Onboarding new mentors

Onboarding is a hard task for small communities, you do not have the voice nor resources for people to want to be part of your program. You want to sell yourself and make yourself known! If people have to work for you, you must offer them something that motivates them to do so, and make them part of the community.

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The standard for any community the Edgerton Center has built is to recruit mentors from the one thing you already or will have: Students. Part of being a successful mentor is having been part of the program as a student and know how it is experienced from within. But, how do you select the right mentors? How do you chose people who will succeed at this?

Choosing the right mentors

To be honest and from experience, recuriting people is very counterintuitive. Those who you think will fail end up being the most successful ones. However, there are some common factors that you should look out for when recruiting people. Let’s talk about what to do and what not to do.

Listen to what they are saying or how they are saying it

When talking with a potential mentor, there are two ways of knowing if it is the right person for a role:

Listening to what they are saying: Introverts exist and they might not be very open about how they feel or their excitement. Their words are valuable, listen to them, as they might not feel super excited because how they are.
How they say it: It might not make much sense, but are they excited? Does it feel like they want to be here?

TLDR: do not laser focus on one stereotype of mentor that is very open and loves to help and do things. Almost anyone who wants to be a mentor can be a mentor, but they must want to be one.

Understand what they want and how you can help

It is key to understand that even though people will work for you, they want something in exchange. This might be a learning experience, curriculum, money or making friends. Reasons may vary, but people won’t work for you for free. A program like this, tends to provide an educational experience and connections with people worldwide (plus friends). Understanding these reasons and acknowledging that people have goals and objectives will help you understand what you are looking for.

Learning takes time

New mentors have very little clue about the inner workings of your program, it is normal. From personal experience, it takes between four to eight months for a new member to learn all information necessary to fulfill their role. If new mentors feel lost or struggle to understand, it has probably little to do with their passion, skills or fitness for the role. 99% of the time it is due to them lacking knowledge. So, TLDR, give mentors time, space and be repetitive when teaching. Be ready for them to make mistakes, it is normal.

Do not choose based on how long they will stay

I believe it is key to accept and understand that 90% of mentors will leave the team in the next two to five years. It is normal and happens to all undergraduate clubs, programs and projects. This is something you must plan and play around, but never enforce people to be part of the team for a certain period of time. From personal experience, I tend to plan for an average duration of two years, what means that every year you will lose around 25% of the team. This gives you plenty of space to plan for knowledge transfer between members.

Don’t be afraid to make mistakes

Onboarding is hard. You will select mentors that may end up flopping, last for 2 months or don’t fully understand what they are supposed to do forever. This is completely normal and part of being a leader is to talk to these mentors and figure out what went wrong or why they are struggling. Having honest conversations with them will go a long way and help you and them learn.