Adzuna Brand Guidelines: A 2011 London Job Search Engine, Trovit, Mitula & Joblift

A search engine for job adverts, launched in 2011.

Adzuna was founded in 2011 by Andrew Hunter and Doug Monro, English Wikipedia says. Both came from online classifieds: Hunter had run marketing at Gumtree and at the review site Qype, and Monro had been managing director of Gumtree and chief operating officer of the property portal Zoopla. The company behind the site, Adzuna Limited, was incorporated in England in July 2010 and is registered in London, Companies House records show.

The service went live as a beta in April 2011, backed by Passion Capital and private investors, and had its public press launch in July 2011, according to English Wikipedia. Index Ventures and The Accelerator Group joined in January 2012 to help it move into more countries and categories, and in July 2015 Adzuna raised money from more than 500 people through the crowdfunding platform Crowdcube; a Series C round from Smedvig Capital followed in May 2018, the same account says.

The model was set early. Adzuna does not sell job adverts as a classic job board does; it is a search engine that gathers vacancies from large job boards, specialist portals and employers’ own websites into a single database, English Wikipedia says, and lets jobseekers search them in one place. In January 2014 Fairfax Media announced a joint venture with Adzuna in Australia, aimed at the market led there by SEEK, English Wikipedia adds.

Search, data and AI tools.

Because it sees so many adverts, Adzuna has become a source of labour-market data as well as a search site. The Office for National Statistics publishes experimental weekly indices of online job adverts built from adverts supplied by Adzuna, its methodology note says, with several million advert entries running back to February 2018, broken down by job category and by region; the note was last revised in June 2021. The statisticians remove duplicate adverts before building the indices and compare the results with their own vacancy survey, the note explains. Adzuna also publishes its own monthly figures, and in August 2026 The Guardian reported its count of UK graduate vacancies, a series the company says it has gathered since 2016, with comments from co-founder Andrew Hunter.

Around the search box the company has added tools for jobseekers. English Wikipedia lists a relaunched ValueMyCV in September 2017, an AI interview practice tool called Prepper in June 2023 in the US and UK, and ApplyIQ, an AI job-search agent, in April 2025 in the same two markets.

It has also grown by buying smaller sites. In October 2018 Adzuna bought Work In Startups, a UK job board for start-up hiring launched in 2011 by Diana Ilinca and Alex Borbely to help young companies find tech and creative staff without going through recruiters, TechCrunch reported, and said it would keep running the site as an independent brand with free job posting; Hunter told the magazine that a focused niche site can serve some jobseekers and employers more closely than a general search, and that he wanted to make hiring easier and cheaper for UK start-ups. English Wikipedia records the purchase of the job search engine Getwork in June 2022.

Job boards and recruitment platforms.

For a designer, a job board is mostly a search box and a list: a field for the job, a field for the place and a button, followed by a column of job cards giving the title, the employer, the location and the date. Where that pattern is shared, the brand has to work in the small places: the wordmark at the top of the page, the colour of the button, the app icon on a phone and the tone of the alerts that arrive by email.

The names do a lot of the work. Many are plain words or short compounds that say what the site is for, and some companies build their advertising directly on the name: SEEK, for example, has long used the line “SEEK and you shall find,” according to the trade title Campaign Brief. Others keep separate names market by market: SEEK’s group runs Jobstreet and Jobsdb sites in Asia alongside SEEK itself, according to its own website.

The second audience is the employer. Job sites sell advertising, résumé search and matching tools to hirers, and their corporate pages speak to recruiters as much as to candidates, with products for job posting, candidate search and employer branding presented next to the public job search.

Ownership is part of the story too. Many of these brands belong to larger groups, and their corporate pages list the countries and sites they run: SEEK’s about page names marketplaces in eight countries, and after the 2025 sale of CareerBuilder + Monster, the new owner BOLD listed CareerBuilder and Monster among its brands, HR Dive reported. This guide sets out who founded each brand, who owns it now and what has changed hands, and treats colours and type as an unofficial interpretation rather than an official specification.

Buying other search engines’ jobs traffic.

The pace of deals rose in 2026. In March Adzuna bought the jobs businesses of Trovit and Mitula, two classified-ads search engines run by the Lifull Connect group, Tech.eu reported on 23 March 2026. Trovit and Mitula were founded in 2006 and operate in more than 50 countries across jobs, property and cars, the report said; only their jobs sections changed hands, and the deal strengthened Adzuna in markets including Spain and Italy. Tech.eu described it as Adzuna’s third acquisition in four years, and quoted Doug Monro, chief executive and co-founder, as saying the purchase would let Adzuna reach millions more jobseekers in Europe, the US, Asia and Latin America with its AI search tools. For users of Trovit Jobs and Mitula Jobs the deal was presented as continuity with a new search engine behind it, and a Lifull Connect manager said those users would gain from Adzuna’s technology and recruitment experience, Tech.eu reported.

In July 2026 Adzuna took over Joblift, an insolvent job search engine from Hamburg founded in 2015, deutsche-startups.de reported on 17 July 2026. Joblift’s search engine continues in Germany under its own name, using Adzuna’s technology, while its international activities are folded into Adzuna and its sales and customer-success staff join the wider Adzuna organisation, the report said. Joblift had earlier been backed by investors including DN Capital and Cherry Ventures, according to the same report.

Adzuna Limited remains a privately held London company, Companies House records show. In the 2026 reports Doug Monro speaks for it as chief executive and Andrew Hunter as co-founder, so the two founders are still the public faces of the business fifteen years after the beta launch, and the brand still rests on the promise of one search across many sources.

For a design guide, Adzuna shows how a search-led brand can stay plain while it absorbs other sites and keeps some of their names. Compare Totaljobs and Reed, two other London jobs sites. For this guide we use a deep plum, an ink plum and a warm coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Adzuna’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.