Internal Mentoring Software: What It Should Do, and What to Check Before You Buy

Most internal mentoring starts on a spreadsheet. Someone in HR or L&D collects names, pairs people by hand, sends calendar invites and hopes the pairs keep meeting. It works for a pilot of twenty people. It rarely works for two hundred, and it almost never produces the records a leadership team asks for at the end of the year.

Internal mentoring software replaces that manual work. This guide sets out what the software should actually do, what to check before you buy, and the questions worth putting to any vendor. It is written for HR, L&D and procurement teams in companies of a few hundred to a few thousand people.

Spreadsheets versus software: where manual programs break

Manual programs tend to break in the same places:

• Pairing. Matching by hand is slow, and it depends on one person’s knowledge of who would suit whom.
• Scheduling. Pairs lose weeks to calendar ping-pong, and first meetings slip.
• Follow-through. Without reminders, sessions are forgotten. Without notes, each meeting starts from scratch.
• Records. At year end, nobody can say with confidence how many pairs met, or how often.

Good software fixes each of these, and you should test each one in a demo rather than taking it on trust.

Access: who can get in, and how they sign in

An internal program should stay internal. Check that the platform can keep the wrong people out without making it hard for the right people to get in.

In MentorPlace, each organisation gets its own private workplace with its own web address. Registration can be limited to approved email domains, so only people with a company address can create an account, and self-registration can be turned off entirely in favour of invitations. Administrators can invite one person or many, and invites can also come in from another system through an authenticated invite feed.

Sign-in options include email and password, passwordless sign-in links, and single sign-on with Google, LinkedIn or Microsoft, each switchable and using your organisation’s own application credentials. Email and password can be disabled if you only want people signing in through your identity provider. Two-factor authentication is part of the account model.

The mentor directory can be limited to your organisation, and public marketplace browsing can stay switched off.

Who can mentor: approval, safeguarding and visibility

You need control over who is allowed to mentor.

• Approval. New mentors request to mentor and administrators approve or reject, with each decision recorded and the mentor emailed. Approval can be automatic if you trust self-nomination.
• Visibility. Administrators can feature a mentor, or hide them from discovery without deleting their profile.
• Availability. Mentors set a weekly time commitment and the days and times they can meet.
• Safeguarding. For programs that include young people, the organisation can require a Working With Children Check style identifier before a mentor is cleared. Most employee programs will leave this off.

Matching and pairing options

Look for more than one way to match people, because different programs need different approaches. MentorPlace offers browse and search, a lightweight “express interest”, AI suggestions based on a person’s goals and career history, and administrator pairing, including importing pairs from a spreadsheet. AI suggestions come with short reasons, such as a similar career path or shared languages, so people can see why a mentor was suggested. Two people can also be connected as peers.

Our article on mentor matching compares the options in more detail.

Scheduling, video and reminders

This is where most programs quietly fail, so test it carefully.

A member books against a mentor’s published availability, and the session can then be confirmed, rescheduled or cancelled, with reschedules kept as history and cancellation reasons collected. People can connect a Google or Microsoft calendar, and booking or rescheduling creates or updates the calendar event.

Sessions run in built-in video rooms, so nobody has to find or send a meeting link. In-person sessions can be allowed by the organisation, with a location stored on the session.

Reminder emails go out three days and one day before a session, with an SMS reminder about an hour before. Both people can review the session afterwards, including flagging a no-show.

Records: connections, notes, sessions and transcripts

A mentoring relationship is more than a list of meetings. Check that the platform keeps the relationship on the record.

In MentorPlace a connection is the lasting record of a pair, either a mentorship or a peer pair, marked active or archived. Participants can add, edit and delete notes on the connection, and the connection shows every session between them. After a video session, a transcript can be imported and made available with the session and on the connection. Session activity is written to an audit log.

Integrations: webhooks, invite feed and calendars

Ask how the platform connects to the systems you already run. MentorPlace takes a simple, open approach.

• Outbound webhooks. An administrator registers a webhook, chooses events, and reviews delivery logs. Events cover mentor applications, sessions, people, goals, tasks and goal comments. That is enough to post a message to a team channel when a pair meets, update a data warehouse, or trigger an automation when a goal is finished.
• Inbound invites. Another system can push invitations in.
• Calendars. Google and Microsoft calendars connect per person.
• Reporting feed. A daily count of members, mentors and sessions is written to BigQuery.

Security questions to ask any vendor

Procurement and IT will have their own checklist. These are the questions we would ask, with our answers.

Is our data kept separate from other customers? Yes. Data is separated by organisation, including the matching index, so a suggestion for one organisation never returns another organisation’s people.

Can we control what each administrator can do? Yes. Administrator permissions are granted by area, such as people, mentors, programs, connections, reporting and webhooks.

What happens when someone leaves? They can be deactivated without deleting their history, and reactivated later. Accounts can also be soft-deleted.

How do we handle a request to export or delete someone’s personal data? There is no self-serve export or erasure feature in the platform. Requests are handled through a process built on deactivation, soft delete and our support team. Ask any vendor the same question and how long it takes.

Can we audit what happened? Session audit logs, email delivery logs, webhook delivery logs and mentor approval history are all kept.

Can we set our own privacy and terms links? Yes.

Before you sign

Run a short pilot with real people, not a sandbox. Ask a few mentors and mentees to book, meet and review a session, then check what your team can see afterwards. If you are building the business case at the same time, our guide to the ROI of mentoring sets out a method finance teams accept. If you will run more than one program, read One Platform, Many Programs.

Ask us the hard questions

We are happy to answer your security and integration questions in writing, and to show you the platform with your own settings. Book a demo.