Jacksonville emerges as hidden hub for global HR tech industry (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Jacksonville’s long reputation as a back-office city is getting a high-tech rewrite.
The same city that once processed paychecks and staffing forms for Fortune 500 clients now builds the software that runs those very systems. Over decades, a deep bench of HR-technology pioneers — from the legacy of MPS Group and Adecco to innovators like Beeline — has turned Jacksonville into an unseen command center of the global human-capital industry, even if few locals realize it.
The global human capital management and payroll market was valued at $7.83 billion last year and is expected to reach $33.12 billion by 2033, according to Business Research Insights in September.
A stealth global leader in HR technology, the hidden engine built here now quietly decides how the world’s biggest companies — from Meta to JP Morgan Chase — source talent, pay workers and track billions in contracts.
In a city often overshadowed by financial technology giants like FIS and Black Knight, the HR sector remains a hidden gem that industry insiders tell the Business Journal influences the world, though rarely acknowledged locally and discounted.
The origins
Jacksonville’s HR industry began quietly but significantly in the late 20th century — its roots tracing back to Delores Kesler, who founded ATS Staffing in 1977. This foundational company later became AccuStaff. Then, through a multi-company merger, MPS Group emerged in 1992.
Within that group was Modis, the IT arm of the staffing company MPS Group, headquartered within the Independent Life Building. For nearly a decade in the early 2000s, Modis’ logo sat atop the glass-paneled building, a staple of Jacksonville’s skyline representing the local HR empire.
“We used to call it the 35-story billboard,” said Pete Cochrane, a practice director for global human resources consulting firm Robert Half. “That’s what it was.”
Toward the latter half of its residency among Jacksonville’s skyscrapers, MPS Group was acquired by the Adecco Group — a global talent and staffing company based from Zürich, Switzerland — in 2010.
It was an approximately $1.3 billion deal that settled Adecco’s North American headquarters locally and truly established Jacksonville’s role as a global HR hub.
Employing more than 10,000 people across the world, including several hundred in Jacksonville, Adecco was founded in 1996, according to Crunchbase, an online database tracking investments and financing and of private tech-based companies.
Its worldwide revenue is between $1 billion and $10 billion, per Crunchbase. The group completed a Series A funding round with TalentToday in 2017 and a successful venture funding round with Path.to in 2012 valued at a collective $5 million.
Adecco’s North American headquarters still operates from Jacksonville’s Southside, said Tyra Tutor, the company’s former head of corporate development who’s been with the group since 1997.
“I think it’s an easy argument that (Jacksonville) is influencing HR tech around the world,” she said.
Innovation
The Adecco Group itself is a staffing firm, not HR technology. But before Adecco acquired MPS Group, it created Beeline VMS in 1999. Spun out into its own standalone company shortly after, Beeline is an anchor institution in the world’s HR-technology cluster, all based from Jacksonville.
Now separate entities, Adecco uses practically every candidate-search vendor under the sun, according to Tutor, from Beeline to LinkedIn to Indeed and beyond.
Beeline’s emergence as a vendor management system was a direct response to the inefficiencies exposed during the Y2K hiring surge.
That period was basically a multi-million-dollar mad dash by U.S. companies to hire technology-trained employees to prevent potential problems when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.
“All these organizations were freaked out by Y2K … so they hired a lot of temporary workers to come in and provide help, but they were at the mercy of the staffing firm, so they paid a lot of money,” Beeline CEO Doug Leeby said. “So when Y2K ended, and there was a big nothing, there was a fair amount of backlash from enterprises in the corporation saying ‘gosh, we just paid $200 bucks an hour for this resource, it was $100 an hour a year ago.’”
That’s when Beeline entered the fray, a vendor management software to manage non-employees: the independent contractors, consultants and freelancers of the world.
It was a turning point for the industry.
These vendor management systems, abbreviated to VMS, leveled the playing field by going and finding people in a specific geography for a specific position, “then best men or women win,” Leeby said.
Beeline won major clients like JP Morgan and Merill Lynch early, Leeby said.
