Launched in 2004, Indeed has grown to 80 million unique visitors per month and has been profitable since 2007. Revenues over the last three years have nearly doubled as the company moved past Monster to become the largest job site in the US in 2010.

Now the company will look to continue its strong growth overseas, which already accounts for half of Indeed’s traffic. It is currently the top job site in the US, Canada, the UK and France, and is number one in job searches worldwide.

Indeed raised $5 million in 2005 from Union Square Ventures, the New York Times and Allen & Company though, as USV’s Fred Wilson wrote, the company at that time didn’t need the money. That has been the only funding to date.

Although the details of the deal were not announced, Business Insider says a source close to the company pegged its value at  $750 million to $1 billion. It’s unclear if that’s true but the New York Times today disclosed that it made $100 million from its investment in Indeed.

Co-founders Rony Kahan and Paul Forster have operated under the radar and have largely bootstrapped themselves. Indeed helped validate the idea of a search advertising-based job service, which differed from other recruiting sites where users paid to list open jobs. It now has more than 25,000 advertisers in its pay-per-click recruitment ad network. The company also has 5,000 employer clients and 550 employees based in Austin, Dublin, London, Mountain View, New York and Stamford.

With the acquisition, Recruit Co. is hoping to be the dominant HR and recruitment services in the world. The private company already does $10 billion in revenue but most of it in Japan. It’s looking at an IPO to fund more acquisitions.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

“In some ways, the value of information and the job search process is lower in a hot jobs market,” says co-founder Doug Monro, who was previously COO at property search site Zoopla and classified outlet Gumtree, which is owned by eBay. When things are tight, users are more desperate for jobs — so we have to be really fast, and providing them with a good user experience is really important.”

To get potential candidates into positions, the site’s taken its cues from other comparison websites and rivals such as Indeed.com. Instead of bringing in listings itself, Adzuna simply aggregates job ads from across many of the major services, as well as including items from small, industry-specific boards and sites. This means it can provide a single point of contact covering wide swaths of the market — saving job hunters time they’d spend sweeping across what is, actually, a surprisingly fragmented market.

In fact, Adzuna’s engine is so broad that on launch, it claims to have more than 300,000 jobs listed all around Britain: enough vacancies to swing the country’s unemployment rate by almost an entire percentage point.

The site itself is actually pretty straightforward. You can easily refine your search by region, postal code, salary, industry, company, or contract type (I did a search for “manager” in my local area and got 720 listings back). It also adds a neat social element by letting users connect through Facebook or LinkedIn — and then showing them open jobs at the companies their friends and contacts work at. The idea, presumably, is to let them get the inside scoop on positions. Now, perhaps that’s not the most meritocratic way of doing things, but handy when it comes down to who you know rather than what you know.

So how does that compare to a social jobs search like Top Prospect and Branchout, which offer referrals and listings based on who your friends are? Monro suggests they are “doing it the wrong way around” by concentrating on niche markets first. In terms of mainstream adoption, he says, “they’re going to really struggle to get an abundance of listings”.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that he thinks this way: after all, Monro and his co-founder Andrew Hunter have a rich history in the local classified industry — they met at Gumtree and Hunter count the Yelp-like Qype in his background. But even with such experience, there’s no doubt that they will face significant competition. There are a wide range of well-established companies like TotalJobs and fish4jobs in the U.K., as well as the local arms of international giants like Monster.

“I don’t see the likes of Monster and TotalJobs as competition, they’re a consumer alternative, but really we see them as clients,” says Monro. He says data is provided to Adzuna either by dedicated feeds or by spidering job sites, but that ultimately this is good news for job listings sites as it simply helps them get more exposure. “For them, we drive traffic to their listings — we’re an alternative to Google. We’re not misappropriating any data.”

But competition in the jobs market seems to be the least of the site’s worries. In the long-term Adzuna, which is backed by a £300,000 ($478,000) seed round from new London-based fund Passion Capital, has broad ambitions. It doesn’t want to just stay in one sector, but intends to expand into other areas such as property search, car buying and so on. That’s going to expose it to a great deal of rivalry — some of it even more voracious than job listings. Is there really anything left to win in this classified battle? Monro thinks so.

“Other verticals are less fragmented than jobs, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t chances to expand,” he says. “There are a lot of parallels in search technology across different sorts of classifieds — you’ve got a listing, an owner, a price, a similar structure.”

As a result, the company is hoping to expand aggressively: new verticals could be in play by the end of the year, with a move into new territory to follow.

“We’re definitely looking at this as an international opportunity,” says Monro.

