Mentoring software: A guide for HR professionals looking to modernize their mentoring programs

Mentoring workers encourages employee motivation and development, promotes diversity, and encourages knowledge sharing.

Research has found that 76% of workers find mentors necessary, yet only 37% have a mentor. Those who do have a mentor are happier at their workplaces than those who do not.[1]

However, offering guidance and support to workers is not without challenges. Training mentors, setting goals for mentees, and monitoring the outcomes of these mentorships are all extra obstacles in an HR professional’s busy day.

There’s a simple solution to these problems. Mentoring software is a great tool that provides the right structure and keeps track of your mentoring program’s outcomes for you, saving time while also enhancing the program’s effectiveness.

In this article, we discuss what mentoring software is, the right mentoring platform for you, and how to leverage these tools for mentoring to take your HR technology stack to the next level.

What is mentoring software?

Mentoring software is a platform that connects mentors and mentees, enables them to schedule mentoring sessions, and tracks their progress.

Companies use mentor-matching software to track the program’s objectives, match mentors with mentees, provide meeting reminders, and access and analyze reports. 

Integrating this software into their HR dashboard gives program managers a quick reference overview of the progress of their mentoring programs. 

They can use it alongside employee recognition software and other types of employee wellbeing automation.

Some companies also use this software to keep track of their return on investment and other metrics to get management buy-in for their mentoring programs and HR automation.

Why is mentor software important to HR professionals?

Mentoring is crucial for company growth, and recent HR technology trends have turned to mentoring software because organizations, especially medium and large ones, can’t stay on top of their mentoring needs at scale without automation.

Employees demand learning and development. Without mentoring program software, providing them with an effective, individualized development program that considers all their needs is challenging.

For example, in companies with high generational diversity, older employers may want to explore new opportunities without quitting their jobs.

Mentor matching software gives them the perfect way to explore these new avenues as part of a professional development plan.

The benefits of mentoring program software

Using mentoring software has proven benefits for employers. 

It strengthens their mentoring programs, giving them perks like increased retention and a more diverse workforce.

5 best mentoring software

Let’s look at the best mentoring program software you can add to your HR tech stack.

Factors we considered

In looking for the mentoring platforms that are the best fit for your mentoring needs, we took the following factors into account:

1. Features: The software offers a comprehensive set of features relevant to mentoring programs, including scheduling, reminders, mobile apps, and analytics and reporting tools

2. Ease of use: The platform is intuitive and easy to set up with minimal training, and is adaptable to different types of mentoring programs

3. Integrations: The software integrates well with a variety of third-party software used for communication, scheduling, and reporting

4. Customer support: The platform has reliable and readily available customer support

5. Reviews: Most users’ feedback about their experience with the software is positive

The best employee mentoring software: A summary

1. Qooper: Best for integrations

Qooper is a learning management system and mentoring software that easily integrates with existing systems like Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Google Workspace.

It provides AI matching, including self-matching for mentees, pre-designed training materials, customizable templates and profiles, and easy analytics and survey results reporting.

The platform uses automation for conversation starters, reminders, meetings, and follow-ups. It enhances your program by using AI in HR to monitor pairings and see which ones aren’t working well or are stagnating.

Qooper also provides training for mentors and mentees by ATD- and CIPD-certified trainers and mentoring experts.

Rating: 4.6 out of five (G2)

Pricing at time of writing: Available on request

2. MentorcliQ: Best for employee development

Together with River Software, MentorcliQ has 20 years of experience in software development and mentoring programs.

Its software is helpful for scaled employee development in large enterprises. It’s fully automated on the back end and provides rich data, reporting, and analytics to help enterprises see their employees’ engagement in real time.

The company provides success coaches to give program administrators advice and guidance on how to use the software for the best results.

The platform also has a host of resources for mentees and mentors, including TED recommendations, videos, webinars, and articles.

Rating: 4.9 out of five (G2)

Pricing at time of writing: Available on request

3. Together Mentoring: Best for beginners

Together Mentorship helps organizations assign mentors and find peers easily with its matching algorithm. Its template is easily customizable and doubles as an onboarding buddy program and a DEI program.

The mentorship platform uses AI to match teachers and students based on goals, strengths, personal interests, and areas for development, and boasts a 90% success rate on matching.

It integrates directly with HRIS systems and is available for various communication platforms like Slack, Teams, and email.

The software has an HR Outbox that companies can use to bring awareness of the program and register mentors and mentees on multiple channels.

Rating: 4.8 out of five (G2)

Pricing at time of writing: 

$10,000 per year minimum for Professional Plan 

$20,000 per year minimum for Enterprise Plan

4. Chronus: Best for corporate teams

Chronus offers personalized experiences at scale, AI-matching, and an engaging user interface. It also uses secure connections in its cloud-based software.

The software focuses on DEI and makes it easy to track metrics such as employee retention and engagement with proprietary dashboards and key performance indicators for granular reporting.

The platform is easily accessible from any browser and smartphone. In addition to mentoring software, Chronus also offers software for employee resource groups (ERGs).

Rating: 4.7 out of five (G2)

Pricing at time of writing: Available on request

5. Mentornity: Best for startups

Mentornity offers various mentoring services, from employee mentoring for public and private companies to startup mentoring, student mentoring, and community mentoring. 

Its payment structure reflects its wide range of programs.

The platform offers SSO and SAML support, helping to enhance security and simplifying access to different applications. It also doubles as an employee onboarding software and uses automatic and manual pairing for mentors and mentees.

It has an analytics and activity feed, applications, surveys and polls, and announcements and messages. It provides detailed statistics and reporting for all stakeholders.

Its third-party integrations include:

• Google Calendar

• Outlook

• Office365

• Zoom

• Google Meet

• Teams

• Email and messaging

Rating: 4.7 out of five (Capterra)

Pricing at time of writing: 

$249 per month for 50 users

$399 per month for 100 users

$499 per month for 150 users

$699 per month for 250 users

$899 per month for 500 users

$1,199 per month for 1,000 users

$1,499 per month for 5,000 users

$1,899 per month for unlimited users 

7 best practices for leveraging mentoring tools in your HR department

Knowing which software platform is the best fit for your mentoring needs is half the battle done. 

However, you still need to know the best way to integrate it into your mentoring program.

Let’s look at that next.

Best practices for leveraging tools for mentoring: A summary

1. Assess employees with talent assessments to make more effective mentor-mentee pairings

Talent assessments enable you to gauge each employee’s hard and soft skills. You can deploy them during the hiring stage as part of your applicant tracking system to get a clear and objective picture of each candidate.

Besides using talent assessments for your immediate hiring needs, you can also use them after hiring. Pair them with employee onboarding software to discover development opportunities for your high-potential new hires.

Coupling talent assessments with mentoring platforms removes the guesswork from the mentorship pairing process, as the software can pair each couple based on their assessed skills and the ones they need to develop.

Different career mentoring platform software can track employee skills, greatly enhancing your ability to match the right people and track their progress as they develop more skills. Finally, talent assessments can help you monitor skill gaps in your company, helping you align your mentorship goals with organizational needs.

As technology improves, mentoring software can offer more advanced relevant training materials and feedback about each niche skill mentors and mentees develop.

2. Monitor analytics to gain crucial insights into your mentorship program

Mentoring software can offer analytics and reporting, which are valuable ways to assess the success of your mentoring program.

Different platforms approach analytics differently. For example, Together offers built-in reporting, showing employee engagement and program activity. 

Other platforms provide you with different HR analytics software options, so picking the right tool for your needs is important.

However, this data is useless if you don’t review it regularly. Your mentoring program should have metric review milestones each month or quarter. Here’s a screenshot of Qooper’s progress tracking:

Mentoring software also keeps track of other metrics that show your program’s uptake. 

Registrations and reports on which skills and goals your pairings developed and accomplished at each step are useful metrics to consider, as they make it much easier to gain insights into the program’s performance at a glance.

Instead of surveying or interviewing each individual involved in mentoring, you can run a customized report for the entire program or individual mentor-mentee couples.

3. Track if employees are struggling and jump in to support them

With mentorship software, you can see if your employees are sticking to their meeting schedule, communicating regularly, and progressing throughout the program. 

You can integrate this software with remote working technology to ensure all your workers can participate to improve employee wellness.