Its client list today includes some of the world’s biggest companies: Meta, Southwest Airlines, Mastercard, The Home Depot, LinkedIn and FIS, according to Cochrane, who uses Beeline’s software.
“The genesis started here in Jacksonville — the global footprint,” Leeby said. “We’ve never been contacted by the mayor’s office or anybody to say, ‘Wow, from an attraction perspective, would you speak on behalf of Jacksonville?’ I’d be happy to do that.”
Backed by private equity firms Stone Point Capital and New Mountain Capital, Beeline today operates in more than 80 countries worldwide that puts millions of people to work. It makes an estimated revenue between $10 million and $50 million, according to Crunchbase. Despite roots extending across the globe, Jacksonville’s influence on the HR industry goes largely unnoticed by its residents, even when billions of dollars change hands.
“We were one of them — several billion dollars,” Leeby said. “Not even mentioned.”
Operating undercover
Despite housing the North American headquarters of the Adecco Group, (recognized as one of the world’s largest staffing firms) and being the birthplace of Beeline, Jacksonville rarely makes headlines for its HR influence.
“There’s a lot happening in Jacksonville from a human capital management perspective,” Leeby said. “But, look, I don’t think Jacksonville is perceived at wide scale to be a sexy tech hub.”
Plenty of people scoff at the premise that Jacksonville is a rising technology hub, and the HR sector doesn’t even glimmer in their minds. This lack of visibility is a missed opportunity in the eyes of industry leaders, especially as the HR tech sector continues to evolve.
Jacksonville’s infrastructure and legacy position it as a natural leader in this space. But that strength is found not just in its companies but its people.
The city’s network of experts is deep and globally connected.
“There’s a lot of people that are still here too that are involved with HR tech on a global scale but they happen to live here,” Cochrane said. “The ‘80s and ‘90s, that’s when it all was building up, but then we never really left; we just stayed here.”
Many of the industry’s pioneers still live and work in Jacksonville, offering a rare opportunity for startups and innovators to tap into decades of expertise. Those minds reside within effectively a 50-mile radius, according to Cochrane, making a well-saturated ecosystem to fuel the creation of new companies in the sector.
“If I were a betting person,” Cochrane said, “I would get a flight to come to Jacksonville … and say, ‘Hey, I’m building this. Can you help me validate it?’”
Industry leaders aside, literal technology talent — a pearl, to Leeby — is bred in Jacksonville and leveraged by some of the world’s biggest names that fly completely under the radar locally.
“We’ve got $65 billion streaming through our software every year, we have some of the world’s biggest names like Microsoft and Meta, people just wouldn’t even know that,” Leeby said. “(Jacksonville’s) a great place to start a company, it’s a great place to raise a family … and it’s one of the best kept secrets that I’m happy to keep a secret.”
For a city long branded by its back offices, that secret may be Jacksonville’s most powerful calling card yet.
Jacksonville’s long reputation as a back-office city is getting a high-tech rewrite.
The same city that once processed paychecks and staffing forms for Fortune 500 clients now builds the software that runs those very systems. Over decades, a deep bench of HR-technology pioneers — from the legacy of MPS Group and Adecco to innovators like Beeline — has turned Jacksonville into an unseen command center of the global human-capital industry, even if few locals realize it.
The global human capital management and payroll market was valued at $7.83 billion last year and is expected to reach $33.12 billion by 2033, according to Business Research Insights in September.
A stealth global leader in HR technology, the hidden engine built here now quietly decides how the world’s biggest companies — from Meta to JP Morgan Chase — source talent, pay workers and track billions in contracts.
In a city often overshadowed by financial technology giants like FIS and Black Knight, the HR sector remains a hidden gem that industry insiders tell the Business Journal influences the world, though rarely acknowledged locally and discounted.
The origins
Jacksonville’s HR industry began quietly but significantly in the late 20th century — its roots tracing back to Delores Kesler, who founded ATS Staffing in 1977. This foundational company later became AccuStaff. Then, through a multi-company merger, MPS Group emerged in 1992.
Within that group was Modis, the IT arm of the staffing company MPS Group, headquartered within the Independent Life Building. For nearly a decade in the early 2000s, Modis’ logo sat atop the glass-paneled building, a staple of Jacksonville’s skyline representing the local HR empire.
