A mixture of community sites, trade associations and some job boards have already downloaded Workhound's employment trends widget, launched last month, which allows a site to provide real-time data on trends in a particular industry or sector.

Bill Fischer, director at the the online job site, told Recruiter: "People love raw data, especially when they can receive it in real-time."

He explained: "It is an awareness exercise, but we also believe it will help drive more traffic to the Workhound site. We know that around a third of the 95% of people who are employed will look for a job in any given month, although not as intensely as those who are unemployed or seriously looking for a job. So it helps put us in front of those people."

Workhound gathers the data from millions of job listings and hundreds of career sites.

To run one of the graphs on your site, simply set the parameters of the chart you want, copy the piece of code that appears below it, and then paste it where you want it to appear on your site.

Current sectors for which the widget is being used include engineering, recruitment agency and banking, as well as general industry and social networking trends.

Earlier in the year, Workhound developed a salarytracking tool, which takes data from millions of current UK job postings — many existing surveys are based on historical data.

"People are appreciating this as a free service and we've had a lot of feedback from people benchmarking it against survey data. So far it benchmarks very nicely," said Fischer.

www.workhound.co.uk