FRIENDS REUNITED ACQUIRES ONLINE RECRUITMENT SITE TOP DOG JOBS
Friends Reunited, famed for reuniting millions of old school friends, has acquired online jobsboard Top Dog Jobs, to offer its 12 million members a free and easy to use job search facility.
The new recruitment site, to be called Friends Reunited Jobs, is due to launch in April and will allow candidates to sort vacancies by category, location and wage for free, while offering companies a great value service for posting jobs and searching candidates. From day one there will be over 200,000 CVs and 30,000 jobs on the site, with an established employer base offering a broad range of jobs from across the UK .
Michael Murphy, chief executive of Friends Reunited, says: “All of our services are about searching for people in one form or another. Friends Reunited may have started out reuniting old school friends, but it has quickly grown to include reuniting old work mates. There are already over three million people using this service, registered across 480,000 different workplaces and we found employers were using our listings to find candidates, so it made sense to offer the service ourselves.”
Mark Gaisford, co-founder of Top Dog Jobs and now director of Friends Reunited Jobs, says: “ The online recruitment business is currently growing at a phenomenal pace of around 40% per annum. While the company outstripped this industry growth rate throughout 2004, it recognised that the ultimate winners were going to be the companies with the largest number of potential jobseekers.
“Friends Reunited, with its strong and trusted brand, offers this opportunity through its 12 million user network, equivalent to 43% of the UK adult internet population. Allied with Top Dog’s technology with its candidate matching facility ensuring employers get the right applicants for the right job and expertise in the market, we hope to build a very successful jobsboard.”
The online recruitment market is burgeoning with revenue forecast to grow 85% from 2004 to £183 million by 2009. Currently, less than one in three people with internet access use online recruitment sites when looking for job information, so there is plenty of untapped potential*.
Murphy says: “Before Friends Reunited came along finding an old friend was like finding a needle in a haystack and now the site makes the search quick and easy. We want to do the same with the recruitment market.
“Moving job is a big deal and what we hope is simply to make finding the right vacancy or candidate the really easy bit, just like we have for finding old friends, finding relatives and finding romance.”
The launch of Friends Reunited Jobs, follows successful brand extensions Genes Reunited - now the UK’s largest ancestry site with 2.4 million members and 29 million names listed - and Friends Reunited Dating - the UK’s fifth largest dating site with over 300,000 active members - enabling members to connect to their past, present and future all under one umbrella brand.
NOTES TO THE EDITOR
About Friends Reunited
Founded by North London based husband and wife team Steve and Julie Pankhurst and their business partner Jason Porter, Friends Reunited was launched in July 2000 so that people could get in contact with their old school friends. A combination of word of mouth and immense media attention has propelled the site to phenomenon status, expanding beyond the school friends proposition to include workplaces, teams/clubs and streets. The site has over 12 million members, representing 43% of the adult internet population in the UK .
To help take the company to the next stage in its development, in February 2003 the trio opted for a management buy-in. Headed by Michael Murphy (former COO of Financial Times), the new management team has successfully retained the core ethos – no customer exploitation - at the same time as implementing the good business practice necessary to ensure structured yet rapid growth.
Other brand extensions
Building on the enormous success of the parent site, brand extensions Genes Reunited and Friends Reunited Dating are both winning formulas in their own areas and provide a real benefit to members, enabling them to connect to their past, present and future.
Genes Reunited : In just 20 months has become the UK ’s largest genealogy site with 2.4 million members and 29 million names listed
Friends Reunited Dating: Fastest growing dating site in the UK and already the 5 th largest, with over 300,000 active members
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