“We used to call it the 35-story billboard,” said Pete Cochrane, a practice director for global human resources consulting firm Robert Half. “That’s what it was.”
Toward the latter half of its residency among Jacksonville’s skyscrapers, MPS Group was acquired by the Adecco Group — a global talent and staffing company based from Zürich, Switzerland — in 2010.
It was an approximately $1.3 billion deal that settled Adecco’s North American headquarters locally and truly established Jacksonville’s role as a global HR hub.
Employing more than 10,000 people across the world, including several hundred in Jacksonville, Adecco was founded in 1996, according to Crunchbase, an online database tracking investments and financing and of private tech-based companies.
Its worldwide revenue is between $1 billion and $10 billion, per Crunchbase. The group completed a Series A funding round with TalentToday in 2017 and a successful venture funding round with Path.to in 2012 valued at a collective $5 million.
Adecco’s North American headquarters still operates from Jacksonville’s Southside, said Tyra Tutor, the company’s former head of corporate development who’s been with the group since 1997.
“I think it’s an easy argument that (Jacksonville) is influencing HR tech around the world,” she said.
Innovation
The Adecco Group itself is a staffing firm, not HR technology. But before Adecco acquired MPS Group, it created Beeline VMS in 1999. Spun out into its own standalone company shortly after, Beeline is an anchor institution in the world’s HR-technology cluster, all based from Jacksonville.
Now separate entities, Adecco uses practically every candidate-search vendor under the sun, according to Tutor, from Beeline to LinkedIn to Indeed and beyond.
Beeline’s emergence as a vendor management system was a direct response to the inefficiencies exposed during the Y2K hiring surge.
That period was basically a multi-million-dollar mad dash by U.S. companies to hire technology-trained employees to prevent potential problems when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.
“All these organizations were freaked out by Y2K … so they hired a lot of temporary workers to come in and provide help, but they were at the mercy of the staffing firm, so they paid a lot of money,” Beeline CEO Doug Leeby said. “So when Y2K ended, and there was a big nothing, there was a fair amount of backlash from enterprises in the corporation saying ‘gosh, we just paid $200 bucks an hour for this resource, it was $100 an hour a year ago.’”
That’s when Beeline entered the fray, a vendor management software to manage non-employees: the independent contractors, consultants and freelancers of the world.
It was a turning point for the industry.
These vendor management systems, abbreviated to VMS, leveled the playing field by going and finding people in a specific geography for a specific position, “then best men or women win,” Leeby said.
Beeline won major clients like JP Morgan and Merill Lynch early, Leeby said.
Its client list today includes some of the world’s biggest companies: Meta, Southwest Airlines, Mastercard, The Home Depot, LinkedIn and FIS, according to Cochrane, who uses Beeline’s software.
“The genesis started here in Jacksonville — the global footprint,” Leeby said. “We’ve never been contacted by the mayor’s office or anybody to say, ‘Wow, from an attraction perspective, would you speak on behalf of Jacksonville?’ I’d be happy to do that.”
Backed by private equity firms Stone Point Capital and New Mountain Capital, Beeline today operates in more than 80 countries worldwide that puts millions of people to work. It makes an estimated revenue between $10 million and $50 million, according to Crunchbase. Despite roots extending across the globe, Jacksonville’s influence on the HR industry goes largely unnoticed by its residents, even when billions of dollars change hands.
“We were one of them — several billion dollars,” Leeby said. “Not even mentioned.”
Operating undercover
Despite housing the North American headquarters of the Adecco Group, (recognized as one of the world’s largest staffing firms) and being the birthplace of Beeline, Jacksonville rarely makes headlines for its HR influence.
“There’s a lot happening in Jacksonville from a human capital management perspective,” Leeby said. “But, look, I don’t think Jacksonville is perceived at wide scale to be a sexy tech hub.”
Plenty of people scoff at the premise that Jacksonville is a rising technology hub, and the HR sector doesn’t even glimmer in their minds. This lack of visibility is a missed opportunity in the eyes of industry leaders, especially as the HR tech sector continues to evolve.
