ZipRecruiter heads into its Q1 2026 earnings report — due after the close today — with options traders taking a strikingly bullish stance, even as the stock's year still looks bruised.
Options positioning is the most telling signal into the print. The put/call ratio has collapsed to just 0.11, well below its 20-day mean of 0.25 and near the bottom of its 52-week range. Calls are swamping puts by roughly nine to one. That is not a market bracing for bad news. It follows a dramatic shift: through most of March and into mid-April, the PCR was running above 0.58 — close to the 52-week high of 0.65 — then flipped hard as the stock doubled off its lows. The stock has surged 48% over the past month to close at $3.10, recovering sharply after spending much of Q1 below $2. That 1-week gain of 6% adds to a move that has clearly pulled fresh call buyers in.
Short interest tells a less excitable story. At 6.6% of the free float, shorts are present but not historically extreme, and the position has actually been declining — down 3.2% over the past week. Borrow remains cheap at 1.1% annualised, and availability is loose, meaning there is no meaningful squeeze dynamic to amplify the move. The ORTEX short score of 48.5 is mid-range. None of that screams imminent capitulation from the bearish side.
The analyst backdrop is notably cautious, though the most recent formal updates date to February — following the Q4 print, which saw the stock fall 23.5% in a single session. That reaction prompted UBS to cut its target from $4.50 to $2.50, and Barclays from $5.00 to $3.00. Both maintained neutral ratings. The stock has since traded well above those February targets, which now look conservative. The mean target from that cohort implies roughly 9% downside from current levels, but given the gap between those stale targets and the recent price action, the figures carry limited forward weight until analysts revisit after today's results. The EPS momentum 90-day factor sits at the 91st percentile, suggesting forward estimates have been moving higher — and that may be part of what is pulling buyers in.
Insider selling in the name has been persistent. CEO Ian Siegel sold shares on at least five separate occasions between mid-March and early April, at prices ranging from roughly $1.86 to $2.07. President David Travers also sold in March. The values are small in dollar terms — individual transactions largely in the tens of thousands — and appear likely to be plan-based sales, but the pattern is one-directional. No insider has purchased shares in the window available in the data. Net insider selling over the past 90 days totals around $450,000, which does not suggest internal conviction that the stock was deeply undervalued at those prices.
Today's print is therefore a test of whether a recovering online employment marketplace — operating at a PE near 8.6x and EV/EBITDA of 6.4x against an estimated EBITDA of roughly $5.8m — can show stabilisation in revenue trends and a credible path to growth after a year of persistent estimate cuts.
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