FRIENDS REUNITED, the website that brings old school chums back together, now plans to unite employers with staff. It is acquiring an online recruitment site, which it will rebrand under the Friends Reunited banner.

Michael Murphy, chief executive of Friends Reunited, will this week announce the purchase of Topdogjob.com, one of the top 30 online recruitment firms in Britain, for up to £2m. The site will be rebranded as FriendsReunitedJobs.co.uk.

Brothers Mark and Steve Gaisford, Topdogjobs’ co-founders, will stay on and continue to run the firm under the new structure. The site will be relaunched at the end of this month with more than 30,000 jobs advertised and 200,000 candidates’ CVs.

The deal is part of Murphy’s attempt to diversify the Friends Reunited brand away from the core site. He has already added Genes Reunited, a genealogy service that allows people to trace their family trees, and has launched an online dating service that has become the fifth most popular dating website in the UK.

Murphy said the move into recruitment fitted the Friends Reunited strategy. “We’ve developed a very simple, easy-to-use website all about people finding people in one form or another.

“This acquisition propels us into the league in a fairly big way. This is potentially a huge market. About one-third of people who are online and actively looking for a job use an online recruitment site.”

Murphy said he expected the jobs site to become one of the top five in its market within the next 12 months.

The purchase of Topdogjob is Friends Reunited’s second acquisition. Last June, The Sunday Times revealed that the company had bought its Australian rival Schoolfriends.com. The success of that deal has given Murphy and his team the confidence to buy an online recruiter.

The group has certainly delivered financially. Last year, it made profits of a little over £5m on revenues of £9m.

Friends Reunited has turned into a cultural phenomenon since it was launched by Steve and Julie Pankhurst and their friend Jason Porter in July 2000. The original service continues to grow at a rate of about 5,000 registrations per day and has more than 12m members.

Murphy, formerly chief operating officer at the Financial Times, led a management buy-in of the business in February 2003.