Greetings and welcome to the Mastech Holdings, Inc., First Quarter 2015 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jennifer Ford Lacey, Manager of Legal Affairs for Mastech Holdings, Inc. Thank you, Ms. Ford Lacey, you may begin.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to Mastech's first quarter 2015 conference call. If you have not yet received a copy of our earnings announcement, it can be obtained from our Web site at www.mastech.com. With me on the call today are Kevin Horner, Mastech's Chief Executive Officer; and Jack Cronin, our Chief Financial Officer. I would like to remind everyone that statements made during this call that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements include our financial growth and liquidity projections as well as statements about our plans, strategies, intentions and beliefs concerning our business, cash flows, costs and the markets in which we operate. Without limiting the foregoing, the words believe, anticipate, plans, expects and similar expressions are intended to identify certain forward-looking statements. These statements are based on information currently available to us and we assume no obligation to update these statements as circumstances change. There are risks and uncertainties that could cause actual events to differ materially from these forward-looking statements, including those listed in the company's 2014 Annual Report on Form 10-K, filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission and available on their Web site at www.sec.gov. As a reminder, we will not be providing guidance during this call nor will we provide guidance in any subsequent one-on-one meetings or calls. I will now turn the call over to Jack for a review of our first quarter 2015 results.

Thanks, Jen, and good morning everyone. Revenues for the first quarter of 2015 totaled $27.1 million, which were 6% below the first quarter 2014 revenues. The revenue decline largely reflected at a high level of assignment in December 2014, which impacted a number of consultants-on-billing that we entered the New Year with. Our average bill rate for the first quarter of 2015 of $74.46 was approximately 1% higher when compared to the corresponding quarter of 2014. Activity levels were solid for most of the quarter after a slow start in early January. Given a tightening supply of IT professionals, our assignment win rate was a little late in Q1 2015 compared to historical averages. Gross profits for the first quarter of 2015 totaled $4.7 million or 17.3% of revenues compared to $5.2 million or 18.2% of revenues during the same period last year. Our gross profit dollar decline was due to less consultants-on-billing in the 2015 quarter compared to the first quarter of 2014 as well as a lower overall gross margin percentage. Our first quarter 2015 gross margin percentage was impacted by higher bench cost related to the start-up of our technology practice and higher benefit cost related to the Affordable Care Act. On new assignments, we have adjusted our pricing to recover these higher benefit cost, however, we haven't been a successful in getting bill rate increases on existing assignments that's the reason for the negative impact on margins in the short-term. SG&A expenses were $4.1 million in the first quarter of 2015 when adjusting for severance cost of $305,000 incurred due to a change in sales leadership. Adjusted SG&A expenses represented 15% of total revenues in the first quarter of 2015 compared to 13.4% of revenues in the corresponding quarter of 2014. This increase in SG&A expense reflect additions to our offshore recruitment staff and investment in our sales organization to support our technology practice. Net income for the first quarter of 2015 was $195,000 or $0.04 per diluted share compared to $869,000 or $0.20 per diluted share in the first quarter of 2014. It should be noted that the previously mentioned severance charge negatively impacted diluted earnings per share by $0.05. Addressing our financial position at March 31, 2015, we had cash balances on hand of approximately $2.9 million, no outstanding borrowings and over $16.4 million of borrowing capacity under our existing credit facility. We currently have a commitment from PNC Bank to increase our existing $20 million credit facility to $26 million in support of our recently announced plans to acquire Hudson Global U.S. IT staffing business. I will now turn the call over to Kevin for his comments.

