Smart: Adzuna's search engine connects job ads to your contacts in the companies

The classified jobs market – indeed classifieds themselves – are sharded across many different providers from Gumtree in the UK to newspapers to Craigslist. It therefore seems a no-brainer to create a search engine which looks across all these sites in an intelligent way, and hooks the listings into social platforms. And Adzuna, which launched today, does seem a fairly uncomplicated no brainer. To that end it’s secured £300,000 seed investment from Passion Capital and angel investors to take this jobs search market.

The market they are after consists of 300,000 live UK job vacancies, or £7 billion in salaries. The site pulls job ads in real-time from major job boards as well as Crunchboard and LinkedIn.

So far so obvious. The smart move is that an “Adzuna Connect” feature lets you connect your LinkedIn or Facebook accounts which shows contacts and links to current vacancies at the companies of your friends and contacts. So when the site displays job search results, it shows connections underneath each relevant ad along with links to message contacts about the jobs. Frankly I think this is a great feature. Often people in companies have no idea what jobs their firms are advertising.

Adzuna was founded by online veterans Andrew Hunter, mostly recently VP Marketing & UK GM of local review site Qype, and Doug Monro, who has left his post as COO of property portal Zoopla for Adzuna. The two met at – guess what – Gumtree, back in 2005. However, this UK focused heritage shines through – the site is a .co.uk and is not looking very much like a global play right now, though the Adzuna.com domain maps to the UK site.

Passion Capital (http://passioncapital.com) emerged in March in this year, lead by former Angels Stefan Glaenzer, Eileen Burbidge and Robert Dighero, with a £37.5 million ($60 million).