When tracking these meetings and the overall performance of each mentoring pairing, you can see if any mentor and mentee is struggling with attendance or falling behind. 

When that happens, make sure that you don’t ignore their difficulties. Approach the struggling employees and invite them to discuss the issues they have trouble with.

You can have a one-on-one meeting with them or an informal conversation to find out what resources to offer them and how to help strengthen the session agendas.

Tracking these metrics also enables you to identify other areas of improvement, such as the design of your mentoring program, to continuously improve the employee experience. 

For example, suppose most of your mentors and mentees seem to hit a wall after a particular milestone in the program. It may be a good idea to review this milestone and either eliminate it or modify it to make it more approachable for them.

4. Ask employees for feedback to continuously improve your program

Getting employee feedback is vital for any mentoring program, and mentoring software makes it easy for you to get continuous feedback.

Unlike having to administer periodic employee pulse surveys by email or through written forms, which can become a nightmare for large organizations, using mentoring software lets you collect feedback within the platform.

Different platforms use one or more of the following to collect feedback for you:

• Registration questionnaires

• Periodic surveys

• Post-session feedback forms

• Pairing ratings

The insights you gain from this feedback are particularly useful for improving your mentoring formats by suggesting extra content, activities, or events relevant to mentors and mentees.

5. Nurture a culture of learning to make mentoring second nature

Mentoring software takes care of tracking, monitoring, and analyzing your mentoring program, leaving you with valuable extra time to concentrate on creating a learning culture in your company.

A mentoring culture extends beyond just instituting programs. It involves creating an employee network and communities that connect all your employees and encourage them to engage in peer learning and knowledge sharing.

Other attributes of a learning culture include:

1. Opportunities to learn new skills

2. Professional development plans and support

3. Aligning employees’ goals with organizational goals

4. A psychologically safe environment where everyone feels included and encouraged to learn

Mentoring software helps form the basis of this learning culture, enabling organizations to start customized mentoring programs for one-on-one, peer, or group mentoring.

Once your company has a learning mindset, mentoring can happen organically because each employee already appreciates the value of growth and development.

6. Build your succession plan

Mentoring software makes it easy to build a succession pipeline by showing you which employees have or can develop the right skills to be a part of it.

When you track your participants’ results with mentoring software, you can see at a glance:

• The information and knowledge shared between mentors and mentees

• The skill sets each participant develops

• Soft skills needed by upper management, like leadership or strategic thinking skills

This information lets you identify talented candidates for succession and develop the skills of those you want to retain.

Mentoring is a way to create your next generation of leaders, and mentorship software is a powerful way to expedite your succession planning.

Mentoring software can also help you plan succession for more than just your upper management team.

By giving you insights into each participant’s skills and growth, it enables you to make succession plans for middle management and team leaders as well.

7. Use employee training programs to support mentors in their job

Finally, many mentoring software platforms enable you to choose training programs for mentors. For example, Qooper gives you training resources for both mentors and mentees.

Mentor training has a host of benefits, including:

• Better communication

• Aligned expectations

• More confidence

• A better understanding of mentees

• The ability to address diversity issues affecting mentees from marginalized backgrounds[5]

You can use talent assessments to find out if your mentors are lacking in any of the above fields and then turn to mentoring software for the right training recommendations.

Even if many mentors think they don’t need training because they’re in senior roles, they enhance their leadership development by learning to manage expectations and be on the same page as their mentees.

3 examples of companies succeeding with business mentoring software

Many companies use mentoring software to organize their mentoring activities and make them useful for their employees.

Here are three real-life examples of companies taking advantage of these coaching and mentoring tools to give you an idea about how to use them in practice.

1. Amazon

2. King

3. A Fortune 500 Financial Services Provider

Amazon

Amazon partnered with Chronus in 2016 and launched its Amazon Mentoring Program. The Amazon Mentoring Program focuses on engagement, satisfaction, and advancement.

The company has taken advantage of Chronus’s features to create custom solutions at scale to meet the needs of its most important customers – its employees.

The mentoring software provides all users with a plan, including employee training and development resources for mentors and mentees.

As a testament to its success, the program has grown by 750% since its launch and supports 160,000 employees globally.