Thanks, Jack, and good morning all. First I would like to comment on our first quarter performance then I will give you some of my thoughts on our recently announced agreement to acquire the U.S. IT staffing business with Hudson Global. With respect to first quarter, we made changes to our sales organization in early March. In connection with these changes, I assume the role of Chief Revenue Officer in addition to my CEO responsibilities. While we certainly have much work to do, I'm feeling very good about what we have accomplished in just a few months and how the organization is responding to the change. As we clearly stated in our Q4 earnings call, year-over-year comparables would be unfavorable for the first half of 2015. I do want to point out that our [CMB] [ph] head count was essentially unchanged in Q1 and more importantly currently positive in the last half of the quarter. The supply side of our business continues to be our largest challenge as IT talents become more and more scarce in relation to demand. Simply to put, recruiting capacity and capability both need increase and our sales organization needs to be in its absolute best given the available talent in the market. For the low cost recruitment engine, I believe these market dynamics will actually put us in a better competitive position as compared to many of our peers. Gross margins were disappointing in Q1 and were impacted by two cost items, which should not have the same negative impact in future periods that they have in Q1. Namely, higher bench costs from our start-up technology practice and the cost of compliance with the Affordable Care Act. Moving forward, bench cost in our technology practice will be significantly lower than in Q1 than higher health…

Thank you. At this time, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from David Polonitza with AB Value Management. Please proceed with your question.

Hey, guys, good morning. Just wonder if you can just explain a little bit why Mastech was looking at acquisition candidates, what is the benefit of improving or increasing your footprint now in the retail space and how you will be able to leverage your existing infrastructure to improve this acquisition?

Sure, Dave. Let me take a shot at that and Jack, if you have anything to add please do. Number one, obviously, we are trying to be a bit careful because the acquisition didn't close. And – but let me offer what I can right now Dave. We talked in the past about a growth strategy for Mastech that includes basically four prongs or four quadrants of activity. The first quadrant is growing with our existing client base and driving both the 1.5x market. But, the second quadrant is adding new larger scale customers that are VMS, MSP style customers that stick in our high volume, low cost speed recruiting model. The third quadrant of growth was really all about growing in-depth in the technology practice and growing from a retail client base as you will all know, our wholesale – excuse me, our business is 75% wholesale and 25% retail today. And our long-term vision is to drive that to a balance – it looks pretty much 50/50. We don't expect to get there overnight much more of a 3 to 5 year approach. But, we see high value in having a retail client base as well as having a wholesale client base. And the couple of obvious reasons, right, and if you look at any of our publicly traded peer group, who have a much higher retail base than we do, you can see gross margin impacts of that retail base, or interesting and we like those. And we believe that first and foremost, we can bring a retail client base into our business and then using our low cost SG&A model service that through our offshore sourcing business and our offshore sourcing group, so we can actually make that onshore recruiting organization a bit stronger and a…

Thanks. Just a kind of one more question kind of related to that. Our – would you guys be looking at further acquisition candidates once the integration of this potential acquisition has been completed, and also what's your plan to really drive organic growth of the existing business, obviously, the first quarter there was a lot of areas that you worked on. But, overall, how do you see your company – your legacy business and now this new business achieving that growth rate that you are hoping to achieve with respect to industry?

Yes. I will answer that several ways and I may have to be a little bit cryptic here just because the deal isn't closed. So in our legacy business in the Mastech [proper] [ph] business, we have as I think, you will all know from our last call, we made a – we now make two really significant leadership changes in the organization. First, we moved Sameer Srivastava, who was running our alliance channel out of India, moved him into a role where he is now the Managing Director in India and he is running all the recruiting. So first and foremost, Sameer's role inside of our company since the beginning of January has been to bring a disciplined focus to the way we on-board, train and develop our recruiting organization. And Sameer and his team have worked on that pretty hard over the last 90 to 100 days. As you guessed, those kinds of things – those kinds of changes aren't simple to make. I think I quoted the numbers for the group of four, so let me do that again. We have a – we built a recruiting efficiency in that to put several variables around the recruiting process into consideration and created kind of a batting average, if you will say. And in 2012 that batting average for our team was about 25%, right – 250 batting average. Over the last two years, we have driven significant amount of change to the recruiting organization and move that batting average to about 500, okay. What we determined in the fourth quarter of 2014 is that, if you wanted to have batting average to look more like 750 and we had to make a step change in the way we manage the organization and with the quality of the…

Great. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions in queue at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to management for closing comments.

Thanks operator and thanks to all for participating today. Please join our call in late July as we talk about second quarter, look forward to that with you all and watch for the close announcement as we have noted in our press release, we expect the transaction to close some time in the second quarter. So yes, I'm very, very excited for the business as we move forward into the second half of 2015. Thank you very much.

Thank you. This does conclude today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. And have a great day.