Photograph used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user BethCanPhoto

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• How consumer media will change in 2013
• Social third-quarter 2012: analysis and outlook
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated

The pervading approach to launching a startup is to do it quickly, iterate constantly and make as much noise as possible throughout the process. It’s not a bad way of doing things, and given the lower cost of startup operations, and the nature of consumer web startups in particular, and it’s completely doable. But be careful if you’re not a data hog.

Getting your startup launched as quickly as possible is fine – but you should also spend a good chunk of time preparing to collect data. [Why? Because data is something you can leverage to make money, Ben explains below. ] This means building the necessary infrastructure into your system to collect, review and analyze the data generated by users, right from the start.

What Data Should You Collect?

Anything and everything. Collect as much as you possibly can, even if you’re not sure of its value upfront. Data has a sneaky way of revealing things over time – things you might not have thought of immediately. Data has a way of helping you figure out what questions to ask, because it exposes trends, and allows you to look at things with different perspectives.

Ask Basic Questions to Start

Start by asking yourself some basic questions on how you expect your application (or hope your application) will be used. There are some fairly common questions and data points that will be of value regardless of what type of application you’re building (be it B2B, B2C, etc.) For example:

* how often do people log in?

* how long do they use the system?

* what features are people using?

* when are people using the system?

* where are the users located geographically?

If you’re out of the gate with a business model and charging customers, there are a whole bunch of additional questions you can ask:

* how many people are paying?

* what are they paying for?

* what payment plan are they using (if you offer monthly, yearly, etc.)?

* how much are they spending?

Questions Beget Questions

As you start to ask questions and answer them with the data you’re collecting, it will lead to more questions. Getting into an analytical mindset of evaluating trends through data will help you uncover all sorts of interesting things. Here’s a good example from Standout Jobs…

We currently distribute job postings to a variety of job boards and job aggregators, including SimplyHired and Indeed. We also sponsor jobs on both SimplyHired and Indeed (through a pay per click model) to see how well those jobs perform in terms of generating clickthroughs and applications. And we want to compare the two of them.

A few simple questions we ask include:

* how many clickthroughs are generated from these job aggregator sites?

* how many applications are generated?

* how much is it costing us per click and per application?

What’s interesting is that we notice a higher clickthrough and application rate for new jobs that get submitted through our feeds into SimplyHired and Indeed. That makes sense, of course, because people are always looking for the freshest jobs. So that leads to the next question, “How many clickthroughs and applications do we receive for jobs over time?”

This is interesting because it can affect how we spend money on sponsoring jobs. If we see that a job receives almost no applications after it’s been in an aggregator for 2 weeks, why bother paying for it show up anymore? So that leads us to think about optimizing our spending based on the age of jobs…

That leads to a whole bunch of other questions, all of which are answered through the data we collect.

Why Data = Money

1. The data itself can be valuable. People will pay for data if it helps them answer questions they need resolved. It’s really as simple as that. And entire businesses have been built on collecting data and reselling it, or selling the knowledge gained from the data.

2. The data can optimize your business. You can use the knowledge gained from data to become more efficient and innovate, which will save you money. And saving money means making money.

3. The data can lead to new business opportunities. Simply understanding what parts of your product people use can help you find ways of staying focused and making more money from it.

4. The data can drive product development. You may even discover new products worth building based on the data you’re collecting.

5. The data can drive sales. For example, we track “last login” for customers that haven’t yet published their career web sites. When we see a prospect that’s recently logged in, we get in touch to see how things are going, and very often can convert them on the spot.

6. The data can improve customer support. Fixing bugs is always frustrating when you don’t really know what a user was doing. And as much as you’d like them to tell you, they can’t always do a good job of it. If the data can help you figure out how somebody was doing something when they ran into trouble, you’ll be able to fix it faster. That’ll make your customer happy. Happy customers spend more money.

Ben’s BOTTOM LINE …

Startups need to collect data. Incidentally, VCs love data. They understand the value behind it, and how entire businesses can be discovered, created and evolved off of collecting lots and lots of data.

Data Doesn’t Always Tell You Why

Data can tell you a lot of things, but it doesn’t always answer the question “why?” Answering “why” typically requires more analysis of what’s going on, a deeper understanding of user behaviors, some guesswork and investigation. Don’t be afraid to go to your customers and ask them “why” — often they’ll be happy to tell you. And then you can correlate user answers to what you see in the data, and make the best decisions from there.

Ben Yoskovitz is the founder of Standout Jobs, based in Montreal, Quebec Canada. Earlier Found|READ posts by or about Ben include: Presenting at DEMO: 12 Do’s. 5 Don’ts; DEMO Went Great, Then “All Hell” Broke Loose; and 5 Tips for Maintaining Vision in the Day-to-Day. For even more, visit Ben’s terrific Instigator Blog.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected consumer first-quarter 2013: Analysis and outlook
• Readers weigh in: future prospects for Twitter
• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem