So you’ve started a mentoring programme and managed to create some mentor-mentee pairs… After a few months, you notice that some pairs are ok, some others or even many others are not seeing each other regularly, or even haven’t gone passed the first meeting. It may be a sign that the match is not a good fit, but it may not only be due to conflicting personalities; your matching process may be the problem.

After nearly ten years of designing and auditing mentoring programmes, I have seen my share of mentoring matches, mismatches, unethical pairings, and downright foolish matching processes. In this article, I’m focusing on the three key criteria of a matching process and explore how they are impacted by the various forms of matching such as random, speed-matching, manual, semi-autonomous and pro-active.