Following expansion into Germany last month, Adzuna, the UK startup that operates what it calls a next generation jobs search engine, is taking its wares even further afield today. The London-based company has rolled out dedicated sites for Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada. That’s an interesting mix of countries and territories — the U.S., for now, is still notably missing in action — but, nonetheless, we can safely now call Adzuna a startup with global ambitions.
Like its UK and German versions, the new localised sites feature the same job search functionality by indexing job vacancies found on classified ads and job boards around the web, and mining that data for its search engine and to provide free access to labour market trends, such as tracking salaries for a particular vocation and region.
Adzuna’s social features have made the flight, too. Dubbed Adzuna Connect, users can sign in to Adzuna via Facebook or LinkedIn to leverage their social graph to help them get an in at a particular company which has a job vacancy they wish to apply for.
In addition, in a move that could be seen as partly cheeky PR but also has some genuine utility, Adzuna co-founder Andrew Hunter says that the startup is offering to build an employment market data dashboard to be used by the governments of each of the newly supported countries, similar to the one it currently powers for the UK’s Number 10 and Prime Minister’s own iPad web app, which we’re told has been well-received.
“The feedback we’ve had from Number 10 is that the PM uses the app regularly,” says Hunter, “and that there are discussions happening at the moment around rolling out the dashboard to wider government. The opposition have not approached us asking for an app yet, but in the interest of open data, we’d happily talk to them about providing something similar.”
Back to today’s international expansion. I asked Hunter why, for example, Canada was chosen before the U.S. “Don’t worry, U.S. is coming,” he says. “We’re generally really excited about the Canadian market because job seekers clearly aren’t satisfied with any of the job search engines currently there.”
He also says that he and co-founder Doug Monro, having been at eBay Classifieds for a number of years, previously worked “very closely with the folks at Kijiji.ca” (the craigslist or Gumtree of Canada), so they already had the required business relationships and market knowledge in place. “That always helps”, he says.
