A company-sponsored mentorship program rooted in mentees formally pitching mentors for guidance on a three-month project. Built from grassroots efforts, later adopted and promoted by HR to drive employee engagement, retention, and recruitment.
My role
Community manager. Recruited and supported prospective mentors and mentees to build a mentorship marketplace spanning teams (sales, engineering, HR) and seniority (from interns to the CEO).
Champion to leadership. Led the effort to establish an official company-sponsored mentorship program, and proved out the process by running a pilot with one mentor/mentee pair.
Mentor and mentee. Participated in the program myself, supporting and executing both data science and product management projects.
Execution
We'd been advised that company mentorship programs usually die off just two cycles in, usually because too much demand is put on mentors and mentees and participants burn out.
To keep a program running longer than two cycles, we landed on three key factors:
Mentees drive the mentorship relationship from start to finish.
Mentors have the final say in who they choose to mentor.
The official mentorship relationship only lasts three months.
With these pillars in mind we created the Co-Pilot Academy. Mentees pitch prospective mentors on why they want to be mentored and for what purpose. Mentors receive pitches and choose to accept or decline. If accepted, the three-month mentorship relationship begins.
To gain leadership buy-in and company sponsorship, we ran a three-month pilot with one official mentor/mentee match, then followed up with a demonstration of results to leadership, who greenlit a full rollout in fall 2018.
Challenges
Mentees don't know what to pitch. Mentees often struggled to know what kind of project to propose. We built a template and held office hours to help them get past that hurdle.
Mentors are afraid no one will pick them. A common refrain from prospective mentors was, “what if no one picks me?” We focused recruiting on senior folks and shared examples of previous pitches to build confidence that the marketplace had a need for their skillset.
Mentors sometimes drop the ball. We talked with previous mentees to learn what the hangups were, to prevent issues in the future (like ensuring manager buy-in so a mentee could spend work-week time on their project).
Achievements
50+ matches in the first six sessions, with great traction from the very first session — 100+ mentors and mentees signing up, and on average 10 pitches submitted each session.
Mentees gained promotions from their work, working closely with company leaders across the organization and learning new skills that helped advance their careers.
The program became a recruitment darling. Hiring managers were keen to discuss it directly with candidates, and it became a recurring hit in hiring conversations.