UK-based Adzuna takes its jobs search engine to Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada

UK-based classified ads search engine Adzuna launched for the UK market way back in July 2011, and celebrated its one-year anniversary by opening its data for jobseekers to see salary trends by industry.

Now, as it approaches its second year in business, Adzuna is going global by targeting Brazil, South Africa, Australia and Canada with fully localized sites.

Just to recap, Adzuna aggregates job, property and car ads from hundreds of sources, letting users search and filter them on a single interface. For its international launch, however, it’s focusing just on jobs – at least to begin with.

Adzuna already claims more than 1.5 million monthly visitors, and the London-based startup is hoping to take its social job hunting tools and real-time labour market data to the global masses.

The site collates the latest job ads in real-time from all the major local job boards, and throws in a social layer too which allows users to tap their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to see if there’s any jobs where their buddies work. Adzuna now claims more than 1 million live job vacancies internationally.

Last year, Adzuna also launched another interesting feature going by the name of ‘Friend Map’, which lets you ask Facebook friends which areas you should live in, and which to avoid.

Aiming big

Back in November, we confirmed that UK Prime Minister David Cameron and other senior government figures had their own app, which was long rumored to be the case. Well, it transpired that Adzuna was actually powering a “significant portion” of the so-called ‘Number 10 Dashboard’. Adzuna’s job and housing market data is being used in the app, alongside other data streams, to help inform Government decisions around the UK economy.

With that in mind, Adzuna says it’s also offering to build free data dashboard apps for leaders in its new markets too, in an effort to “help governments across the globe with better decision making around the economy”. This may include job vacancy counts, average salaries, unemployment data, regional hiring patterns and more.

Adzuna was founded in 2011 by Andrew Hunter and Monro, formerly of eBay, Gumtree, Qype and Zoopla, and is backed by venture capital firms Passion Capital, The Accelerator Group and Index Ventures.

“We’re delighted to announce the launch of these new sites and we’re excited to build on our UK success,” says Hunter. “We believe jobseekers in these countries are underserved by the tools currently available in the market. Our aim is to arm job seekers around the world with all the information they need to find their perfect job.”