Meet Our Team

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When you’re in the business of finding good people, you need to be staffed with - you guessed it - good people. Meet the minds behind Accolo.

John Younger

President, CEO and Founder
For over 21 years, John has successfully identified and incorporated major trends and technologies affecting the recruitment landscape.

In January 2000 John founded Accolo, an innovator in networking-based Recruitment Process Outsourcing (RPO). John’s passion to dramatically improve how people and jobs find each other is rooted in his deep understanding of technology, the recruitment process, and a core belief that everyone deserves courtesy and respect. This idea is central to Accolo’s vision, methods, and communications.

John’s vision for a completely outsourced staffing solution led him to found y/net in January 1996. After a successful launch of y/net, TriNet acquired John and his company in November 1996 where he remained until December 1999. TriNet was one of Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing companies in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999.

From 1987 to 1994, John was the Vice President of Human Resources for Bank of America where he led technical recruitment for an organization of 16,000 people.

John has successfully identified, incorporated and advanced recruitment solutions for over 16 years. He was Resumix user #2 in 1988 and established the first Vendor on Premises for both Bank of America and Olsten Corporation in 1992. He was an early adopter of Internet recruiting with the On-Line Career Center (to later become Monster) in 1993, and was Hire.com user #4 while running his Venture Talent recruitment Agency in 1998.

John earned a degree from Notre Dame in Mathematics and Computer Science and is a former member of the United States National (Olympic) Rowing Team.

Matt Cooper

Vice President, Strategy & Operations
Matt joined Accolo in March 2004, and is responsible for managing the operating and financial activities of the company.

Matt met John Younger while working as a partner in the OwensMessina Group, a boutique consultancy in San Francisco that he co-founded in early 2003. Matt’s focus while at OwensMessina was financial strategy and capital-raising. Matt developed the OwensMessina Group’s unique “sweat equity” fund structure that was used to fund the early-stage strategy firm.

From 1998 until 2002, Matt worked as an investment banker with JPMorgan’s Telecom, Media and Technology Group in New York and Dallas. Matt worked on over $45 billion in successful capital market and M&A transactions.

Matt attended Vanderbilt University, where he received a Bachelor degree in Economics. He also received an MBA from Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management with a double concentration in Finance and Accounting.

He received a Six Sigma Black Belt certification from the American Society for Quality in October of 2006.

Seth Taylor

Vice President, Technology
Seth joined Accolo in May of 2004, and is responsible for the technology and development direction of the company.

Seth came from PeopleSoft where he was an engineer and team lead in the PeopleTools mobile development group. Seth was R&D lead on PeopleSoft’s Mobile Disconnected team developing tools that allowed application developers to extend PeopleSoft’s applications to various devices. Seth also led the development of a toolset within PeopleTools allowing application developers to build PeopleSoft applications for cellular phones. While developing the mobile technologies at PeopleSoft, Seth filled various evangelical roles traveling to customer, partner, and supplier site extolling the virtues of PeopleSoft’s mobile technologies.

Seth raced cars professionally for a number of years, spending time in Europe racing for the elite Elf Petroleum La Filiere team and for various teams in North America. Seth is an avid cyclist competing in national and local mountain bike races.

Seth holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from The University of Texas at Austin.

Mark Grimshaw

Vice President, Client Services
Mark joined Accolo in April 2007, and is responsible for managing the client services team, which is responsible for the delivery of our core Recruitment Process Outsourcing services.

Mark brings more than 14 years of experience to Accolo with depth in operations, delivery, implementation, and client relationship management. Most recently he led the Implementation Services and Client Management teams at Veritude, a national staffing services provider. Prior to Veritude, Mark held position in sales, delivery and client management with Aquent, a global provider of staffing services, and Renaissance Worldwide, an IT staffing services firm.

Mark is a graduate of Marquette University, where he received a degree in Advertising.

Investors

Accolo’s investors include Altos Ventures, Vedior, and TriNet.