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The founder of Internet recruiting company HotJobs.com, Ltd. Richard Johnson has resigned as chief executive officer to focus on building revenues from corporate clients.

Dimitri Boylan, who was chief operating officer, has been appointed acting CEO while the company looks for a replacement. Johnson is to remain chairman of the board of directors.

The announcement follows a steady decline in the share price of HotJobs, which slid by 44 percent in a week to close at $4.23 on Thursday. The price has been trading down 62 percent from the $11 - $12 range it was holding at during the last quarter of 2000.

During a conference call with reporters Friday morning, Johnson said he was comfortable turning the day-to-day operations over to Boylan, who has been with the company since 1998.

He said the main reason for the decision is so he can focus on new strategies, such as its separate business-to-business site called AgencyExchange which targets staffing agencies and corporate hiring managers.

When it was announced in mid-December, the site signaled a shift in strategy for the New York-based HotJobs, which has maintained a no-headhunter policy on its flagship Web site. AgencyExchange is positioned as a site linking headhunters with a database of job-seekers.

The exchange is expected to operate independently of the consumer-focused HotJobs.com to provide staffing agencies with access to tools that will allow them to create profiles on potential new hires. Company officials said staffing firms would pay a $700 per month membership fee to use the searchable directory on AgencyExchange.com.

With HotJobs' competitor Monster.com taking in an estimated 40 percent of its revenue from sales to staffing firms, the decision to go after B2B revenues makes sense for HotJobs. During prior interviews about AgencyExchange, a company official projected revenues in the $80 million range from the new initiative.

Currently, headhunters and staffing agencies are not allowed to post jobs on the consumer-focused HotJobs.com site and are not able to search the resume database. The new division would give them their own database to do that and more while creating a new, more stable revenue stream for HotJobs.