HOW STRATEGIC RECRUITMENT HELPED A TECHNOLOGY COMPANY PIVOT AND SCALE
How moving away from transactional recruiting with previous suppliers and building a long term relationship with Armstrong Lloyd developed into a strategic partnership that has strengthened and helped TrustLayer to scale.
RECRUITMENT BRIEF
COMPANY: TrustLayer
SECTOR: Technology - Cybersecurity
LOCATION: United Kingdom
ABOUT TRUSTLAYER
TrustLayer is a UK cybersecurity company delivering intelligent, integrated protection for email, web and cloud applications through its TrustLayer One platform. The business serves organisations across finance, healthcare, retail, legal, education and the public sector, both directly and through a network of MSP and reseller partners, with a mission to make enterprise-grade security simple and accessible without stacks of stitched-together tools.
THE SCOPE
Gareth Lockwood, Chief Product and Technology Officer at TrustLayer has been a crucial driver in growing the team. As a growing business, TrustLayer doesn't have the biggest recruitment budgets, but every hire matters. Gareth's team needed people who could hit the ground running in a fast-moving, sometimes ambiguous environment, taking ownership and adding value from day one.
As Gareth explains, the difficulty in recruiting for roles like this isn't just about technical skills or the right keywords on a CV: “It's about finding people with the right mindset. Cultural fit for us is as important, if not more important, than skill set.”
RECRUITMENT SOLUTION
Armstrong Lloyd has worked with TrustLayer for three years, and Gareth is direct about how that relationship compares to the recruitment agencies he'd worked with previously, over more than a decade in his career.
“Working with you has really helped, and it's been night and day compared to some of the people I've worked with in the past, because the whole process end to end has felt very much more consultative. You're effectively an extension of our organisation.”
Rather than taking a job description and sending over candidates, Armstrong Lloyd took the time to understand TrustLayer as a business: the stage it's at, the team dynamics, and what would make someone successful there. For Gareth, that translated directly into better-qualified conversations and no wasted time.
“The candidates that came through were more relevant. The conversations that we had were really, really well qualified. We didn't waste time reviewing people that might have looked good on paper but were clearly wrong for our culture and our environment. I don't think I can think of a time that I saw a profile come through and just thought, where's this come from?”
Gareth frames good recruitment as a two-way fit rather than a sales exercise in either direction: “It's not just about selling candidates to a client, or selling the company to the candidate. It's all really about making it a two-way fit – and that's really where the relationship we've had has been really valuable.”
A SUCCESSFUL OUTCOME
The impact of getting the hire right shows up clearly in retention and progression. Every person Armstrong Lloyd has placed with TrustLayer has stayed with the business, and one hire – brought in at a relatively junior level – has since been promoted three times and is now TrustLayer's Marketing Director.
Gareth recalls that the brief for that hire was about attitude and personality as much as experience: “I knew that this individual was going to get the job because when I interviewed and met them and asked them a series of questions about solving problems, I knew that person had it.” He was specifically looking for people with their own curiosity to problem-solve, rather than those who would only do what they were told.
“It's something where I'm forever grateful for.”
Looking back across three years of working together, Gareth sums up what's made the difference:
“This has very much felt different and less transactional than the people I've worked with in the past – almost like having an embedded talent partner. It's very much felt thoughtful as opposed to volume driven. You've been willing to challenge us as well, to listen, to refine your briefs, to think about that long-term fit. And that's been critical for us, because the wrong hire costs time, it costs money, it really slows the business down. But the right hire really shapes the team and has that compounding effect. That combination of pace and judgement – you move quickly but not carelessly – is really the key thing. It's about understanding that the goal is not just finding people, but finding the right people.”
