As employment brokers, mentorship is an incredibly important way of getting the best outcome for candidates, and in turn, providing clients appropriate personnel.
Mentoring can be an essential part of any industry, and we believe it’s integral in the mining and resources industry when it comes to recruitment. Mentoring helps people find their potential, and for us, we demonstrate this in our work with ex-offenders and finding employment opportunities to get them back on track, but we also provide mentoring to all candidates.
Through our experience of mentoring, we’ve found these five tips are vital to being a good mentor:
#1 – Be Compassionate
As a mentor, you need to understand your mentee’s story. For us, this is understanding where our candidates have come from; they may be ex-offenders from generations of crime, or they could be candidates that haven’t set a foot wrong but they’ve found themselves at a time in their lives where their confidence has been shattered after being turned down for jobs again and again. The best thing you can do is to be compassionate and help them understand that you are there to help them, without judgement.
#2 – Show Integrity and Honesty
It’s important to be transparent about your history. Many great mentors haven’t lived the perfect life, if they have, then what have they learned that they can share? It’s important for a mentor to be open about their experiences and what they’ve learned from it; from telling stories of bankruptcy or when they’ve failed a job or let a friend down – it’s this information that helps you build trust and credibility, as well as helping the candidate to have hope that they too can overcome a tricky situation.
#3 – Ensure Quality Interactions
Make every moment you spend with your mentee count. It’s not about giving the person 150 ways to change their lives, it’s about helping them realise they have potential and by giving them the strategies, platform, and friendly ear to uncover this and the steps to take to better their lives.
#4 – Show Humility
Make sure you show humility; talk at the same level as your mentee, not above them. Being a good mentor can’t be learned from a textbook. Again, it’s about sharing real-lived experiences and the strategies you’ve learned along the way.
#5 – Focus on Removing the Limiting Belief
We’re of the belief that everyone is born with similar skills and they have the skills within them to take on any role (or have the skills to achieve specific accreditations). These skills might have been forgotten or quashed by either not using them for a while or through negative experiences. As a mentor you can help the candidate realise the realistic opportunities available to them, and how they can get equipped. It’s important to work with the candidate and help them remove their limiting belief so they can be open to learning and enjoying new experiences.
