Everyone’s Suddenly Hiring Growth Marketers in Cyber. Here’s What That Actually Says.
You know when something keeps popping up and you can’t quite tell if it’s a trend or a collective existential crisis? That’s me lately with UK cyber companies and their sudden, slightly frantic, obsession with “growth” marketing roles.
And look, I’m not here to throw shade at the concept of growth marketing. I’ve worked with some brilliant ones—data-driven, revenue-minded, and not afraid to tell you your lead magnet looks like a GCSE revision sheet. They’re useful. Invaluable, even. But what’s happening right now isn’t strategic hiring. It’s a symptom. A tell.
And if you squint past the jargon in those job specs, you’ll see what I mean.
So… Why All the Growth Hires?
Honestly? Most of these companies aren’t hiring for growth. Not really.
They’re hiring for a miracle. Or a distraction. Sometimes both.
Here’s the pattern; because there is one:
They’ve exhausted the founder’s network. The warm leads have cooled. The inbound form hasn’t pinged in weeks.
There’s new funding. The board wants movement. Metrics. Something that looks like momentum.
They still don’t have real marketing foundations. No proper ICP segmentation. Messaging built on metaphors from 2016. Content that reads like it was cleared by legal then lobotomised by ChatGPT.
So, they skip ahead. Hire someone to “run the engine” even though the engine’s… well, mostly imaginary.
Growth Feels Like the Fast Button
It promises so much, doesn’t it? Results you can chart. Dashboards that make investors nod approvingly. Acronyms. Automation. Attribution models that feel like science even when they’re mostly vibes and broken UTMs.
But what it really does—if you’re not careful—is give the illusion of progress while quietly reinforcing every structural flaw you’ve refused to deal with.
And if the message is unclear, if the market doesn’t trust you, if the product’s value prop needs a whiteboard and a TED Talk to explain?
Then growth marketing is just turning up the volume on confusion.
The Deeper Reasons (Let’s Name Them)
Alright, let’s call out a few things that are fuelling this rush:
1. The VC Effect
There’s pressure. Real, sweaty, end-of-quarter pressure. You took money. Now you need to “scale.” Which apparently means pushing leads through a funnel built on hope and duct tape.
2. Technical Founder Fatigue
You’ve sold your heart out. Every deal so far came from your LinkedIn DMs or a conference coffee. You’re burnt. So you hire someone who knows “funnels” and “paid social” and assume they’ll sort it.
Except they inherit a website that makes zero sense to anyone outside your dev team.
3. The Marketing Team of One
Maybe there’s one poor soul juggling content, brand, events, and HubSpot integrations. Maybe not even that. A “growth hire” feels like progress. Feels like doing something. But without a strategy, it’s not support—it’s a stress multiplier.
And Here’s the Twist
Growth marketing isn’t the villain here. Misalignment is.
In a healthy setup, a growth marketer takes strong positioning, a clear audience, compelling content—and builds scale. Adds fuel.
In most UK cyber startups right now? There’s no fire to fuel.
It’s not the growth marketer’s fault when the leads aren’t converting. It’s that you never actually figured out your angle. Your value. Your story. You thought that could wait.
Spoiler: it can’t.
If You’re the Growth Marketer…
…and this is sounding a bit too familiar?
You’re not mad. You’re not underperforming. You’re in a system that wasn’t ready for what you’re being asked to deliver.
I wish more founders understood that what you’re doing is more than pressing buttons. You’re translating value. And if that value is murky? You’re translating fog.
Push for upstream fixes. And if they won’t listen—leave. Seriously. Your CV will survive. Your sanity might not.
If You’re the One Doing the Hiring…
Here’s a quick checklist before you slap “growth” on another job ad:
Can you clearly say what makes your product different? Not better—different.
Do you know who your actual buyers are? Not just their job titles—what keeps them up at night.
Does your messaging work on humans, or just in Notion?
Do you have content that earns trust, or just blogs for SEO ghosts?
If the answer is no across the board, you don’t need a growth marketer.
You need to slow down, clarify, and build the system you want to scale. Otherwise, you’ll keep spinning hires—and blaming people who were set up to fail.
One Last Thought (Before I Go Make a Cup of Coffee)
Not every hire needs to be about urgency.
Sometimes the boldest move is fixing what’s upstream (quietly, carefully, and properly) so that when you do plug in growth, it actually goes somewhere.
Because momentum without direction? That’s not growth. That’s just burning budget.