Jacksonville’s infrastructure and legacy position it as a natural leader in this space. But that strength is found not just in its companies but its people.
The city’s network of experts is deep and globally connected.
“There’s a lot of people that are still here too that are involved with HR tech on a global scale but they happen to live here,” Cochrane said. “The ‘80s and ‘90s, that’s when it all was building up, but then we never really left; we just stayed here.”
Many of the industry’s pioneers still live and work in Jacksonville, offering a rare opportunity for startups and innovators to tap into decades of expertise. Those minds reside within effectively a 50-mile radius, according to Cochrane, making a well-saturated ecosystem to fuel the creation of new companies in the sector.
“If I were a betting person,” Cochrane said, “I would get a flight to come to Jacksonville … and say, ‘Hey, I’m building this. Can you help me validate it?’”
Industry leaders aside, literal technology talent — a pearl, to Leeby — is bred in Jacksonville and leveraged by some of the world’s biggest names that fly completely under the radar locally.
“We’ve got $65 billion streaming through our software every year, we have some of the world’s biggest names like Microsoft and Meta, people just wouldn’t even know that,” Leeby said. “(Jacksonville’s) a great place to start a company, it’s a great place to raise a family … and it’s one of the best kept secrets that I’m happy to keep a secret.”
Jacksonville’s long reputation as a back-office city is getting a high-tech rewrite.
The same city that once processed paychecks and staffing forms for Fortune 500 clients now builds the software that runs those very systems. Over decades, a deep bench of HR-technology pioneers — from the legacy of MPS Group and Adecco to innovators like Beeline — has turned Jacksonville into an unseen command center of the global human-capital industry, even if few locals realize it.
The global human capital management and payroll market was valued at $7.83 billion last year and is expected to reach $33.12 billion by 2033, according to Business Research Insights in September.
A stealth global leader in HR technology, the hidden engine built here now quietly decides how the world’s biggest companies — from Meta to JP Morgan Chase — source talent, pay workers and track billions in contracts.
In a city often overshadowed by financial technology giants like FIS and Black Knight, the HR sector remains a hidden gem that industry insiders tell the Business Journal influences the world, though rarely acknowledged locally and discounted.
The origins
Jacksonville’s HR industry began quietly but significantly in the late 20th century — its roots tracing back to Delores Kesler, who founded ATS Staffing in 1977. This foundational company later became AccuStaff. Then, through a multi-company merger, MPS Group emerged in 1992.
Within that group was Modis, the IT arm of the staffing company MPS Group, headquartered within the Independent Life Building. For nearly a decade in the early 2000s, Modis’ logo sat atop the glass-paneled building, a staple of Jacksonville’s skyline representing the local HR empire.
“We used to call it the 35-story billboard,” said Pete Cochrane, a practice director for global human resources consulting firm Robert Half. “That’s what it was.”
Toward the latter half of its residency among Jacksonville’s skyscrapers, MPS Group was acquired by the Adecco Group — a global talent and staffing company based from Zürich, Switzerland — in 2010.
It was an approximately $1.3 billion deal that settled Adecco’s North American headquarters locally and truly established Jacksonville’s role as a global HR hub.
Employing more than 10,000 people across the world, including several hundred in Jacksonville, Adecco was founded in 1996, according to Crunchbase, an online database tracking investments and financing and of private tech-based companies.
Its worldwide revenue is between $1 billion and $10 billion, per Crunchbase. The group completed a Series A funding round with TalentToday in 2017 and a successful venture funding round with Path.to in 2012 valued at a collective $5 million.
Adecco’s North American headquarters (pictured above) still operates from Jacksonville’s Southside, said Tyra Tutor, the company’s former head of corporate development who’s been with the group since 1997.
“I think it’s an easy argument that (Jacksonville) is influencing HR tech around the world,” she said.
Innovation
The Adecco Group itself is a staffing firm, not HR technology. But before Adecco acquired MPS Group, it created Beeline VMS in 1999. Spun out into its own standalone company shortly after, Beeline is an anchor institution in the world’s HR-technology cluster, all based from Jacksonville.
