For numerous companies today, the struggle with employee retention is a challenge known all too well. On the bright side, there’s a trick to handling this issue, which isn’t as popular as it should be: mentorship.
Setting up a mentorship plan for your employees takes a lot of intentionality and strategizing, but it can be tricky. Mentors have an undeniable effect on their mentees, so you must be focused on identifying the best ones for your company.
To help you do this, we’ve done some heavy lifting and found 10 key qualities a good mentor should have. In this guide, we will share them with you and explain how to screen candidates for these essential skills and, in turn, hire only the best for your company.
What is a mentor?
A mentor is an individual with extensive experience in a specific field who guides junior employees with less experience in the same or a similar role. These mentors have a primary responsibility of offering all the necessary support, knowledge, and direction to the employees they are assigned.
Ultimately, mentors help their mentees navigate challenges and perform their roles more efficiently by applying their experience and sharing insights. This enables the junior employees to become more productive and motivated to perform in their roles.
The job of a great mentor isn’t just limited to technical skills and industry knowledge. Rather, they are concerned with the employees’ overall growth, both professionally and personally, to boost their usefulness to your company. Below are some more roles of a mentor:
- Mentors provide practical advice on career development to junior employees.
- They offer emotional support and encouragement to junior employees, boosting their confidence and motivation.
- They share valuable knowledge and insights about the role, especially with recruits.
- Mentors help employees build professional networks and connect with valuable contacts that can aid their professional journey.
- Excellent mentors give constructive criticism, appraisals, and general feedback on tasks and responsibilities assigned to the junior employees.
- They also serve as positive role models to the employees, demonstrating emulatable behaviors.
- Mentors for new hires help them settle into the company’s culture, educating them on your core values and goals.
From employee motivation to boosting your productivity as a business, mentors are quite important. Safe to say, great mentors are important for your employees’ growth and that of your company in general.
What are the qualities of a good mentor?
Planning a mentorship strategy for your company is one thing, but finding the perfect mentor requires more tact. For starters, you must assess their soft and hard skills and level of expertise. However, before these assessments, you should know what to look out for in the first place.
Not to worry. In this section, we will discuss 10 key qualities of a good mentor you should know about.
1. Possession of relevant skills and experience
The whole idea of mentorship is for the mentors to direct junior employees on developing themselves and performing better in their roles. As such, they must have enough experience-vetted skills to provide this guidance.
Experience in a role gives mentors foresight on common challenges that junior employees might be experiencing in the same or a similar role. Based on this foresight, they can provide guidelines that worked for them in the same issue or those obtained from a similar task.
2. Ability to offer constructive feedback
Constructive feedback is a crucial quality of a good mentor because it can increase or decrease the employees’ motivation for the role. The better the mentor presents their feedback on a specific task, that is, the higher the feedback’s quality, the better the employee’s response to it.
In most cases, a mentor-mentee relationship lacking constructive feedback doesn’t allow the junior employee to grow. Rather, it can demotivate them and reduce their productivity. In extreme situations, it can also lead to low employee retention rates.
3. Ability to respect others’ opinions and emotions
A mentor’s job revolves around their mentee, and as such, they can only succeed if they value the junior employees’ opinions and emotions. This quality allows them to work better with the employees and even suggest new ways to solve challenges.
For example, if a junior employee is faced with a challenge, rather than enforcing their own opinions and views, the mentor can be more receptive to the mentee’s ideas. This means they would listen to the employee’s thoughts and ideas for solving the problems and then brainstorm with them to streamline the solution further or develop a new one.
4. Accountability and transparency
Part of the mentor’s function is to report their mentee’s progress to the company. To do this effectively, they must be accountable and trustworthy, observe and record their mentee’s growth, and submit detailed and accurate reports.
Accountability is super important as it also helps you track the employees’ growth and productivity rates. This information lets you know whether or not the mentorship pairing is effective.
5. Excellent interpersonal skills
Great interpersonal skills allow mentors to build an environment where their mentees can open up to them and get the most out of the mentorship. That said, traits like open-mindedness, good communication, empathy, and compassion are vital for any mentor’s success in their role.
Mentors use these interpersonal skills to encourage employees to communicate their challenges with them, with the assurance of safety and a lack of judgment.