King

King, a division of Activision involved in the creation of the popular mobile game Candy Crush, used Together Mentoring to give all its employees opportunities for advancement.

The company used the mentoring software platform to help employees gain more visibility for leadership roles by providing one-on-one training and pairing them with executives.

King wanted to support and improve diversity in the workplace and used mentorship software to help employee resource group members pick the right leader for their needs.

As a result of using the platform, the company continues to expand its successful mentoring program.

A Fortune 500 Financial Services Provider

A Fortune 500 financial services provider wanted to launch an enterprise mentoring tool that united 18 programs into one and included an employee-driven learning program.[6]

The company used MentorcliQ’s River software to centralize all the mentoring initiatives and create one learning platform. 

It used the platform’s mentoring, peer learning, employee coaching, and social learning abilities to improve its inclusivity and create a learning culture.

The employee-driven mentoring program was successful, involving 15% of the company’s employees in mentoring on a company-wide level.

Use mentoring software with talent assessments for a bullet-proof mentoring program

Mentoring software can make your mentoring program efficient regardless of the size of your workforce.

It helps match mentors and mentees and guides them throughout their mentoring journey together.

Pick the best mentoring software platform for your needs and use it to pair your mentors and mentees, monitor analytics to gain insights into your program, and create a culture of learning in your organization.

Then, you can reap benefits like increased employee retention, a strong succession plan, great working relationships, and a diverse workforce with multi-generational teams.

Learn more about improving diversity and your bottom line in our article about personalized coaching.

Want to know how TestGorilla can help you use talent assessments with mentoring software to develop an effective mentoring program?

Watch a live demo or jump straight into skills testing by signing up for a free account today!

Mentoring software FAQs

Mentoring software can be intimidating if your company has never used an automated platform.

However, it’s the best way to scale your mentoring program and involve more workers. Here are some quick questions and answers about mentoring software.

How do I set up a mentoring program?

To set up a mentoring program, you should follow the steps below:

1. Set goals

2. Pair mentees and mentors

3. Train mentors

4. Make expectations clear to both parties

5. Ask for feedback

6. Include mentorship programs in your performance management system

Next, learn which mentoring software to use by checking out our list of the five best platforms.

What are the 3 A's of mentorship?

The three As of mentorship refer to three fundamental qualities each mentor should have. Each mentor should be:

1. An active listener

2. Available 

3. Analytical

Without displaying these qualities, mentors cannot effectively teach and coach mentees.

What are the 5 pillars of mentorship?

The five pillars of mentorship or the foundational mentorship principles are:

1. Interest

2. Investment

3. Involvement

4. Inculcation

5. Inspiration

Mentors use these pillars to instill excellence in mentoring and create an effective employee wellness platform with mentorship and career development opportunities.

Sources

1. Comaford, Christine. (July 3, 2019). “76% Of People Think Mentors Are Important, But Only 37% Have One”. Forbes. Retrieved January 12, 2024. https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2019/07/03/new-study-76-of-people-think-mentors-are-important-but-only-37-have-one/?sh=6eb70a243297 

2. “Case Study: Workforce Analytics at Sun”. (October 27, 2006). Gartner. Retrieved January 12, 2024. https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/497507 

3. Wronski, Laura; Cohen, Jon. (July 16, 2019). “Nine in 10 workers who have a career mentor say they are happy in their jobs”. CNBC. Retrieved January 12, 2024. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/nine-in-10-workers-who-have-a-mentor-say-they-are-happy-in-their-jobs.html 

4. Dimmock, Liz. (September 7, 2017). “New UK Research: Mentoring is improving gender balance in organisations”. Moving Ahead. Retrieved January 12, 2024. https://www.women-ahead.org/press/turning-the-dial 

5. Johnson, Mallory O.; Gandhi, Monica. (October 2, 2014). “A mentor training program improves mentoring competency for research working with early-career investigators from underrepresented backgrounds”. NIH. Retrieved January 13, 2024. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4383738/ 

6. “Global Mentoring at Fortune 500 Financial Services Provider”. River Software. Retrieved January 13, 2024. https://www.riversoftware.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/River-Success-Story-Financial-Services.pdf