Keep Top Talent With 3 Types of Mentors

Top talent is hard to find. It’s why so many organizations are shelling out so much money to send out teams of recruiters into the world. Once top talent is brought on-board, doesn’t mean it will stick around.

Salary is a part of it. Talented people expect to get paid well for their skills, but money isn’t usually enough to keep them on a team. Mental, spiritual, and personal attachments are much stronger factors in retaining workers. People are more likely to stick around if they feel they have a meaningful role and feel engaged with their work environment.

Effective mentoring goes a long way in retaining talented people. If we examine what mentoring looks like in today’s world it isn’t just “learning more” for people who have been in the company longer. Mentoring, done right, is much more tailored and unique to the mentor and mentee. Some people will need mentoring on skills and advice while others need more encouragement and emotional support.

Very few organizations think about mentorship as closely as they need to. Special attention needs to be given to how veteran employees and executives interact and relate to younger or new recruits. The best way to control these relationships is through a formal mentoring program. Mentoring programs can be controlled by HR and company executives to yield the best results for all those involved. Top-flight executives and veteran employees can be signed up as mentors and systematically paired with new recruits, talent, and lower-level employees to ensure they get the proper development and attention to grow within the company. Using powerful software (Like Wisdom Share provided by Mentor Resources) a single admin can supervise thousands of mentoring relationships.

Buddy/Peer Mentoring

This is a good starting point for mentoring. Buddy/Peer mentoring is focused on apprenticeship.

The early stages of employment (often referred to as on-boarding to a new job) can be some of the toughest times for an employee. Newly acquired talent can make the decision to stay with a company or leave based on their initial experiences. A good strategy to retain newly talented recruits is to integrate them into a mentorship program that pairs them up with a senior buddy or peer. Mentors can help take the bumps out of getting started in a new organization and also shorten the learning curve.

This type of mentoring focuses on honing specific skills and the organizational nuances of “this is how things are done here.” While there are similarities in how business is done across all companies, each individual workspace has its own unique methodologies that are picked up a lot faster by new employees when a mentor grooves them in.

Assigning a mentor from day one on someone’s new job is a great way of showing care and extra attention. This can go a long way in retaining top talent.

Career Mentoring

No matter how bright, how talented a new employee is they don’t have the experience of someone who has already walked the path. A mentor can guide an employee around the pitfalls and traps so they can be safely avoided and help ensure success.

Career mentoring also contextualizes an employees work. Employees can often feel like a cog in the machine, grinding away with no real understanding of how their job contributes to the bigger picture of the company.

A career mentor can make employees feel like someone “has their back.” Ideally, the mentor is someone who doesn’t work in the mentee’s immediate work environment. When a mentor comes from a separate area of the organization, it removes the “pressure” of production and impending performance reviews. Career mentors can provide guidance on how to function within an organization, provide needed orientation to how an employee’s work influences the overall picture and also help propel the mentee’s career.

Life Mentoring

This may be the most important type of mentor to provide to talented new employees. Life Mentors provide wisdom, experience, and guidance that isn’t strictly professional. This mentoring is generally provided by a more veteran executive to a junior employee.

Think of it as the ultimate sounding board. Someone with no bias, no skewed opinions or corporate viewpoints. A life mentor can listen and provide invaluable advice on life choices that may or may not be professional.

It’s the wise organization that exposes its fresh, new talent to alumni. Retention rates are proven to boost when companies showcase long-term veteran employees and make their experience accessible. This type of mentoring also shows new employees that the company considers them equally important as their clients or customers.

There are many types of mentoring and aspects to take into account to make it successful. You have to be very thorough and careful with your matching process to ensure talented new employees that you want to keep around get hooked up with the correct mentors who will help them grow within your ranks. But, it starts with making mentoring a priority in your company culture and making bold efforts to show top talent you are willing to invest in them as people.

Mentor Resources can help any company to leverage technology to create tailored career development programs that are cost-effective. Our mentoring software - Wisdom Share is a cloud-based program that is simple and comes with guided workflows. Included are tools for administrators to attract, enroll, connect, and guide participants. We also provide analytics to ensure you can monitor your employee development program and easily see ROI metrics.

Reach out to us today for a Free Demonstration of our software.