In this video, Holly answers a question every mentoring program manager eventually runs into: what's the ideal mentor-to-mentee ratio? While traditional programs default to strict one-on-one pairings, she explains that recruiting enough mentors to sustain that model isn't always realistic, so many organizations now let mentors take on multiple mentees when they're willing.
Rather than prescribing a single magic number, Holly walks through a practical framework: organizations should first set their own ceiling (she suggests capping it at five, since anything beyond that risks mentors neglecting their actual jobs), then ask individual mentors what they're personally comfortable managing. Some will want just one mentee, others two or three, which means the ratio ends up varying mentor to mentor rather than being fixed program-wide. It's a short, practical answer that trades a rigid rule for a flexible system built around both organizational capacity and mentor bandwidth.