Keith Robinson, former commercial director of the totaljobs job board, has quit to pursue his own business interests.

Robinson has risen to become an influential figure in online recruitment and plans to focus on two new products, both in the online sector.

One is an online consultancy called E-Strategy Practice, which Robinson will run with e-business guru Alan Whitford.

The second project is a recruitment product scheduled for a US launch in September. He plans to launch it in the UK in the second quarter of next year.

Robinson has developed the product, currently in the later stages of production, with several former staff members from online recruitment firm Hotjobs.

The team will include Adam Margulies, who was formerly head of engineering for Hotjobs.com and helped sell the company to Yahoo in 2002.

Also on board are Simon Goddard, who was senior vice president for sales at Hotjobs.com, and Andrew Johnson, who helped launch the site in 1998.

Avid Crystal Palace fan Robinson, who claims he used to be a punk, said his split with totaljobs was amicable but that after five years, it no longer needed his “disruptive” personality to drive

it forward.

“The company went from requiring disruptive people to requiring corporate people.

People with disruptive personalities rarely make good corporate people,” he said.

As totaljobs became more profit able, parent company Reed Elsevier Group wanted to take more control of its day-to-day running, he said.

Michael Wall, sales director at Jobsite, used to work alongside Robinson at totaljobs five years ago.

“At the time, he was driven and his vision was to take the online recruitment message to the corporate markets,” said Wall. “He was instrumental in this, and the industry benefited from his work.”