New-hire mentor

Selecting a mentor for your new hire

To run a successful mentorship program, it’s best to set up a system where your established employees can sign up to become a mentor. The best mentors are the ones who are actually passionate about advising people, so they’ll gladly raise their hand to join the program.

In order to select the best possible mentors for your new hire, consider having those interested fill out a quick form about their background, why they want to be a mentor, and what they can bring to the table. Depending on each of your potential mentor’s roles, make sure they have enough years of experience and the skillset to truly help your new hires reach their potential.

After you vet each mentor and choose the best ones, match them with a new hire who’s in the same department as them (doesn’t have to be the same team), has similar career aspirations, and has compatible personalities.

Training your mentors

To level up in their careers, mentees need to focus on enhancing three core competencies: their hard skills, soft skills, and network. Here’s how you can train your mentors to help them offer the best possible guidance to their mentees. 

Hard skills

Honing job-specific skills is a pretty straightforward endeavor, but mentors can help expedite their mentees’ progress by first understanding their strengths, weaknesses, and goals. Then they can work together to build a plan to find opportunities to employ their strengths and improve their weaknesses. And by making a concerted effort to execute this plan, mentees can ultimately achieve their goals. 

Soft skills

Humans are social, emotional creatures. Learning how to be a delight to work with is just as important as honing your job-related skills. To move up in the working world, people need to enjoy working with you and, in turn, vouch for you. So when it comes to soft skills, just like with their hard skills, mentors should work with their mentees to identify their strengths and weaknesses, then employ and improve them. It’s also crucial for mentors to lay out the inner workings of their organization so their mentees can navigate the structure of their company in the best way possible.  

Network

You can be the most talented, highly skilled professional in your industry, but if no one knows who you are, then you’re severely stunting your potential for growth. Building an extensive network not only helps you acquire new knowledge and sharpen your skills but it also boosts the chance of getting a referral for a job opportunity that you might not come across otherwise. Mentors can help their mentees grow their network by giving them the chance to tap into theirs. 

Setting expectations for your mentors

A successful mentorship program needs standards. Make sure to set expectations for your mentors on: 

• how often they should meet with their mentees
• how long their meetings should be 
• the topics they should be discussing with their mentees
• how often they should check in on Slack to see how their mentees are doing
• how available and attentive they should be with their mentees when they have questions or need guidance

Remembering these guidelines can be a lot for your mentors, though. So consider assigning them as tasks in your onboarding automation platform. It will automatically send reminders and notifications to your mentors that you can set up in advance.