The Signal · A Mentis podcast

The conversations recruitment founders have privately.

A podcast for UK recruitment agency MDs. Hosted by Trisden Mills and Malik Makinde. Each episode runs three themes, built from a real brief, not a content calendar.

Episodes Be a guest
From Episode 01 · Preview

Kamaal Watkins on the AI question. Our answer back.

A short cut from the first episode of The Signal — a recruiter on why AI scepticism still runs the room, and the one-line frame we keep coming back to with clients.

Episodes

Three themes per episode. No filler.

Every guest comes in with a brief built around three themes. We write them. We share them in advance. The conversation runs on rails so it doesn't sound like one.

01Preview
Going out and coming back.

What it actually felt like to wind down an agency in late 2025 and walk into an enterprise seat at Google. The decade behind it. The view from the other side of the desk.

Kamaal Watkins
Randstad Enterprise · supporting Google
02Coming soon
The refusal to stay in one lane.

Nine years across agency, RPO, in-house and founder seats. Vertical-depth specialism, a senior-to-business-manager run in fourteen months, EMEA and US delivery for a global supply-chain platform, and three roles in parallel today, including one deliberately outside recruitment.

Jamie Ray Robinson
Director · Flink! Remotely · Robinson Guest
The hosts

Two co-founders. One desk.

Both of us run the Mentis desk by day. The Signal is the hour each week we set aside to ask the questions our clients ask us privately.

Co-founder · Mentis
Trisden Mills

Built the Mentis signal engine after eight years inside the UK's biggest data and architecture teams. Hosts The Signal because the conversations recruitment founders have privately rarely make it into print.

Co-founder, Operations · Mentis
Malik Makinde

Serial operator. Asks the practical questions: what's actually on your desk, what hasn't worked, what changed when it did. Co-hosts so the conversation stays grounded in the work.

Be a guest

We don’t book guests by category. We book by question.

If you’re a recruitment founder, MD, or senior operator with one question we haven’t already answered, get in touch. Three themes, one hour, fully prepped. Nothing is by accident.

Meet the team first
Goes straight to hello@mentisdigital.co.uk

Prefer email? hello@mentisdigital.co.uk

Listen, follow, send to a friend

TheSignallandsthisquarter.

We'll publish here first. Follow on LinkedIn for episode drops, behind-the-desk notes, and the briefs we write before each conversation.