Friends Reunited, famed for reuniting old school friends, wants to become one of the top five UK recruiters by 2009 after acquiring online job-board Top Dog Jobs.

The new recruitment site, to be called Friends Reunited Jobs, will launch in April and aims to have over 200,000 CVs and 30,000 jobs on the site.

Michael Murphy, chief executive of Friends Reunited, said: “We found employers were using our listings to find candidates, so it made sense to offer the service ourselves. 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 recruitment.”

Murphy predicts the market will grow 85% by the end of the decade. The firm hopes to grow to 500,000 CVs and have at least 80,000 jobs on the site by April 2006.

Mark Gaisford, co-founder of Top Dog Jobs and now director of Friends Reunited Jobs, claimed: “Friends Reunited’s user network is equivalent to 43% of the UK adult internet population.” The website currently has over 12m members.