03: Timeline & Recruitment

The third element after Purpose and Population, is your Timeline. This often goes hand-in-hand with the way you with to recruit your participants, so we’ll take a look at both below. 

Recruitment Styles

There are three main recruitment styles that mentoring programs generally fall in. While you’re not limited to these, they can help you design a program in tandem with a timeline that works for your organisation. Most importantly, by knowing your timeline this will make it easy to communicate to participants, stakeholders and plan any extra activities such as launch events or guest speakers.

🔓 Open Enrolment / Always-on:

Great for organisations who want to empower their participants to organise themselves into a match at a time that suits them, where participants can join at any time. Mentorloop will guide them through milestones and send them relevant bite-sized content so they get the right content at the right time, yet still have a framework and structure to work through.

💡 On / Off:

This approach is great if you plan to recruit in bursts. Recruiting in bursts can help drum up excitement for the program, motivate those who may be ‘on the fence’ to join before a closing date and give you, the time you need to dedicate towards marketing the program. Working with internal marketing teams is a great way to uncover recruitment opportunities you may not have thought of in your organisation. 

⏱  Program Cohorts:

This option will have clear start and end dates for the program. If your organisation is advertising the program as part of a membership offering or cannot afford to run multiple campaigns, cohorts may be the right option for you. In some corporates, cohorts are tied to annual performance reviews, where programs run for 6-months or 12-month periods. This option is also good if you have your own resources and events and wish for all of your participants to be on a linear journey.

Meet Ally Cedeno (Program Coordinator behind Women Offshore Mentoring Program), with her tips on how she implements the “On/Off” method: