Exec Search · 8-person firm, London
£180k pipeline in 3 months
They do the BD we never had time to do ourselves. The pipeline runs in the background now.
- Co-founder · confidential, on request
Lead Generation · UK Recruitment Agencies
Leadgenerationfor UKrecruitmentagencies.
Qualified meetings with hiring managers, booked into your diary by people who know your sector. Signal-led prospecting, niche-specialised campaign managers, human follow-up. The BD function you'd build yourself, without the headcount, the ramp, or the commission plan.
£180k+ pipeline30+ UK agencies10 meetings · 90 days30 minutes a week
The Mentis team has worked at.
What we do
Lead generation for recruitment agencies, plainly explained.
Lead generation for UK recruitment agencies means one thing here: booked, qualified meetings with hiring managers in your target sectors. We run the prospecting layer; your consultants run the conversation.
The phrase “lead generation for recruitment agencies” gets thrown around a lot, and it usually means three different things. We do one of them. Here’s which.
What this isn’t. We are not an RPO. We don’t source candidates on behalf of end employers, and we don’t replace your consultants. We are not a list broker, and we don’t hand over a spreadsheet of contacts and call it pipeline. We are not a generalist SDR shop running the same playbook for SaaS and recruitment.
What this is. A managed BD service purpose-built for UK recruitment agencies. We monitor hiring intent across your sectors, identify the hiring managers signalling a real need, run the outreach, and put a real human on the phone the moment they engage. The deliverable is a meeting in your diary, not a contact in a database.
Why the distinction matters. Recruitment is the only industry where “BD” and “recruitment” are the same word for two different jobs. Most prospecting services confuse the two and end up booking meetings with the wrong people. We have built our entire process around finding the right person: the hiring manager with budget, signal, and timing. Never anyone else.
Who it’s for
UK recruitment agencies with a sector to own.
Built for boutique and mid-market UK recruitment agencies. Five to thirty consultants, founder-led, with a niche they already win in.
We run lead generation for recruitment agencies that fit a specific shape: deep in one or two sectors, strong on delivery, short on time for the prospecting layer. The pattern is usually a founder who closes well, a small team of consultants who place well, and no one whose full-time job is finding new hiring managers to talk to.
It works best when you can name your top three sectors, you have at least one case study you can quote, and you’re willing to give us thirty minutes a week to keep the campaign tuned. It works less well for generalist agencies who recruit across every vertical. Depth is what makes our campaign managers credible on the call.
It is not for you if you already run a full-time in-house BD function with a senior director hitting target. We add the most value where the prospecting layer is missing, not where it is already in place. We will tell you on the discovery call if we think you don’t need us.
£0k
pipeline added in 3 months
Exec Search firm, London
0
hiring-manager meetings in 30 days
Contract IT desk, Manchester
£24k
MRR, from £24k in 6 months
Remote-first EMEA SaaS
0+
UK recruitment agencies on Mentis
2024–25
Voices from the market
The problem real recruiters describe. And the answer we give back.
Two short clips from The Signal. The first is a recruiter on why AI scepticism still runs the room. The second is our one-line answer to it.
Recruiter · on the AI question
Founder · on what Mentis actually is
A live signal
We watch the market for hiring intent. Then we move inside the window.
A “signal” is anything that tells us a hiring manager has a problem to solve in the next two weeks. A new role posted on their careers page. A senior departure on LinkedIn. A funding round. A regulatory change forcing a compliance hire.
We score every signal across your ICP daily and route the strongest into a campaign your manager runs. Outreach inside the 24–72 hour window where the manager is actively looking for help. That timing change is the biggest reason our response rates clear what cold outreach typically manages for recruitment.
Live signal · London
Series B closed · FinTech
The method
Lead generation, but not the way you’ve been burned by it.
Most outsourced lead generation for recruitment agencies fails because it’s generic outreach to a static list. Ours is built around signals, niche specialisation, and human follow-up.
When a hiring manager engages with our outreach, a niche-specialised campaign manager picks up the phone. Not a sequence. Not a bot. Someone who knows what an FD versus a financial controller actually does, and can hold a thirty-second conversation that earns the meeting.
The handoff to your consultant is a calendar invite with a pre-call brief: what the role looks like, what signal triggered the outreach, what the manager said on the phone, and what objection to expect. Your consultant walks into the meeting with everything they need to win the room.
A standing start to a proper pipeline in five working days. We hadn’t booked a meeting like this in months before they came in.
Director · Climate-tech recruitment, Bristol
Recent results · 2024–25
One agency. One real number.
The longest-running campaign on Mentis as of April 2026. References available on a discovery call. More case studies in build.
Who actually runs your campaign
Real people on the phone. Not a sequence.
A niche-specialised campaign manager runs every desk. The same person you'd hire if you were building this team yourself, without the headcount.
The deliverable
Hiring-manager meetings, in your diary, every week.
The output is meetings with the right person at the right time, with a brief that gives your consultant everything needed to win the room.
Every campaign produces the same shape of deliverable: a qualified meeting with a hiring manager in your ICP, booked directly into the diary of the consultant who will run it.
The first ninety days carry a meeting floor. We commit to a minimum number of qualified hiring-manager meetings; if the floor isn’t hit, the campaign continues at our cost until it is. The exact number depends on your sector, the depth of signal in your geography, and the cadence you can absorb.
Beyond the meeting count, the longer-term deliverable is a pipeline you can forecast. The reason agencies stay with us isn’t the first meeting. It’s that, six months in, they’re no longer running on feast-or-famine BD.
By niche
Lead generation for recruitment agencies, by sector.
Each desk runs a niche-specific signal stack. The decision-makers, the trigger events, and the language of the call are different in every sector, so the campaign is too.
Engineering managers, CTOs and heads of platform. Reached on the back of a funding round, a senior departure, or a new product line that needs hiring.
FDs, financial controllers and heads of finance. Reached when a finance team is restructuring, after a private-equity transaction, or when a permanent hire has just left a gap.
Heads of legal, general counsel and managing partners. Reached when a firm signals expansion into a new practice area or has just lost a senior lawyer.
Heads of clinical operations, recruitment leads in NHS trusts, founders of independent health providers. Reached when capacity, regulatory or commissioning pressure forces a hire.
Operations directors, heads of engineering, plant managers. Reached when a project ramp, a contract win, or a notable departure opens a real role with budget already attached.
Project directors, commercial managers and pre-construction leads. Reached when a tender lands, a programme slips, or a key role becomes vacant on a live project.
Founders, boards and incoming chairs. Reached when an exec exit signals, a private-equity sponsor begins value creation, or a board reset forces succession planning.
FAQ
What you’ll likely ask first.
Plain answers to the questions every recruitment agency owner asks us inside the first ten minutes of a discovery call.
Question we haven’t answered? Run the fit check or book a discovery session.
Want the broader picture? Read what we do across the desk, see case studies from UK recruitment agencies, or meet the team who runs every desk.
Ready to see hiring-manager meetings on your desk?
Thirtyminutes.Nopitchdeck.
We'll map your ICP, look at the signals already firing in your sectors, and tell you honestly whether lead generation for your kind of recruitment agency makes sense with us. If it doesn't, we'll tell you that too.