FreshNetworks Blog

Today saw the launch of a new job search engine Adzuna, which integrates Facebook and LinkedIn contacts to help job hunters get ahead of the competition.

Adzuna works by aggregating existing job postings from sites such as Monster, TotalJobs and LinkedIn, which in itself is a great time-saver for job hunters.

Where Adzuna really shines though is by “connecting” your LinkedIn and Facebook contacts, helping you get the most from your friends and connections on both social networks.

So how does it work?

Once you have shared your contact details, the search engine pulls up any of your contacts who work at companies which have vacancies on the Adzuna database. You can send a message directly from within Adzuna to your connection, with a link to the job details, and get the ball rolling from there.

It’s quite unobtrusive and you don’t have to create a new social network, unlike on  BranchOut and BeKnown, the other job hunting and professional networking tools on the market at the moment.  In fact the only time you need to contact your friend through Adzuna is to make them aware of your intention to pursue a job once you’ve found something that you’re really interested in.

We spoke to Andrew Hunter, co-founder of Adzuna and formerly of Qype and Gumtree, to learn some more about the social integration:

Could you tell us a bit about how and why you decided to develop Adzuna Connect in the way you have?

We want to make the job search experience much, much better.  Social is a key part of that and we believe a social layer gives job seekers a distinct advantage in the market. Understanding where you can get a quick intro through a friend to an employer or even get the low down on what it’s really like to work at a company is incredibly valuable job seekers – we want to make this a seamless part of our search.

Currently Adzuna seems to be geared primarily for job hunters. Do you have plans to offer services for recruiters to help them search for candidates?

Not for the time being. In the short run, we want to focus our efforts on building the best possible search experience for job hunters. Recruiters will benefit naturally from the traffic we refer to them immediately and in the future we will provide services to allow them to showcase their vacancies to a wider audience. For now though, it’s all about the job seekers.

Currently the LinkedIn jobs are just for your first-degree connections – are there plans to have the option for broader searches?

Absolutely. Watch this space, as what you can see now is only a beta version.  We see huge value in being able to leverage your friends’ networks as well as your own to find the perfect job.

You have stated that the job ads are just the beginning, and that you intend for Adzuna to serve property and car classifieds too. How will Adzuna manage social search for these listings?

There will be obvious differences and we’re keen to only make social connections where users find the connection / information genuinely useful. There’s no point in ‘doing social’ for the sake of being cool. So to take property as an example, users looking for a house in a new area might be interested in which of their friends live in the local area and what people on twitter say about it. We hope to fold relevant social signals like this into all of our verticals to ensure the best possible search experience.

Finally, is there anything else you would like to add about Adzuna?

For those of your readers who are wondering where the name “Adzuna” comes from, “Zuna” means “abundance” in a number of African languages. We aim to be the most abundant classified ads site on the the web, and to bring you the best ads sooner than anyone else. Hence the name Ad-zuna.

Oh, and make sure you try the connect feature here – http://jobs.adzuna.co.uk/connect.html

Adzuna is currently in beta and already has over  300,000 live UK job vacancies listed. We’re looking forward to seeing how it develops.