All About Recruitment: How Does it Work?

Mentor Collective’s platform allows you to expertly facilitate and manage your mentor and mentee recruitment process, making outreach and onboarding for participants simple for your institution. The recruitment process generally follows four primary steps:

1. Provide Participant Directory Information 
2. Institutional Promotion
3. Institution Invites Participants
4. Mentor Collective Follow-Up Messaging

Step 1. Provide Participant Directory Information 

Once you have determined your target mentor and mentee population, you can provide participant directory information to Partner Support (partnersupport@mentorcollective.org) for upload into our system, in order to aid in Mentor Collective’s recruitment and participant support efforts. 

Learn more about what participant information is required and how to share this data here.

Mentor Collective is FERPA compliant.

Step 2. Institutional Promotion

Next, it is crucial for your team to identify channels for promotion at your institution. The goals of this step include: generating awareness of the mentorship program, establishing connections across the institution with relevant stakeholders, and offering the benefits of mentorship to every eligible participant. 

Recommendations

• Learn how to recruit in a participant-centered, strategic, and visible way in our webinar, Boost Mentorship Recruitment Through Orientation.
• Ensure Mentor Collective is an Approved Sender at your institution.
• Create a landing page on your institution’s website. 
• Promote the program on institutional social media accounts.
• Create, print, and distribute flyers across the institution.
• Host recruitment or informational events or facilitate tabling at your institution. 
• Collaborate with relevant stakeholders and departments that can deliver ongoing invitations to participate in mentorship. 

Review Mentor Collective's full Recruitment Materials Library here!

Step 3. Institution Invites Participants 

Mentor Collective always recommends that the initial invitation email be sent from your institution. This informs eligible participants about the program and establishes Mentor Collective as a legitimate partner of your institution. Your invitation email should be sent from someone at your institution that mentors / mentees would be receptive to.

For your convenience, Mentor Collective provides invitation email templates that you can customize to fit your needs, your program’s branding, and/or your institutional “voice.”

For easiest use, open the PDF in your preferred editing tool (Google Docs, Microsoft Word, etc.).

The registration links will be provided to you by your Mentor Collective representative.

When to Invite Mentees and Mentors

Mentor Collective recommends staggering recruitment efforts - more specifically, mentors should be invited at least two weeks prior to mentees. This staggered approach allows mentors enough time to complete their matching survey and required mentor training, and avoids a situation where mentees sign up to participate but have to wait an extended period of time to be matched. 

Talk with your Mentor Collective representative to coordinate the best time to send each invitation email, and be sure to let them know when they have been successfully sent. 

Step 4. Mentor Collective Follow-Up Messaging

After the initial invitation email is sent, Mentor Collective's automated messaging system will begin additional recruitment messaging. Mentor Collective’s user-tested and finely tuned messaging encourages participants to sign up for the program and automatically adjusts based on what actions the mentor or mentee has (or has not) taken, in order to guide them to the appropriate next steps.

Once recruitment has begun, matching can begin shortly after.

If eligible participants have questions about the program, replies to Mentor Collective’s messaging will be sent to our Participant Support team and we will provide any necessary assistance. 

Review recruitment progress on the Onboarding & Matching tab of the Partner Dashboard! 

FAQ

❓When is the best time to recruit participants? 

• The ideal time to begin recruitment will vary for each program, based on when the mentor and mentee population will be most likely to pay attention to their institutional emails and when they will find the most value in mentorship. 
• For mentorship programs serving first year students, many programs benefit from the following recruitment timeline: 
  • Recruit mentors prior to the end of the academic year.
  • Recruit mentees throughout the summer. 
• Work with your Mentor Collective representative to determine the best timing for your specific program! 

❓I’m not seeing the recruitment results I expected. What should I do?

• Review common recruitment blockers and how we can approach them here.
• Review common strategies and interventions to boost recruitment here.