Patrick Cox started with a fax. The business was always people.

Patrick Cox began his technology staffing business on the second floor of an old colonial in Canton, Massachusetts. The year was 1994. Résumés travelled by fax. The internet had yet to make itself indispensable, and the approach of Y2K supplied the industry with something to worry about. For a company selling technical expertise, it was an agreeably inconvenient time to open the doors.

Cox and fellow founder Tony Varano called their business The Professional Alternative. It would become TPA technologies. The ambition Cox later recalled was straightforward: establish a lasting place in technology staffing. An upstairs office was the starting address for a business whose work would depend on getting other people through the right doors.

There is a temptation to furnish such a beginning with a heroic desk, a sleepless night and a conveniently prophetic conversation. The fax machine is quite sufficient. It places Cox in a particular working world, before recruiting could present itself as an exercise in endless digital reach. A résumé still needed a reader. A vacancy still needed someone capable of doing the work.

Upstairs in Canton, 1994

The founding partnership remains central to TPA’s identity. Cox is its chief executive; Varano is its chief financial officer. Both are identified as co-founders dating to 1994. Their accounts put people at the centre of the enterprise, although each approaches the subject from a slightly different direction.

Varano describes wanting to combine the useful habits of larger staffing agencies with the closer atmosphere of a smaller firm. Cox’s own biography focuses on recruiting and selling IT consulting services, followed by a hiring principle: build a culture he would want to work in. Together, those ideas suggest a fairly demanding standard. The organisation offering career advice should itself be a place worth joining.

The original company name has a pleasingly direct quality. The Professional Alternative sounds like a promise made across a desk. The later TPA technologies identity places the technical work nearer the front. Under either name, the exchange involves an employer’s requirements and a professional’s next move. Neither side has much reason to admire a clever introduction that leads to the wrong assignment.

Today, TPA offers contract, contract-to-hire and direct-hire arrangements. Those are different kinds of commitment, and they give the underlying work its human complications. A company may be staffing a defined project; a candidate may be considering a longer stay. Cox’s business sits at that junction, where technical competence and the shape of a working life have to meet.

The range of assignments makes the point concrete. TPA’s staffing work includes enterprise software, project management, business analysis, application development and infrastructure. These fields call for different kinds of judgement. A résumé full of the right vocabulary is only the opening document; the company describes screening skills and checking references as parts of its recruiting work.

That places a particular responsibility on the intermediary. The client knows the problem inside its own organisation. The candidate knows the work they have done. A recruiter has to make those accounts intelligible to each other. It is a modest description of the job, but it leaves little room to hide behind a handsome list of names.

A birthday with somewhere else to be

By July 2019, TPA had reached its 25th anniversary. Cox’s recollection of Canton appeared alongside a plan for a year of giving. During the campaign, the company would connect every placement with a charitable donation, with donations made quarterly to selected charities. The anniversary would travel beyond the people entitled to a slice of cake.

There is a neat piece of design in that arrangement. It attaches giving to the transaction the company exists to make. Each placement supplies a repeatable occasion. Quarterly distribution supplies a rhythm. A business milestone becomes the beginning of an activity rather than the end of a speech.

The distinction matters in a company built around introductions. A client and a consultant are already connected by the placement. The anniversary plan adds a community beneficiary to that chain. It gives the company’s everyday activity another destination, without requiring a new story about what the company does.

Cox’s company biography also describes community giving as part of his responsibility as CEO. The Salvation Army and Year Up are among the organisations TPA names as beneficiaries of its support. In that context, the anniversary campaign reads as a specific expression of an existing commitment. The useful detail is its mechanism: a placement leads to a donation. Good intentions are easier to understand when they come with a verb.

When the client’s question changes

The milestones after the anniversary concern a different kind of responsiveness. In September 2022, TPA announced an expansion of its Workday practice. Client demand for professionals with Workday knowledge was increasing, and the company described adding experienced team members to meet it. Cox’s explanation joined technical understanding to the ability to find the people needed.

That is a revealing combination for a staffing executive. Knowing a platform’s name is a beginning. Understanding the challenge well enough to identify an appropriate professional is the actual service. The expansion placed more weight on specific knowledge, both inside the recruiting team and among the consultants it sought.

In November 2023, Salesforce received a dedicated practice. Again, the explanation began with demand from clients. TPA described hiring knowledgeable sales and recruiting staff to support the new area. Cox spoke about defining the company’s expertise more clearly as the market for Salesforce professionals expanded.

The two announcements give the longer company history some texture. They show adaptation in the ordinary form of people being added around a particular need. There is no requirement to drape every change in revolutionary language. A client asks a more specialised question. A service business has to arrange a more informed answer.

A new front door, the same two audiences

In February 2024, TPA brought its practice capabilities and a redesigned website together in another announcement. The site offered an updated presentation of the business and improved access for people seeking opportunities, including use across devices. For a company whose early résumés went by fax, the change in the front door is easy to appreciate.

Cox addressed companies looking for technical hiring support and candidates developing their careers. That pairing is consistent with the founding purpose: help organisations obtain expertise while helping professionals find opportunities. A staffing company has to keep both audiences in view, even when their priorities arrive in different envelopes.

“It’s a new day at TPA.”

Patrick Cox, February 2024

His closing remark was cheerful and brief. The chronology gives it a more useful setting. Workday had already been the subject of an expansion in 2022; Salesforce had received its practice announcement in 2023. The 2024 presentation therefore belongs to a sequence of changes. The website supplied a place to show capabilities the company had been developing.

The contrast with 1994 is enjoyable without being mysterious. Faxed paper gave way to a site that candidates could use on different devices. The task on the other side of the interface remained recognisable: understand the assignment, understand the professional, and make an introduction that can survive the first conversation.

For the candidate, access is part of the experience. An opportunity has to be discoverable before anyone can consider it. For the employer, a practice page helps explain the kind of assistance available. A website cannot make the match on its own, but it can make the first step less awkward.

The company he would want to join

TPA’s current leadership page lists Cox as chief executive officer and Dan Hinckley as president. Hinckley joined in September 2024, with responsibility for business processes and consistency across the organisation. Varano continues to be identified as chief financial officer. The founding partnership now sits within a wider leadership structure.

Cox’s own stated hiring preference remains an unusually accessible way into his view of the business. He wants people suited to the culture of a company he would want to work for, and one clients and consultants would choose to deal with. It is a personal test that also looks outward. The internal experience and the external relationship belong in the same sentence.

Read alongside the practice expansions, that preference offers two questions for the enterprise he co-founded. Can the team understand the increasingly specific work its clients need? Can it offer an experience people want to return to? Those questions concern different things, but a recruiter will eventually have to answer both.

The Canton office gives this story its beginning; the placement-linked giving campaign gives it a particularly clear expression of purpose. Between them sit changing technologies, new practice areas and a business still making introductions. Cox started with a fax. The interesting part was always the person waiting at the other end.