Gumtree duo enters South African job search market with Adzuna

The guys behind popular classifieds network, Gumtree.com, is launching their job search engine, Adzuna, in South Africa today. Having gained traction in the UK through social job hunting tools, real time labour market data and of course search, the venture-backed job aggregator now aims to make a splash in South Africa.

Adzuna reckons that are over 50 000 live job vacancies in South Africa that represent an estimated R16.9-billion of ‘Total Earning Opportunity’. The job search egnine collates the latest job ads in real-time from major job boards such as PNet, Career Junction, JobMail, JobSpace and Gumtree. Arguably the most compelling aspect of Adzuna is its social layer which allows users to gain an “unfair advantage” in the job search process by using their Facebook and LinkedIn contacts. It allows job seekers to find jobs that are connected to friends of theirs.

Adzuna is a free service, which across the pond, currently powers the British Prime Minister’s economic data dashboard. Locally, the service brings together things like vacancy maps, salary trends and company hiring patterns. Adzuna provides rich data for over 1 million job titles and location combinations; from demand for Java Developers in Jo’burg to the top companies hiring cooks in Cape Town.

Andrew Hunter, Co-Founder of Adzuna, commented “We’re delighted to announce the launch of Adzuna.co.za today and we’re excited to build on our UK success. We believe the 4.5 million people out of work in South Africa are underserved by the tools currently available in the market. Our aim is to arm job seekers in South Africa with all the information they need to find their perfect job.”

Adzuna makes money by referring traffic to certain job sites that it lists, and from contextual advertising. Ads are listed for free in the organic index, with websites and portals having the option to buy premium listings which they pay for on a CPC or CPA basis — think Google Adwords.

Adzuna was founded in 2011 by Andrew Hunter and Doug Monro, formerly of eBay, Gumtree, Qype and Zoopla and is backed by leading Venture Capital firms Passion Capital, The Accelerator Group and Index Ventures. The startup has managed to raise a total of £800k in funding in two seed rounds.

Adzuna already claims more than 1.5 million monthly visitors and is launching localised versions of its service in a second emerging market, Brazil as well as Australia and Canada.