Mentorship is a powerful tool in any organization's talent development toolkit. But the outcomes of your mentoring program hinge on the orchestration of your mentor-mentee matches.

‍

Mentor matching is the process of pairing mentees with mentors based on experience, goals, and other defined criteria. Nailing the right connections can be the key to creating truly impactful mentorship opportunities that enable your employees and your organization to thrive. But crafting those strategic matches can require much more intention and precision (and technology) than you might think.

This guide takes a closer look at where mentor matching often goes off track—and how you can approach it more intentionally to ensure your pairings support the goals of your program.

Why your mentor-mentee matches matter more than you think 

Mentor-mentee matching sounds easy in theory. It’s as simple as pairing two employees together, right?

Nope. Effective mentor matching is much more than that.

Mentor matching goes far beyond putting two random people in a room together. When it comes to mentorship programs that impact talent outcomes, matches have to be strategic. 

When done right, your matching criteria align with your overall program and employee goals. Get the matches right and participants stay engaged, all while driving growth, collaboration, and moving the needle on the talent outcomes that matter most. 

When mentor-mentee matches aren’t quite optimized, at best, you end up with employees who might be excited about their new connection but fail to reach their goals or contribute to organizational objectives. And at worst, employees are left disengaged, leading to wasted valuable time.

Stop making these mentor-mentee matching mistakes

Organizations tend to have an oversimplified view of mentorship matching. It’s often what leads program managers to create ineffective matches and fail to drive the talent outcomes that really matter.

Here are some common challenges and mistakes to avoid when matching mentors and mentees in your corporate mentorship program. 

Mistake #1: Matching based on seniority alone (without other criteria) 

Many corporate mentorship programs have one matching criteria: seniority. The assumption is that as long as a mentor is matched with someone who’s more experienced, they’ll learn and it’ll drive results.

While level and seniority can—and likely will be—one of your matching criteria, it’s important to think more strategically about what will lead to the most impactful mentoring conversations and move the dial on your overall program objectives. 

Some criteria beyond seniority you may want to lean into include:

• Skills
• Interests
• Experience
• Location and time zones
• Program goals, individual goals,and desired outcomes

💡Consider this: Don’t just match for sameness. Match for stretch. Pairing employees with different backgrounds, experiences, or perspectives can spark fresh thinking, challenge assumptions, and lead to more creative, collaborative problem-solving. That’s where real growth happens.

Mistake #2: Ignoring overall program objectives in matching

Matching isn’t just about appeasing your employees. You need to support individual employee development goals while also prioritizing your talent and business objectives. And that’s impossible to do without factoring those business goals into your matching criteria. 

When you’re hyper-focused on participant goals or just  matching people at random, mentorship serves solely as a feel-good initiative and fails to drive organizational impact at scale. 

For example, let’s say one of your talent goals is to help mid-career employees understand potential career paths within the organization, driving retention and engagement. Your matching criteria should consider who can best help employees learn more about those opportunities. Is it someone who works cross-functionally? Or maybe even someone that’s a skip level above that can paint a stronger picture of the larger organizational objectives? Are these employees from specific teams and job functions? 

“It’s about how you create space for individuals to be able to articulate what they want, but also have the overarching 'here's what we're trying to achieve as a program.'” - Christine Silva, Talent Advisor, former leader at RBC, Catalyst, Shopify

Mistake #3: Failing to provide clear guidance for productive matches 

We often assume that mentorship relationships must be fully organic in nature in order to make an impact. But the opposite can actually be true. 

Of course, we can’t force relationships. But we also can’t expect people to direct themselves entirely either. A lot of participants may have never taken on the role of mentee or mentor before. So even if you get everything right when it comes to a mentor-mentee match, without a nudge in the right direction, you’ll find that conversations and outcomes drift away from your desired path.

‍Curriculums and discussion guides help skip the awkward stage of not knowing what to talk about while helping keep conversations on track. For example, pre-meeting resources, like an article or video, can help spark conversations. Prompts and questions can help steer the conversation in the direction of the skills and knowledge you want people to work on.

