Workcircle, a UK-based search engine for jobs, is enabling recruiters to target passive candidates by putting their job advertisements within specialist blogs and websites.

It works by the site owner or blogger embedding a piece of code, referred to as a 'widget', which then pulls relevant jobs from the Workcircle database to their site.

"The people visiting the site or blog won't be looking for a job but [if they're sales people, for instance] they may be in the mode of searching for sales tips or information about their jobs and the ads could catch their eye," said Workcircle managing director Simon Appleton. "In the job board world, you get a lot of candidates you've already heard of. What I believe this will do is reach candidates that aren't already in that space."

An early adopter of the widget is Bill Thompson, the journalist and technology critic behind thebillblog.com, which when Recruiter visited was already displaying five media and creative job vacancies. In theory, it could make bloggers such as Thompson a new breed of highly specialist job site.

Because Workcircle is a pay-per-click search engine, those who drive traffic back to its database will also earn money.

"I've always liked the flexibility that widgets offer to web publishers, and think that job ads are something that my readership might be interested in," said Thompson. "Perhaps the best thing about it is that it just works — I use Wordpress and have the sidebar widgets plug-in, so it took a whole 30 seconds to get it up and running."

http://affiliate.workcircle.com