Introduction
Mentoring has proven to be extremely beneficial, outweighing any costs involved when you consider the increase in productivity and profits. One of the most frequent challenges for launching a new mentoring program how to effectively recruit mentors and mentees within your organization.
Why it matters: The effectiveness of your program is largely dependent on the participants, and successful recruitment strategies lay the foundation for successful participants and outcomes.
1. Communication Strategy
1. Having a target audience and key objectives
The first step and arguably the most important factor of promoting your program and recruiting mentors, is to understand your target audience and key objectives. You need to work together with your team to fully comprehend why you need a program and who it is targeted at. Are you looking to improve employee engagement? Is there a barrier between departments? Is employee retention low? These are just some of the more common reasons people implement a mentoring program into their organisation. Once you've identified your key objectives and audience, you can begin acting on ideas to promote the program company-wide.
2. Get senior leadership involved
Creating a successful mentoring culture and program within your organisation begins with senior leadership. You need to ensure the senior members of your business are advocates of the program and efficiently convey the importance of mentoring to their colleagues, their success stories and positive experience. This will improve the visibility of the program and how it’s received across your organisation. By engaging with senior team members and having them on board as mentors (or reverse mentees) is highly impactful on how the organisation as a whole embraces mentoring and inspires your employees.
3. Success stories
When trying to relate with your staff members, personalised messages work great. Personal stories from participants of your mentoring program are the ideal way to showcase the influence and success of mentoring within your organisation. Video testimonials and quotes about things such as how the mentoring program has allowed for promotions to be made, the new skills learnt by the mentees/mentors and the personal goals met are some of the things you should be convincing when trying to attract people to the program.
4. Case studies
Although considered similar to success stories, case studies also show the challenges faced and how the individual was able to overcome any obstacles. Case studies are a great way to showcase the success of the program within your organisation. You can share the case studies with your organisation through the use of emails, articles and social posts.
5. Host mentoring events
With the lockdown being lifted, people are more eager than ever to attend real-life events, however, these events can also be hosted online. Hosting a mentoring program kick-off launch or ongoing events can be a powerful way of drawing people's attention to the mentoring scheme you have in place at your organisation. Hosting an event where an inspiring mentor can speak to your employees, a place where they can have the opportunity to network with other mentoring members and discuss their stories is highly impactful.
6. Be clear on commitments
It’s essential that you're clear on the commitments and expectations of mentors, not only to recruit them but to retain them. Provide your employees with transparent and realistic guidelines of what’s expected, including things such as time commitments and how they can help. Some of your employees may not have sufficient free time outside of work due to other personal life responsibilities and need to ensure they have enough time left in their schedule to help mentees before signing up.
7. Email communication
The use of email is a popular communication technique used by companies worldwide. This popular method of communicating with employees is a great way to get the message out there, without taking up too many resources. To recruit mentors to your program you can send a company-wide email outlining more about the program, what’s involved and the value it adds for the individual. However, as it’s easy for employees to miss or ignore their emails, there are factors you need to think about such as the time you send the email or the subject line.
8. Instant messenger channels
Besides email, since the beginning of last year, more companies are using other means of communication such as Slack, Zoom or teams. If your organisation has any of these in place it would be advised to also communicate about the program via these channels by sending out a mass message to all the members of your organisation.
9. Team meetings
Have the managers at your organisation host team meetings to discuss the implementation of the new program. Your managers know and work with their team members and know exactly who would be a great fit for the program. Your team leaders can also be advocates of the program, conveying its significance.
10. Portray the value
The main factor in recruiting and retaining mentors is ensuring your company can express the value mentoring brings to the table. As mentoring is a voluntary experience, it’s crucial to showcase the impression it can have not only on them as an individual but the business in general. To illustrate the value, you need to have a plan in place to fully understand how you're going to reach these members and what methods you're going to use. Examples of this could be utilising email, producing videos and internal blog posts.
Final thoughts
When recruiting mentors for your program, it’s important to strategically plan your methods and truly understand how as an organisation you're able to demonstrate the value and impact the program brings to your staff members. Don’t wait until the last moment and leave the mentors to come to you, utilise these ideas to guarantee your mentoring program is as effective and thriving as possible.