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While last month's merger of travel sites Kayak.com and SideStep may have signaled consolidation in one area of the vertical search market, the job recruitment search sector is still very much developing. A new ₤100,000 ($198,000) angel round of funding for Britain's WorkDigital Ltd., intended to support the marketing of its Workhound.co.uk Web site, shows how nascent that market remains in the U.K.

WorkDigital director Bill Fischer wouldn't name any of the investors that participated in the round, but he says that company CEO and former NewsCorp executive Howard Lee relied on a network of existing contacts to launch Workhound. Fischer says the funding, which featured a "rolling close" received in installments over the past several months, is likely to precede a Series A round worth about ₤500,000.

Like rivals Indeed Inc. and Simply Hired Inc., Workhound trawls existing online job sites, company postings and similar sources to aggregate listings. Fischer says Workhound uses a mix of Google-like search, APIs, custom deals and affiliate relationships to compile its listings.

Fischer says WorkDigital's U.K.-centric strategy will aim for a fragmented space in which other aggregators have hung a shingle, but not yet garnered dominant market share. British apparel vendor Next Group plc is the company's largest customer, although job recruiting still occurs more offline than online in the U.K., Fischer adds.

Simply Hired has received nearly $18 million in three rounds since 2003, including seed investments from Silicon Valley luminaries such as Ron Conway, Rajeev Motwani, Kanwal Rekhi, and Guy Kawasaki, while Indeed is backed by The New York Times Co., Allen & Co. and Union Square Ventures. - Paul Bonanos

See Dec. 21 post from Tech Confidential
See January 2 press release from Work Digital
See April 2006 story from TheDeal.com
For more see TechCrunch UK, PaidContent:UK and Retail E-recruitment

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