The James Chase campaign, published in full, including the parts that didn't work. Everything below comes from watching for the events that predict hiring before the job is posted, and arriving first.
Situation, challenge, what we built, what came back. Prospect names and companies stay anonymous throughout; the client is named.
James Chase place cyber and technology roles across the UK and beyond. In April 2026 they handed Mentis their business development for an eight-week Most Placeable Candidate (MPC) campaign: put their strongest available candidates in front of the hiring managers most likely to need them.
The campaign had to reach roughly 1,168 companies without a single message going out unapproved, and without sounding like every other agency's automation. The agency's reputation rode on every send.
The MPC campaign gave each prospect a personalised candidate page built for their situation, tracked end to end. Humans wrote, approved and called.
The engaged outnumbered the repliers roughly four to one. The pages pull people in even when they stay silent.
That’s true of all cold outreach, and anyone who hides it is selling you activity. The campaign booked its meetings from the engaged, not the polite.
79 people replied in total. 310+ engaged with their page without writing back, roughly four times as many. The pages do the pulling; the caller does the timing.
Verbatim replies from the campaign. Attributions are anonymised; the originals live in the campaign records.
We have bigger hiring needs… we need 220 candidates per month. Can you support this volume?
Profiles look good, thanks for sending! How much do you charge as a recruiter?
Love this that you have sent over. What is the business model behind your recruiting?
The campaign above is what a full engagement looks like, published beat by beat. These are the others, told only as far as the numbers allow. Detailed results appear when the work has produced them.
For Coil Digital, a US recruitment firm, we designed and built the full delivery engine for Anton Hypolite’s tech-and-engineering desk: per-prospect market briefs, MPC campaign pages and role case studies, generated and tracked under the Coil Digital brand. The asset pages on this site come from that engine. Anton, fifteen years in tech recruitment, has since joined Mentis as Head of Global Sales.
A UK digital recruitment agency onboarding onto the engine at £7,500 a month, the published from-price. Structure-mapping first, then signal flow. Results will appear here when they are real, with sources, the same way the campaign above did.
Mentis clients who have agreed to be named. Each is written up jointly with the client. Numbers and quotes are verified before publication.
Apex Staffing. UK-based supported housing recruitment specialists, headquartered in London. Connects housing associations, supported living providers, and residential services with care workers, support staff, and management professionals. CQC-registered, fully compliant on DBS and UK employment law.
New business came almost entirely from referrals and repeat clients. It had worked, until the funding environment for housing associations tightened and the pipeline slowed with it. The founder was doing business development personally, squeezed between compliance work, candidate vetting, and existing client servicing, with no consistency. Generic recruitment lead-gen agencies had been tried, and their outreach landed badly in a sector where CQC standards, safeguarding, and trust-built relationships matter more than volume.
Mentis treated business development as a function to be built, not a campaign to be launched. We set up signal monitoring across Apex's target market: new supported housing scheme approvals, local authority commissioning announcements, registered provider expansions, and senior leadership appointments at housing associations. Experienced operators ran tailored outreach under Apex's own brand, holding genuine conversations with scheme managers and operations directors rather than sending templates. Qualified meetings were booked straight into the founder's diary, with weekly reporting so the founder always knew what was in play.
The pipeline no longer depends on me remembering to do outreach. It just runs. I spend my time in meetings that are already booked, not chasing them.
Most agencies leave new business to a consultant's spare hour or the market's goodwill. That is not pipeline, it is luck. This is the shift from luck to system, for any founder doing business development off the side of their desk.
Volonté. Multi-sector firm with offices in London, Bucharest, and Istanbul. Three business lines: healthcare management consultancy and start-up accelerator programmes; commodity trading (minerals, chemical fertilisers, gas, procurement and supply contracting); and investment introductions across niche sectors. Founders bring three decades of healthcare delivery experience.
Volonté operated across three quite different markets: healthcare consultancy, commodity trading, and investments. Each had its own buying signals and decision-maker profile. New business came through trusted introductions and referrals, especially between Istanbul and London. That worked for known relationships, but left a large universe of qualified prospects entirely uncontacted. The team had no scalable way to identify a healthcare operator about to scale internationally, a buyer entering a supply contract cycle, or an investor opening a fund mandate.
Mentis built a multi-channel signal layer tuned to Volonté's three businesses. For the consultancy: senior healthcare leadership appointments, regulatory announcements, and start-up funding events in target geographies. For trading: commodity tender notices, supply contract renewals, and procurement-team changes at buyer organisations. For investments: fund-launch announcements and mandate disclosures in the niche sectors Volonté serves. Experienced operators ran tailored outreach under Volonté's own brand, in English, Turkish, and Romanian where needed, with messaging that matched each business line's specific buyer.
We had a whole market we were never speaking to. Mentis gave us a way to reach it without losing the relationship-led approach that defines us.
Most consultancies and trading firms grow through referrals, then stall when referrals run out. Proof that signal-driven outbound applies anywhere there is a buying event you can see early.
Thirty minutes on your patch and whether the signals exist in your niche. If they don't, we'll tell you that too.
