Pairing Best Practices

We know you’re extremely close to launching your program! Your next step is to get ready to open up pairing your mentors and mentees. After launching hundreds of mentorship programs with organizations across the world, we wanted to send over two key questions we frequently get before pairing:

 

The article below explains the two questions in full and will take about 5 minutes to read. As always, reach out to your Customer Success Manager if you need any support. After this, you’ve officially kicked off your mentorship program!

You can expect to see a big jump in activity when you open the doors to allow pairing to begin. It’s common that, when looking at pairing activity, there’s a big spike when pairing starts, but there’s also a long tail. For that reason, you should be aware of the three waves of pairing in your program.

In the first wave of pairing, most of your participants will match up with one another and schedule their first meeting. These will be the enthusiastic and excited mentors and mentees. Roughly 50-70% of your users will pair up during the first week.

The second wave is when a mentee does not receive their first choice, but gets accepted/approved by their alternate choices. This typically is 3 days after they submit their preferences (as their first pairing request would have expired).

The third wave of pairings is for the stragglers. They may have been busy and missed some promotional emails, or they’re a little less engaged than others. These participants will need a friendly reminder to sign up, complete the questionnaire, and match.

Overall, give the pairing process two weeks to get everyone on board. Doing so will give you time to answer questions that mentors or mentees have and get everyone set up.

One of the biggest pain points of running a mentorship program manually is the number of emails that need to be sent out. The good news is that Together has your back for announcing your mentor and mentee pairings.

The moment a mentee & mentor are paired (whether a mentor approves the mentee OR a mentee is manually paired with a mentor), Together’s platform sends out an automatic email with the subject (see below).

 

You can find this email in the Together platform & customize it in the Emails > Pairing Process > Mentorship Assignment.

 

The mentee and mentor are prompted to “Schedule Session” where they are brought into the platform the schedule Session 1. The onus is typically on the mentee for this, but we have seen the mentor reach out first in some organizations.

 

We look forward to working together. At any time throughout your onboarding please do not hesitate to reach out!