6. Effective leadership and people management skills
In numerous cases, mentors often have to manage multiple junior employees simultaneously. As such, they need effective leadership and people management skills to ensure they can manage their mentees in a coordinated and organized manner.
These skills are also important for solving disputes involving any of their mentees in a straightforward and professional manner.
7. Active listening
An excellent mentor is always more eager to hear what their mentees have to say than to air their own opinions. This is only possible because of active listening.
Active listening is one of the most important qualities of a good mentor. It allows them to pay full attention to what their mentees are saying. As a result, they can pinpoint the source of the mentee’s issues, proffer solutions, or even gain relevant insights.
8. Adaptability and flexibility
Effective mentors can adapt their mentoring style to meet the mentee’s individual needs and learning style. This is especially important for mentors with multiple mentees or those with a rotational mentorship plan that involves mentoring various mentees at different periods.
Adaptability also allows the mentor to adjust their approach to relating with their mentees based on their specific challenges. This empowers them to think creatively and find solutions no matter the issue.
9. Inspirational attributes
To a large extent, mentors function as role models and can shape the efficiency of their mentees. Consequently, they must uphold good behaviors that demonstrate your company’s values.
In addition, great mentors should be able to challenge the mentees to become better versions of themselves both personally and professionally.
10. Commitment to their role
All in all, a good mentor should show a deep commitment to their role of guiding their mentees. This commitment breeds a sense of accountability and passion that drives them to excel.
Not to mention, commitment is vital to ensure the mentor is always available to mentees and to hear their thoughts, challenges, and ideas. They must be dedicated to helping their mentees become the best version of themselves, thriving both within and outside the company.
Why is it important to get this right?
A 2021 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that 47.8 million U.S. employees, including new hires, resigned within the year. In 2022, the number increased to 50.6 million. Since then, numerous companies have struggled with talent retention as a result of events from the “Great Resignation.”
However, a Gallup study showed that 52% of employees who quit their jobs in 2021 mentioned that their organizations could have taken measures to prevent the separation. This shows that businesses can reduce employee turnover rates by adopting the right strategies. In essence, these employee retention strategies have to focus on boosting your employees’ motivation for their roles. Now, this is where effective mentorship comes in.
An employee who possesses all the qualities of a good mentor, including commitment to your company’s success, can help groom others with the same passion. In the long run, this ensures your workforce comprises developed talent and skilled individuals working to achieve all your objectives.
That’s not all. Effective mentorship can also build strong bonds between your employees, boosting their ability to work and grow together. This also allows them to develop a support, learning, and career improvement network.
Furthermore, developing your mentorship program shows that your company is focused on employee growth as much as the employees themselves. This builds a strong learning culture that is attractive to potential employees in future hiring cycles.
How to screen for good mentorship qualities during the interview process
One of the most effective ways to screen candidates and determine if they have all the qualities of a good mentor is through structured interviews. In this section, we will explain the ways to screen candidates for good qualities during your interviews:
- Consider feedback and references: Before the interviews, you must collect feedback about the potential mentee from their colleagues and supervisors. This gives you a deeper insight into their personality and job fit.
In fact, you can mention the feedback to the candidate during the interviews to see and analyze their reaction.
- Apply skill assessments: Screening candidates for good qualities when appointing mentors requires you to vet their expertise in the role. Skill assessments offer an effective way to do this, giving candidates a platform to apply their skills and solve challenges common to the role.
One effective way to apply these skill tests is to integrate them between different interview stages. This allows you to assess both technical skills and soft skills within the interview process and use the results to find the best mentors for the job.
Finding great mentors is easy with Vervoe
Mentors are undoubtedly vital for ensuring individual employee career growth, productivity, and motivation, all of which support business success. However, it can be a hassle to validate the soft and hard skills required for exceptional mentorship. Fortunately, Vervoe helps you to effectively screen candidiates for both.
Vervoe is a powerful screening tool that uses realistic job simulations, situational-based questions, and anti-cheating capabilities to adequately screen potential mentors. Using our platform, you don’t have to rely solely on word-of-mouth referrals or unproven skills when hiring your mentors.
In addition, our platform’s features for candidate result visualization empower you with enough information about a candidate’s ability to hone their skills and experiences. This enables you to accurately predict their performance as a mentor. Still in doubt? Sign up for a demo of our platform, and let’s show you what Vervoe can do!