Now separate entities, Adecco uses practically every candidate-search vendor under the sun, according to Tutor, from Beeline to LinkedIn to Indeed and beyond.
Beeline’s emergence as a vendor management system was a direct response to the inefficiencies exposed during the Y2K hiring surge.
That period was basically a multi-million-dollar mad dash by U.S. companies to hire technology-trained employees to prevent potential problems when the year changed from 1999 to 2000.
“All these organizations were freaked out by Y2K … so they hired a lot of temporary workers to come in and provide help, but they were at the mercy of the staffing firm, so they paid a lot of money,” Beeline CEO Doug Leeby said. “So when Y2K ended, and there was a big nothing, there was a fair amount of backlash from enterprises in the corporation saying ‘gosh, we just paid $200 bucks an hour for this resource, it was $100 an hour a year ago.’”
That’s when Beeline entered the fray, a vendor management software to manage non-employees: the independent contractors, consultants and freelancers of the world.
It was a turning point for the industry.
These vendor management systems, abbreviated to VMS, leveled the playing field by going and finding people in a specific geography for a specific position, “then best men or women win,” Leeby said.
Beeline won major clients like JP Morgan and Merill Lynch early, Leeby said.
Its client list today includes some of the world’s biggest companies: Meta, Southwest Airlines, Mastercard, The Home Depot, LinkedIn and FIS, according to Cochrane, who uses Beeline’s software.
“The genesis started here in Jacksonville — the global footprint,” Leeby said. “We’ve never been contacted by the mayor’s office or anybody to say, ‘Wow, from an attraction perspective, would you speak on behalf of Jacksonville?’ I’d be happy to do that.”
Backed by private equity firms Stone Point Capital and New Mountain Capital, Beeline today operates in more than 80 countries worldwide that puts millions of people to work. It makes an estimated revenue between $10 million and $50 million, according to Crunchbase. Despite roots extending across the globe, Jacksonville’s influence on the HR industry goes largely unnoticed by its residents, even when billions of dollars change hands.
“We were one of them — several billion dollars,” Leeby said. “Not even mentioned.”
Operating undercover
Despite housing the North American headquarters of the Adecco Group, (recognized as one of the world’s largest staffing firms) and being the birthplace of Beeline, Jacksonville rarely makes headlines for its HR influence.
“There’s a lot happening in Jacksonville from a human capital management perspective,” Leeby said. “But, look, I don’t think Jacksonville is perceived at wide scale to be a sexy tech hub.”
Plenty of people scoff at the premise that Jacksonville is a rising technology hub, and the HR sector doesn’t even glimmer in their minds. This lack of visibility is a missed opportunity in the eyes of industry leaders, especially as the HR tech sector continues to evolve.
Jacksonville’s infrastructure and legacy position it as a natural leader in this space. But that strength is found not just in its companies but its people.
The city’s network of experts is deep and globally connected.
“There’s a lot of people that are still here too that are involved with HR tech on a global scale but they happen to live here,” Cochrane said. “The ‘80s and ‘90s, that’s when it all was building up, but then we never really left; we just stayed here.”
Many of the industry’s pioneers still live and work in Jacksonville, offering a rare opportunity for startups and innovators to tap into decades of expertise. Those minds reside within effectively a 50-mile radius, according to Cochrane, making a well-saturated ecosystem to fuel the creation of new companies in the sector.
“If I were a betting person,” Cochrane said, “I would get a flight to come to Jacksonville … and say, ‘Hey, I’m building this. Can you help me validate it?’”
Industry leaders aside, literal technology talent — a pearl, to Leeby — is bred in Jacksonville and leveraged by some of the world’s biggest names that fly completely under the radar locally.
“We’ve got $65 billion streaming through our software every year, we have some of the world’s biggest names like Microsoft and Meta, people just wouldn’t even know that,” Leeby said. “(Jacksonville’s) a great place to start a company, it’s a great place to raise a family … and it’s one of the best kept secrets that I’m happy to keep a secret.”
For a city long branded by its back offices, that secret may be Jacksonville’s most powerful calling card yet.
Adecco Group’s North American headquarters at 4800 Deerwood Campus Pkwy. photo courtesy of Adecco