In our first installment of the “Mentoring for the 6 Stages of the Employee Lifecycle” series, we tackled attraction. The first touch someone has with your employer brand is crucial, so it’s important to make your company values known from the start.
But ensuring your business’s mentoring program is front and centre when increasing brand exposure is just the beginning. Potential new employees are looking for personal growth and development opportunities in addition to decent pay. So mentoring programs can be a game-changer when it comes to enhancing recruitment strategies. When implemented correctly, these programs have a number of advantages that can help companies secure competitive talent. This is especially important given the current War for Talent.
This is Part Three of our series on Mentoring for the 6 Stages of the Employee Lifecycle. Read our introduction to the series here.
Why Your Recruitment Efforts Are More Important Now Than Ever
According to Forbes, employees now expect a personalised employee experience that meets their needs at every stage of their careers. This means “employers must provide an exceptional employee experience across all touchpoints, from recruitment and onboarding to development and succession planning.” The Financial Times echoes this sentiment. PwC’s Fiona Camenzuli states, “The focus needs to be on the whole employee experience, rather than just how they feel at a moment in time.”
Forbes found that within the employee lifecycle, current hiring processes simply aren’t cutting it. In fact, they say “People are rejecting jobs based on the quality of the recruitment process. Thoughtful recruitment processes can be a differentiator in attracting and retaining talent.”
The Benefits of Mentoring Programs in Recruitment
Having a mentoring program is one way you can differentiate your business during the recruitment phase and ultimately attract top talent.
In fact, a different Forbes article entitled “Why A Mentorship Program Can Help Your Organization Win The War For Talent” states that there’s an often-overlooked tool that organisations can lean on to help employees feel connected and valued in the workplace: a mentor.
Working in a fully remote or hybrid environment can pose a risk to your employees’ overall well-being, longevity, and even career trajectory at your company. This is because of the subsequent lack of casual conversations and general office camaraderie. This is especially true for new hires or more junior employees.
Thankfully, a mentoring program can help bridge that gap. Mentoring programs offer employees a way to learn, connect, and grow alongside someone they might not get the chance to otherwise. Furthermore, a mentoring program not only fosters relationship cultivation but also employer brand building. The availability of mentoring programs demonstrates a commitment to developing talent and creating a positive work environment – something that is very attractive to candidates. So having this initiative to feature during your recruitment efforts not only makes it easier for companies to target job opportunities to folks who have already warmed up to their brands but also to get candidates to get even more interested in joining your organization.
Mentoring programs can also help reduce the costs associated with recruiting. Not only can they provide valuable information to go on when making hiring decisions, but mentoring programs can also reduce reliance on expensive third-party recruiters. Additionally, they have proven to reduce turnover in an organization, making them an excellent long-term investment for recruitment.
Using Mentoring Programs as a Recruitment Tool
Incorporating a mentoring program in your recruitment efforts accomplishes two things – it provides a unique opportunity for companies to directly connect with potential recruits (such as interns and graduates) and crucially, they also provide your team with the opportunity to gain insight into target candidates. These give you invaluable feedback on the effectiveness of existing recruitment strategies, thus allowing you to adjust your strategies and target better-suited candidates while maintaining the same cost-effectiveness.
Mentorship programs also allow you to showcase your organization’s work culture, values, and goals. Doing so helps to attract and select aligned talent who will fit in your existing team better. This helps immensely with reducing the time and resources spent on interviewing and assessing candidates who may not be suitable for the role.
As part of this process, mentors can then provide helpful feedback on recruiting practices and techniques that can improve the success rate of your efforts. When combined with traditional recruiting strategies, mentoring programs offer invaluable insights into target candidates that allow recruiters to make more informed decisions.
If you’re interested in learning more about how your organization can benefit from embedding mentoring into all stages of the employee lifecycle, download the webinar kit for a series on this very topic.
Join Mentorloop’s Head of Sales for EMEA, Jess Benham as she discusses the benefits of embedding a culture of mentoring in your organization to support all 6 stages of the employee lifecycle.
How Mentoring Software Can Help
Incorporating a mentoring program into the recruitment phase of your employee lifecycle may seem like a difficult task. But the truth is it can be made simple with mentoring software like Mentorloop.
Mentorloop’s Enterprise solution fits into large organisations’ employee experience design at every stage—including the recruitment stage.
That’s because Mentorloop Enterprise was built with enterprises and large associations in mind. Mentorloop takes your mentoring program to the next level with powerful algorithmic matching, customisations, single sign-on, and more.
Learn more about Mentorloop Enterprise today.
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