Joe Slavin, formerly the managing director of Monster in the UK has switched allegiances to become chief executive of rival online firm, fish4.

Fish4 is owned by four of the UK’s largest newspaper groups, Trinity Mirror, Newsquest, Northcliffe and Guardian Media Group.

Fish4jobs, its recruitment site, claims to be one of the largest in the UK, with 1.3m unique users according to figures collected in a NORAS survey in 2004.

It combines job adverts from newspapers owned by the four owners to produce a searchable national job database. Fish4 also owns fish4homes and fish4cars, which operate in a similar way.

Slavin said: “This is an exciting time to be involved in the classified advertising industry, which is changing at an extraordinary place.

“I’m looking forward to building on the success of fish4 and adding even greater impetus to its development.”