what was the Healthcare impact?
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
Give me a second. So it's 4% on a comparable basis when you exclude Health eCareers. And there's 1% helping it so that's a 5% decline.
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
Okay. And then -- can you elaborate on the decision to sell the data services piece of Rigzone but retain the Quora services piece? And why that makes sense with your tech-first strategy?
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Sure. So I think the data services business -- we've always liked that business but it really is the farthest afield from what we do. We acquired it when we acquired Rigzone. In the first place, there was a fair amount of interest in that business because it's so discrete, and it fits nicely into potential acquirers portfolio. So in the end, we thought it was easier to sell them separately. On the careers business, we had a number of indications but they really didn't value what we think is the potential of that business as the market starts to turn. And we actually have started to see a turn in that business certainly more so in North America than outside North America. So while from a tech-first standpoint, it doesn't fit nicely. It is the closest to the tech-first strategy of the business as we decide to divest because there's a fair amount of technology lulls embedded in the Rigzone business, in energy, generally. So that's why we decided to keep it. It just -- we see a turn coming and we want to ride the turn.
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
So just for clarification, is the intention to keep it indefinitely? Or you think that you will look to sell it down the road maybe as things turn a little bit?
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
I think the intention is to keep it indefinitely as indefinitely is used broadly, which means, you never know in the future, but the intention is to keep it now.
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
Got it. And then recognizing that downloads are growing for the Dice app, can you speak to the utilization of that app? And whether you find that an important metric?
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Yes. The utilization has grown. It has grown slower than the download growth. But we really haven't pushed from a marketing standpoint the usage as we develop more and more tools and we gather more and more data. So I think going forward, you'll hear more specifically, around the metrics, not only of downloads but also usage of the service.
Kara Lyn Anderson - Senior Analyst of Discovery Group
And then, I guess, last one for me is on the recruitment package customers. What are the reasons you're hearing that people are leaving or canceling their package? And whether or not those are just moving to a different pricing model? If you could comment on that.
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Sure. So we hear a variety of reasons. The most common when we actually survey customers leaving us is no need, but we certainly know that no need is a broader sense. I think the most common reason is that many of our customers or most of our customers have needs that are broader than tech. And many of the ones that choose not to renew with us decide to consolidate their spending with others who are broader. So we tend to have higher renewal rates and it shows as no surprise but higher renewal rates on customers who deep focuses tech as supposed to those who have broader needs. But I think over time, as we develop more tools that are tech-specific, the value to them, to customers, will be somewhat unique as compared to what generalists can provide.
Operator
And the next question comes from Jafar Azmayesh from 1776 Holdings.
Jafar Azmayesh
A few questions for me. The first one, what was the getTalent spend in 2017? And what are the China savings?
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
So the getTalent spend in the first half of '17, from an operating standpoint, was probably about $2 million, plus CapEx, which was probably $1 million or so, using round numbers. So that's through August when we decided to get out of that business. And China is -- the net loss on China was several hundred thousand dollars a year. So what we've done is, we moved the caring -- taking care of those customers to Hong Kong. So there's a number of customers that we now can't serve because we don't operate in China. We don't have a license to operate in China, but there are a number of those customers that we have saved and continue to serve out of Hong Kong because they have services that they can provide outside Mainland China. So it was a couple of hundred thousand dollars of annual loss.
Jafar Azmayesh
Got it. The BioSpace losses now, if I am understanding this correctly, shift off of our books. And what were those losses last year?
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Yes. It was around $1 million, we have the details on the website. So yes, that business is now transferred to the management team of BioSpace and so we don't have that anymore as of January 31.
Jafar Azmayesh
Okay. And you're forecasting flat EBITDA margins, flat next year. You also mentioned you're changing accounting policies for reasons, hopefully, that will be detailed in the 10-K where your capitalizing items like commissions. So in essence, you're forecasting down EBITDA margins on an apples-to-apples basis. Is that correct?
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
That's correct. And we're not changing our policies, just to be clear. There's a new accounting principle that comes into effect for all companies, January 1 that specifies or prescribes more how to recognize revenue. It doesn't change our revenues very much. It will impact a bit on the commissions initially as we adopt because you're deferring commissions over the contract life or over the customer life if it's a new customer. But you're also catching up -- you're taking previous expenses and capitalizing those at the start of the year. So there's going to be an in and out that we're still evaluating. So we've kept that out of what we talked about this morning.
Michael P. Durney - CEO, President and Director
Certainly not our choice.
Jafar Azmayesh
Got it. And then with regards to the debt pay-downs. So now we're at about $29 million net debt against $40 million of EBITDA. Can you shed light on what the liquidity crisis is that you guys are seeing that we're not seeing and what, if any conversations you've been having around, retiring -- for instance, 1/3 of the equity could have been retired this year well within your credit agreement. And it shows in the pay-down debt. Can you help us understand what the liquidity danger or crisis is that we're not seeing in our end.
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
Yes. I don't think we're managing a -- we're seeing crisis. I think we're being prudent in applying the reserve, we want to make sure that we have all that we need to support the strategy and the improvement of the business. And in the meantime, we can reduce our loan, which is a revolver loan so that liquidity remains for us. So we're basically keeping our reserves for pushing our strategy, but to be clear, there's no liquidity crisis. We're a profitable business and have a strong balance sheet. Just being prudent managers.
Jafar Azmayesh
Okay. You have a $150 million capacity which, I understand, you can't take all of it down, but there is still plenty of room on it to do whatever it is you need to do to support the strategy unless there is a major acquisition, as you've stated numerous times, is not on the table. So that argument is difficult to wrap my head around. In any regards, in your Clearance business, can you talk about -- it sounds like a strong franchise. Can you just talk about what you've done in terms of pricing? Or have you taken significant pricing gains year-over-year, quarter-over-quarter, or any sense?
Luc D. Grégoire - CFO
Yes. We certainly have pushed pricing up and the business continues to grow at a tremendous rate. And we think about we'll continue to grow maybe not the same rate it has. But there is a balance that we manage all the time, we've spent a fair amount of time on this. As the government slows to a crawl the approval process, there are fewer and fewer new candidates that are entering into the pool because there's just -- there's a limitation, right? We talk about this all the time that it is an interesting business and that both supply and demand is driven by the same entity, which is the U.S. government. So we're pretty cautious about pushing pricing too high, given the fact that the government is restricting how many new candidates we get and to exempt the people paying more and more for the service and don't see newer candidates at the same rate they did before because the government is restricting who they give security clearance to, we have to find that balance. And so some would say it's a good problem to have, I think we believe it's a pretty good problem to have. But it is -- there is a supply/demand imbalance in security clearance, and we have to manage it. So the simple answer is, yes, we have pushed up pricing but we're very sensitive to pushing pricing too high when -- because of the government restrictions on clearances we can't provide more candidates.
Operator
And as there are no more questions at the present time, I would like to return the call to Rachel Ceccarelli for any closing comments.
Rachel Ceccarelli - Director of Corporate Communications
All right. Thank you, Keith. We appreciate your interest in DHI Group. And if you have any follow-up questions, you can call Investor Relations at (212) 448-4181 or e-mail ir@dhigroupinc.com. Thanks, everyone.
Operator
Thank you. The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.