People will take it in their own direction, and that's part of the beauty of how it gets personalized. People make it relevant to them, but you want to give them enough of a starting point that there's common language. They're anchoring back on organizational resources, common language, and things that your HR leaders, your business leaders would want people understanding. And it becomes just a way to reinforce those topics.” -  Christine Silva, Talent Advisor, former leader at RBC, Catalyst, Shopify

Mistake #4: Trying to manually match mentors and mentees at scale 

For a lot of organizations, mentor-mentee matching ends up stuck in spreadsheets. This often happens because it feels more familiar than implementing a tool to help. Manual matching can seem like the path of least resistance, even if it takes considerably more time and creates more work (and risk) down the line. 

At first glance, it seems manageable. But as your program grows, this manual approach quickly becomes unsustainable. Manual matching might work in very small cohorts, but at scale, it leaves admins spending hours trying to connect the dots across skills, goals, and program objectives. The result? Slower processes, inconsistent matches, and lost time that could be better spent on other work or strengthening your overall mentorship strategy.

Just as importantly, manual matching opens the door to human bias. Without a structured, criteria-based system, decisions can be influenced—knowingly or not—by assumptions and preferences. Over time, this can lead to inequitable or inconsistent pairings that undermine the credibility of your program. When participants feel their match was arbitrary or unfair, it erodes trust in the process, lowers engagement, and can unintentionally exclude the very people your program is meant to support. 

“I remember when we did the pilot, it was me and a colleague from our ERG, the Black Employee Coalition (BEC), in an hour-long meeting trying to manually match people. We had a slide deck and everyone's strengths and weaknesses and the mentor strengths. And we were just trying our best to finagle something together. We're incredibly grateful for the thought that goes into matching algorithms. It's given us time back to really be able to manage programs holistically, instead of being so much in the weeds.” - Michelle Rojas Blackett, former Director, People Business Partner, Spring Health

3 steps to identify strategic mentor-mentee matches at your organization 

When it comes to creating the right mentor-mentee matches, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution. But the success of your matches often hinges on two key elements: 

1. Finding the optimal criteria to determine mentor-mentee matches.
2. Establishing scalable processes to help you effectively facilitate those matches.

So first, let’s talk about some best practices for creating the right matching criteria for your organization’s mentorship program. Then, we’ll cover some concrete examples.

1. Identify stakeholder priorities and overall program goals

Successful mentorship programs start with strong goals. Which means you should have a clear understanding of the metrics you’re aiming to move before beginning the mentor-mentee matching process.

At the end of the day, your matches are only meaningful if they support your mentorship program goals. So, your program objectives should play a key role in determining your matching criteria. Otherwise, you’ll end up saddled with random matches that don’t actually address the things you—and key stakeholders within your organization—care about. We’ll dig into real examples of goal-aligned matching criteria later on.

‍📌 READ MORE: How to Set Strong Mentorship Program Goals

2. Consider employee and participant goals 

Mentorship programs should prioritize both your organizational and employee objectives. Naturally, your organization is made up of individuals who have unique needs and goals that keep them productive and motivated. So if they don’t feel that the person they’re being matched with can help them with those individual goals, they’re unlikely to feel fully engaged in the mentorship program.

How do you get the inside scoop on individual employee and participant goals? Just ask! Surveys and program intake forms can help you identify what employees care about, so you can factor this into your matching criteria, and everyone can get the most out of their mentoring experience. 

💡 Remember that individual goals shouldn’t override your program’s larger purpose. The key is to find alignment—using participant input to inform, not derail, strategic matching.

3. Review and establish matching criteria based on gathered data

Once you gather all the data and understand your desired outcomes, you can begin to determine and optimize your matching criteria. Most importantly, this process ensures your mentor-mentee pairings are purpose-built to align with both organizational priorities and employee goals.  

As you define your matching criteria, it’s also important to consider how you allocate mentoring opportunities across your organization. A common pitfall is relying too heavily on senior leaders as mentors, limiting both program scalability and access. 

Depending on your program goals, consider pairing mentees with mentors just one or two levels up, or even facilitating peer mentoring. These approaches will expand the reach of your program and create meaningful development opportunities for junior and mid-level employees as they grow into leadership by mentoring others.

“There's no one-size-fits-all to what are the right matching criteria to use. It all depends on your goals. The goals of the program—in terms of the program design and what all the stakeholders care about—and the goals of each individual participant.” - Christine Silva, Talent Advisor, former leader at RBC, Catalyst, Shopify

Examples of mentor matching criteria in action 

The most common mentor-mentee match that organizations default to is pairing a junior mentee with a senior mentor. This type of traditional mentoring relationship is valuable in many instances, but there are many other mentor-mentee matches that can help you reach different talent goals.

