Recruitment is the "best space" to be in if you are an internet-driven advertising business, said the director of online job source Workhound. Bill Fischer told Recruiter that the UK has been slow to shift money from offline to online but believes this will change in 2008.

"Search marketing in the UK represents 57% of all online advertising, and almost a quarter of this is recruitment advertising," he said. "No site has a double digit share — it's a wide open market, but we will likely see an acceleration of it this year."

Workhound has just completed its initial round of funding from private investors and features more than 800,000 job listings from UK job boards, agencies and employers. It offers filtering tools to enable job seekers to target their searches and will shortly launch a salary tracker tool, which aggregates salary data from the current job postings.

With major US job search engine sites Simply Hired and Indeed having launched in the UK last year, and sites such as Jobisjob.co.uk boasting around 1.5m job offers, there is no shortage of channels for posting job ads.

Volume of jobs on offer may not be everything, and search engines must find a way of marking themselves out. Simon Appleton, chief executive of jobs search engine Workcircle, told Recruiter: "The value of a job search engine is in reducing the number of sites a candidate needs to follow and, for advertisers, in sending through a good quantity of highly targeted candidates."

www.workhound.co.uk

www.workcircle.com