Mentor Matching Solutions

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Matching and Pairing - The best possible match?

At its core, mentoring is really about establishing mutually beneficial partnerships between individuals to achieve specific goals. That said - successfully matching mentors and mentees is one of the most critical aspects of your mentoring program.

Our recent Mentoring Survey, completed by leading global corporations and organizations, reveals that matching and pairing is one of the top 3 biggest challenges facing those who implement mentoring programs. At Insala, our goal is to help you bridge that gap within your own program. Our solutions help you generate the best possible matches to provide the basis for the best possible mentoring program within your organization.

So what is the key ingredient of a “best possible match” – not just a match that’s "good enough"? That key ingredient is a clear and specific business objective for the mentoring program – which will indicate why you’re creating the mentoring program and what you expect to achieve with it. This will determine both your ideal pool of mentors and mentees as well as your specific matching criteria.

We believe that generating successful and sustainable mentor-mentee pairs is the most critical factor of program success. So we help you achieve not just “good matches”, but the best possible matches within your mentoring programs using comprehensive mentor and mentee data gathering, matching criteria based on business objectives, best-fit matching and pairing techniques, and efficiency-maximizing technology tools.

The following 6-step process highlights the key components of our approach:

• Step 1: Identify specific business objectives
• Step 2: Select mentors and mentee pools based on objectives
• Step 3: Determine matching criteria based on business objectives
• Step 4: Create application and qualification questions for mentors and mentees
• Step 5: Decide the most effective matching method i.e. self-matching, facilitated matching, etc.)
• Step 6: Determine most efficient method to facilitate matching and pairing, whether it's online or offline tool

Based on our 20 years of experience of helping organizations implement successful mentoring programs we have produced a short whitepaper that includes our 5 best-practices for matching and pairing

The Hi-Impact Mentoring® Matching Workshop

The workshop consists of 2 expert-led strategy sessions in which key stakeholders create a comprehensive plan for how exactly the matching and pairing within your program will work - based on your organization’s business objective and measurements.

The workshop is designed to help with the following:

1.) Create a solid foundation for matching and pairing based on a strong business case for mentoring using our proven approach
2.) Set matching criteria that enable mentors and mentees to produce the best possible partnership and program results

Session One – 2 Hours

Participants: Key stakeholders including executive sponsors and program leaders
Goal: - Establish a strong foundation for matching and pairing by determining business objective and success measurements of mentoring program and targeted employees/individuals

Includes:

• Step 1: Identifying specific business objectives
• Step 2: Selecting mentors and mentee pools based on objectives

Session Two – 2 Hours

Participants: Program leaders / managers
Goal: Set matching and pairing criteria, create application forms, set up matching process

Includes:

• Step 3: Determining matching criteria based on business objectives
• Step 4: Creating application and qualification questions for mentors and mentees
• Step 5: Deciding the matching method
• Step 6: Determining the best tool to facilitate matching and pairing, whether it's online or offline tool

Hi-Impact Mentoring® Matching and Pairing Software

Using technology can maximize the efficiency of your matching and pairing process. To ensure the success of your program our subject matter experts can help you define the most appropriate criteria based on your business objectives. Our mentoring software supports various matching techniques to suit your program’s needs, as outlined below:

Multi-Match: Especially designed for very large groups of participants who need to be matched. You will first need to determine the desired matching and pairing criteria.

Individual-Match: Designed for small groups of individuals within your overall participant pool, who are deemed “more difficult” or “less straightforward” to match based on existing criteria. Ideally used in conjunction with Multi-Match to complete matches for all program participants within a large pool. You will first need to determine the desired matching and pairing criteria.

Self-Match: Intended for mentoring programs with limited administrative resources, or a goal of facilitating self-directed matching based on the mentor and mentees’ own initiative. Self-Match can be easily used along with online mentor and mentee profiles, enabling mentors and mentees to view a snapshot of individuals with whom they would potentially like to pair up.

Want to schedule a call with a mentoring expert to learn more about our matching and pairing technology? Request a demo today.

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