Here are some examples of mentor-mentee matches based on different criteria and how you can tailor them based on your program objectives and talent goals. Depending on your organizational priorities, your criteria may factor in a number of these potential matches to create the most valuable matches for everyone involved.

1. To foster talent mobility: match employees with teams/managers hiring in lateral or upward roles.
2. To boost skills development: match participants based on complementary skills they’re seeking or can offer.
3. To accelerate onboarding: match new hires with tenured colleagues.
4. To increase cross-functional collaboration and break down silos: match employees from different teams and functions.
5. To foster promotion and succession: match high-potential talent with leaders in their respective lines of succession.
6. To boost sentiment for return-to-office (RTO): match participants based on location or office.
7. To encourage integration post-M&A or during organizational transformation: match colleagues newly on the same team or same office.
8. To increase global connection: match employees across different time zones and regions.
9. To foster leadership: match future leaders with team leaders or mentorship.
10. ‍To promote diversity and DEI role models: Match members within an employee resource group (ERG) to foster community, or with employees outside the group to enhance connection and opportunity.

📌 READ MORE: 10 Different Types of Mentoring in the Workplace‍

Why manual mentor-mentee matching will hold you back

Once you’ve established the criteria for the best mentorship matches for your program, you’ll  need to find scalable and efficient mentorship solutions to actually help you facilitate the most effective matches. 

Manual matching might seem manageable at first, but it quickly becomes a roadblock. Here's why:

• It’s time-consuming and resource-heavy. Admins often spend hours manually connecting the dots between skills, goals, and program needs—time that could be better spent on other work or strengthening your overall mentorship strategy.

• It doesn’t scale. What works for a small cohort quickly breaks down in larger programs, where volume and complexity make manual matching unsustainable.

• It introduces errors and bias. Like any manual process, spreadsheet-based matching is vulnerable to human error and unconscious bias, which can affect the quality of your matches.

• It limits flexibility across different talent groups. Varying criteria for early talent, managers, leadership, or underrepresented groups are tough to manage manually—making it harder to meet diverse needs with precision.

• It creates inconsistent outcomes. Without a systematized approach, matches may feel arbitrary, weakening employee trust and engagement.

• It slows down momentum. The longer it takes to match participants, the harder it is to build early excitement and keep people engaged in your program.

• It feels easier at first but costs more in the long run. Many teams stick with manual matching because it feels familiar or less effort upfront. But over time, it drains capacity and limits the strategic potential of your program.

“Creating mentoring programs in the past were really spreadsheet based. It required a huge amount of work from a small number of individuals who had to take on the work of gathering the mentors and matching people manually.” - Gina Tesla, VP, Sustainability & Social Impact, Coupa Software

Fortunately, modern mentorship program administrators don’t have to go it alone. There are scalable solutions that minimize lift while maximizing impact. 

The new way: How to automatically pair mentors and mentees with smart-matching technology

Smart-matching tools and algorithms take the guesswork and heavy lifting out of mentor-mentee matching. They take the data and criteria you provide to generate the most effective and impactful pairings.

You set the strategy, and the tech does the optimizing in just a few steps:

1. Determine your criteria: Activate the larger talent goals and outcomes you’ve identified for your mentorship program to create a list of matching criteria that will make the biggest impact. 

2. Integrate with HRIS: Reduce admin work and ensure your matches reflect the latest employee data by connecting with your existing employee data, where possible.

3. Integrate employee preferences: Personalize matches even further by factoring in employee needs, goals, and preferences.

4. Optimize your impact: Whether you’ve got a few key criteria or a long wish list, watch your smart-matching criteria in action and fine-tune to maximize your matches and results based on your list of participants.

5. Make mentorship magic: Sit back, relax, and let the algorithm automatically introduce your strategic matches across the organization with the click of a button and kickstart those conversations. 

Smart-matching algorithms are a powerful tool for creating scalable, high-impact mentoring programs that help your employees and business thrive. 

Make smart-matching your mentorship superpower

Over 200 organizations trust 10KC’s smart-matching algorithm to create employee connections at scale that fuel engagement and catalyze program success. From multi-dimensional mentoring experiences to personalized pathways, 10KC’s mentorship software is redefining workplace mentoring, helping modern companies develop stronger teams and drive exceptional results.