Laura Braithwaite & Kate Merritt | Liberty Hive Co Founders | 1st June 2026

We’ve spent years placing people into teams. Matching talent to briefs. Thinking hard about what makes a hire stick; not just on paper, but in practice, over time.

So when we both sat down with a Lumina Spark psychometric assessment recently, we knew it would be interesting. We didn’t expect it to be quite so on the nose.

It turns out that two people who built a business together, who share a vision, values, and a genuine belief in what they’re doing, can be almost exact opposites in how they think, work, and see the world.

And that, it turns out, is rather the point.

Kate’s dominant archetype is Conscientious Blue - 94th percentile against the general working population. Structured, analytical, outcome-driven, evidence-based. Her profile describes a competitive character with a burning desire to win, someone who listens to others before acting, thinks before speaking, and holds herself to a high standard while remaining empathetic to people and team dynamics.

That drive to win isn’t about Kate - it’s about the people she’s responsible for. The rigour is always in service of the outcome, and the outcome is always someone’s career, someone’s team, someone’s business. She scored in the 99th percentile for Competitive, 98th for Logical, 94th for Reliable. Under pressure, she becomes more structured, not less.

That structure is a form of care - a refusal to leave things to chance when the stakes belong to someone else. She is, in the language of Lumina, Discipline Driven - and she wears it comfortably.

Laura’s dominant archetype is Inspiring Yellow - 89th percentile. Spontaneous, extraverted, adaptable, socially energised. Where Kate keeps her options carefully structured, Laura keeps hers deliberately open. Laura scored in the 98th percentile for Flexible, 97th for Demonstrative, 92nd for Sociable.

Her profile describes someone who is at her best precisely when plans fall apart, who follows her instincts to get things done - and who brings people with her when she does.

Put them side by side and the contrast is almost mathematical. Kate’s lowest archetype is Inspiring Yellow (2nd percentile). Laura’s lowest is Conscientious Blue (1st percentile).

They are, by every measure the tool offers, psychological opposites. Between them, they cover ground that neither could cover alone. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a hiring philosophy.

SO HOW DOES THAT WORK?

The short answer is extremely well. The longer answer is more interesting.

Where Kate brings rigour; the plan, the process, the evidence, Laura brings energy and instinct. Kate ensures the right decision is made. Laura ensures the right people are in the room to make it. Kate holds the structure that allows good work to happen. Laura generates the momentum that makes people want to do it.

When the strategy is solid, Kate’s discipline is what protects it. When the unexpected happens (and it always does), Laura’s adaptability is what keeps the business moving. Her profile is direct about it: she is at her best when the plan falls away. Kate’s holds precisely the opposite to be true.

This doesn’t mean they don’t clash. They do. Kate’s directness can feel harsh to someone who processes ideas out loud. Laura’s fluid approach to goals and timelines can feel chaotic to someone who prefers structure and defined ambitions. The Lumina framework is honest about this too - it names the friction rather than papering over it.

But that friction, managed well, is productive. Kate’s structure catches what Laura’s energy misses. Laura’s openness accesses what Kate’s rigour might close off too early. Neither covers the other’s blind spots perfectly. But they cover enough of them to build something that neither could have built alone.

WHAT THIS HAS TO DO WITH HIRING

Everything.

A CV would have told you that Kate and Laura are both experienced, senior marketing and media professionals. Both co-founders. Both commercially driven.

It would not have told you that one needs certainty to perform at her best, and the other needs ambiguity. That one thinks by writing, the other by talking. That one builds trust through reliability and the other through energy and warmth. That one’s overextended persona becomes more rigid under pressure, and the other’s throws caution to the wind and how, knowing that, you can build structures that catch each other before the pressure tips either way.

None of that is in a CV. And all of it is what makes the partnership work.

THE QUESTION AI STILL CAN’T ANSWER

We’re investing in AI. We use it. It makes us faster and more precise and it gives our team more time to spend on the parts of this job that technology genuinely cannot do.

But here is the question that no AI can currently answer: will these two people build something better together than either could alone?

Not because they share strengths. Because their differences are the right shape.

A 99th percentile Competitive profile paired with a 98th percentile Flexible one. A planner who needs clear objectives working alongside someone who believes goals should emerge. A leader who communicates in writing with one who picks up the phone. These aren’t just personality quirks, they’re the operating system of a functioning co-founder relationship. And you only see them when you look beyond what someone has done, and ask who they actually are.

WHAT WE’RE OFFERING CLIENTS AND CANDIDATES

We started using Lumina Spark because we wanted to understand ourselves better. What we came away with was a sharper understanding of why it matters for the people we place.

It’s a view shared by Steven Dansky of Evolve Profiling:

“The Lumina Spark helps people to see how they can shine in the workplace, and how their strengths can help one another to become far more than they could on their own...

Skills can be developed. Experience accumulates. But how someone shows up, how they communicate under pressure, what energises them, where their instincts take them when the plan changes, that’s harder to change, and far more important to understand upfront.

Psychometric profiling is not a filter. It is a lens. It doesn’t tell you who to rule out. It tells you what questions to ask, what dynamics to anticipate, and how to build a team that is more than the sum of its CVs.

That’s why we’re now offering Lumina Spark as part of how we work with clients and candidates, not as a replacement for human judgment, but as one more tool in service of it.

Because Human Led. Tech Enabled. isn’t just our tagline.

It’s how we actually think about talent.

If you’d like to explore what psychometric profiling could add to your hiring process - or talk to us about how we build teams that genuinely fit - we’d love to hear from you.

You can register your interest here or email us: contact@libertyhive.com