Last Updated: 30 September 2026
Mentorship is consistently ranked among L&D professionals' top priorities, and the organisations that get real value from a mentoring program follow a similar sequence: define clear goals and get leadership buy-in, design the program structure and matching criteria, set up (and test) a way to manage applications and matching, launch, then actively support and track outcomes rather than treating launch as the finish line.
This guide covers each step in detail, including exactly how that setup and testing looks inside Brancher.
Quick answer: Launching a successful corporate mentoring program comes down to six essential steps:
The rest of this guide walks through each step, including the specific setup and testing sequence inside Brancher.
HR.com's Mentoring in the Workplace white paper found organisations that initiate mentoring programs for a consistent set of reasons: to develop leadership skills, increase employee engagement, improve employees' skill levels, and support diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. LinkedIn's most recent Workplace Learning Report reinforces this from the other direction, career progress is consistently cited as employees' number one motivation to learn, and mentorship remains one of the most common practices among organisations with mature career development programs.
Mentors typically report a genuine sense of fulfilment and purpose from the role. Mentees gain skills, confidence, and a confidential space to talk through challenges and ambitions. For a deeper look at the numbers behind this, see mentoring statistics or why organisations need mentoring.
Before building anything, get specific about what you're trying to achieve. Useful questions to work through with stakeholders:
Getting specific here does two things: it gives you a way to actually measure ROI later, and it tells you what kind of program structure and matching criteria you need. It's also the point to secure buy-in from senior leadership, executive sponsorship is one of the strongest predictors of whether a mentoring program actually sticks.
Decide on format before you start recruiting: 1:1 mentoring, group mentoring, peer mentoring, or reverse mentoring (or some mix). Set a rough duration (most structured programs run three to twelve months) and decide what matching criteria actually matter for your goals, skills and goals alone are a reasonable baseline, but personality and values fit is what tends to separate a pairing that clicks from one that feels forced. How to create effective mentoring program matches goes into this in more depth.
Build genuine excitement rather than just announcing the program exists. Having a senior leader share why mentoring matters to them personally, and recruiting a few respected early adopters as your first mentors, tends to do more for uptake than a generic all-staff email. Once early participants have a good experience, word tends to spread organically to their colleagues.
Once your goals and structure are decided, setup and launch inside Brancher follows a clear sequence:
Matching people isn't the finish line, without ongoing support, structured mentoring relationships tend to fade. This means:
A mentoring agreement at the start of the relationship gives both parties something concrete to refer back to if expectations become misaligned later.
Continuously check whether pairs are actually meeting and making progress, rather than waiting until the program ends to find out. Brancher's dashboards and built-in tools give administrators visibility into engagement and outcomes throughout the program, not just a satisfaction score at the end. Reporting continuously, rather than retrospectively, is what lets you catch a struggling pair early enough to actually help it.
None of the steps above need to happen all at once, and there's no single right time to begin. The organisations that get the most out of mentoring tend to start smaller and more deliberately rather than waiting for the perfect moment or the perfect headcount to justify it.
If you're weighing up what this would actually look like for your organisation, we're happy to talk it through. Book a no-obligation demo and we can look at your goals, your context, and whether a mentoring program is genuinely the right fit before you commit to anything.
Dedicated mentoring platforms, including Brancher, typically include built-in dashboards for this rather than requiring a separate tool: tracking meeting frequency, pulse/connection scores, goal progress, and satisfaction survey results across every pair in a program. Brancher's dashboards and automated feedback tools let administrators see this in real time throughout the program rather than only compiling it at the end. Outside of dedicated mentoring software, a shared spreadsheet with regular manual check-ins can work for smaller programs, though it doesn't scale well past a few dozen pairs.
Look for a few things specifically: a matching methodology that goes beyond simple availability or skills tags, admin dashboards that give visibility into every pair (not just aggregate stats), security and compliance credentials appropriate to your sector (Brancher, for example, is AWS-hosted, GDPR compliant, and WCAG 2.0 AA accessible), and evidence the vendor has run programs at your organisation's scale before. Best mentoring software in 2026 compares fifteen platforms against these criteria if you're evaluating options.
Dedicated mentoring software is usually priced per user per month or as an annual enterprise licence; Brancher's published pricing starts from AUD $20 per user per month, or from AUD $15,000 per year for an enterprise arrangement. Beyond the software itself, budget for administrator time (heaviest in the first few months), any training materials or workshops, and incentives or recognition for mentors. How much does mentoring software cost breaks down the full pricing picture, including what tends to get missed in an initial budget.
No, a small program can run on a spreadsheet and manual coordination, and the steps above still apply either way. Software becomes the more practical option once you're past roughly ten to twenty pairs, manual matching, tracking, and check-ins get genuinely difficult to sustain at that scale, and it's where most unmanaged programs start to quietly fail.
Launch timelines usually run from a few weeks to a few months, and most of that time sits in defining goals and securing leadership buy-in rather than in the technical setup itself. Using dedicated software like Brancher, the setup and testing sequence, configuring the application form, testing the sign-up flow, seeding and matching test users, typically takes days rather than weeks once your goals and structure are already decided.
Holly Brailsford is the Co-Founder and CEO of Brancher, and a registered organisational psychologist. She founded Brancher to bring an evidence-based, personality- and values-driven approach to workplace mentoring, and works with organisations across government, enterprise and the not-for-profit sector to design mentoring programs that deliver measurable outcomes.