Dieter Vanthournout & Lien Byttebier

Dieter Vanthournout is not your typical tech entrepreneur who went looking for a problem to fit his solution. He worked behind the bar himself as a student job, runs a boutique hotel with his wife today, and through that experience kept running into the same wall: workforce planning that is unnecessarily complex, error-prone and time-consuming. Out of that frustration, he built bookU. Not because he could code, but because he knew things had to be different.

Today, bookU has grown into a leading SaaS platform with two strong pillars. For SMEs, bookU helps hundreds of companies get flexible scheduling, HR administration and staffing costs under control. For staffing, bookU is building something even more ambitious: AI-driven workforce intelligence that frees planners from the operational grind, allowing them to evolve from shift-fillers into true community managers of talent.

Because Dieter knows better than anyone that technology only creates real value when it moves people forward — not when it replaces them.

Lien Byttebier has been part of the Accent* Group for 19 years. She started as a consultant and account manager in the regional office network, then moved into internal recruitment and later became HR manager. In 2018 she made the move back to the business side, first as GM for construct and since 2021 as CCO for high-volume customers.

The focus there lies on three pillars: one clear point of contact for the client across all profiles, digitalisation to enable fast turnaround (candidate within 3 hours), and an optimal staffing mix to guarantee continuity at the best possible cost.

*Accent, founded in 1995, is a recruitment company with the largest specialised office network in Belgium, employing more than 15,000 people on a daily basis. Accent Jobs is part of House of HR, which is active across the full landscape of HR solutions.