Lyle King

Lyle King did not set out to work in water, or in recruitment. He wanted to be a pilot, and when he failed the medical there was, in his words, no real plan B. He was working in engineering at the time (he trained as a precision engineer, running a CNC machine, and he still calls himself "an engineer at heart"), and a friend who was in recruitment suggested he give it a go. He did, and roughly eight years later he is still in the same niche, which is recruiting the people who make water work. That engineering background is not just colour: King says it is what lets him sit across from a founder with a very specific technical product and actually follow how it works, at least at the top level.

Lyle King spent those eight years specialising entirely in water talent, first at the Leeds search firm Charlton Morris and then, in 2023, on his own. He founded Influx Search to be a global recruitment consultancy focused on the water industry, and his stated ambition is for the name to become synonymous with water-sector hiring. What separates a headhunter from a job board, in his telling, is reach into the part of the market that is not looking: "there's a stat that goes around that's something like 80% of the talent market is only ever passively looking for a job," he says, so a job board only ever reaches the one-in-five who are actively searching. Influx now works across attraction, acquisition and, increasingly, retention, on the logic that keeping good staff is far cheaper than replacing them.

Lyle King's central argument is about a wave that is already breaking. The water industry, he points out, is staring at a generational handover: by a UK statistic he cites, close to half of the water engineering workforce will retire within the next two decades, taking decades of undocumented know-how with them. The industry has nicknamed it the "silver tsunami" (or silver wave, or grey wave), and King is clear it is not unique to water, with construction facing much the same. The risk is a knowledge gap; the opportunity is that the same retirement wave opens the door to a generation of new talent, and to a different kind of talent, because King is a firm believer that data, digital and automation roles, the software engineers and the commercial people around them, are becoming the sector's most sought-after hires.

Lyle King's other recurring theme is one most water companies under-invest in: employer branding. He argues a hiring business needs to answer three questions clearly, and that it usually nails the first two (what the job is, what the product does) and fumbles the third, which is what it is actually like to work there. That third answer, well told, is what tips a candidate who is on the fence. King delivers all of this with the dry, people-first realism of someone who has learned the trade the hard way; as he puts it, when he first started he thought he was selling computers when he wasn't. Recruitment, he is quick to remind you, is a dynamic and deeply emotional business, because at the end of the day you are dealing with people, not products.

Lyle King runs Influx Search from Leeds, in the United Kingdom, and has built it into a firm that says it has made more than 150 senior and specialist placements across 20-plus countries since 2023, for clients that range from start-ups to multinational water names like Grundfos, SUEZ and Hach. He has also tied the business to a cause, with a corporate partnership with WaterAid that donates a slice of every placement fee toward clean-water access. He came on (don't) Waste Water at the start of 2024 to talk about all of it, in an episode that is less about a technology and more about the people who will have to run the water systems of the next thirty years.

“There's a stat that goes around that's something like 80% of the talent market is only ever passively looking for a job.”

He is, in short, the rare guest on the show whose subject is not a membrane or a molecule but the workforce itself, which is exactly the thing every water technology on this site ultimately depends on.