By: Jose Lopez, Center of Excellence (CoE) Manager

Great news everyone! In their Q4 2016 release, SuccessFactors announced the availability of an early adopter care program for the new SuccessFactors Mentoring solution. Available as part of the Career Development & Planning (CDP) module, this new solution drives employee engagement and retention by enabling organizations to take a comprehensive, automated approach to mentoring programs. Customers who are interested in participating in the SuccessFactors Mentoring Early Adopter Care Program are welcome to join through March 1, 2017 by completing this survey.

In a prior blog post, The Power of Mentoring, I wrote about one of my favorite subjects in career development planning. In that post, I shared a few tips and important considerations for companies getting started with mentoring programs, including:

  • The process of matching the proper mentor to an employee is not necessarily straightforward.
  • The best mentors are not always employees who are showing the most success within your organization.
  • The best mentors are those individuals who are willing to teach and truly be a mentor.
  • While mentoring programs can be highly effective in developing employees, special care should be taken when identifying the proper mentors within your organization.   

Given these considerations, creating and administering mentoring programs can be a challenge for most organizations. For organizations looking to streamline and simplify their mentoring programs, the new SuccessFactors Mentoring solution is the answer. It enables organizations to streamline the creation and administration of mentoring programs with automated mentor and mentee matching recommendations. Gone are the days where organizations have to manually match mentors and mentees, resulting in tremendous time savings.

My favorite features of the SuccessFactors Mentoring solution include the ability for:

  • Program administrators to determine how mentors and mentees will be matched – either through supervised matching or the more flexible unsupervised matching – during the creation of the mentoring program
  • Mentors and mentees to decide if they wish to opt out of a mentoring program
  • Mentors to be able to select the criteria that best matches the mentor’s interests for their mentees and vice versa
  • Mentee to select their preferred mentor

While there are many more great features available in the SuccessFactors Mentoring solution, the above are some of my favorites. I’m looking forward to seeing the additional enhancements that will evolve in this product on a quarter-by-quarter basis as customers continue to implement this solution. I encourage customers to consider being an early adopter to this solution, or contact us to help you explore the additional benefits of the SuccessFactors Mentoring solution.