05: Matching Criteria

Next up, we’re going to explore different types of matching criteria.
Depending on your program’s purpose, you may wish to tailor these to suit your program goals.  

Matching Criteria

These criteria will assist you in designing your sign up form and in turn, what you’d like to match your participants on. Pause for a moment and have a think about what might be useful to capture when a participant signs up.

For example, if your program has goals to connect people across regions or teams, you might want to capture their geographic location (to connect teams overseas for example) or perhaps the team they belong to (to encourage cross-departmental connections).

Below we explore four of the top matching categories/criteria:

🌏 Location:

Match people in the same location, or break down geographical silos and broaden their horizons. Encourage cross-departmental relationships and bring back those incidental ‘watercooler ‘ chats your people might miss out on when moving remote or hybrid work.

⏳ Experience:

Whether you’re encouraging traditional ‘hierarchical’ mentoring relationships, reverse mentoring, or connecting a flatter structure – remember that sometimes the greatest insight can come from our peers.

💡  Skills:

Match based on key skills, or promote diversity of thought and make the non-obvious connection available by matching on differing interests or adjacent skillsets.

⚽️  Goals:

The best mentoring relationships are formed around alignment on outcomes, so goals are a crucial ingredient of the matching process. Match your people based on what they want to learn or what they want to offer others. 

Of course, there are other criteria you may wish to match participants on, such as gender if you’re running a program to support women in leadership. With Mentorloop, you can ‘weight’ these criteria to make one more important than the other and set rules around each one.

The Smart Matching algorithm takes this feedback into account when suggesting and pairing mentoring relationships and always considers the entire cohort; ensuring every participant has an equitable match. With a satisfaction rating of over 92%, you can be confident every participant has access to their life-changing connection.