Why I Still Interview Every Mentor Applicant

Last month I got on a vetting call with a mentor applicant, a growth marketer in San Francisco. I went in cold. I'd read his application two weeks earlier and didn't get a chance to look at it again before the call, which bothered me less than it should, because after a thousand of these interviews the application is not why I'm there.

Some 300 mentor applications land in my inbox every month. I've been reading every one personally for seven years.

I jokingly call myself the condom between bad mentor applicants and my mentees. It's crude, but it's the job. One bad session destroys trust, and not just with that mentee, with everyone they tell.

Listening for the Spark

The application filters credentials. The call filters for something else, because seven years of doing this taught me credentials mean almost nothing. Some of the best mentors on the platform have no fancy titles, they're practitioners who know what stuck feels like because they were stuck too, and a mentor who's genuinely excited to help will outperform a more qualified one who's there for the extra income. So on the call I'm listening for one thing, the spark. Why does this person want to give?

Most answers rhyme. Someone helped them early and they want to pay it forward. They believe what goes around comes around. Good answers, true ones, I've heard them a thousand times and I still like hearing them. This candidate gave a version too, he'd received so much guidance on the way up that giving felt like settling a debt. I told him the thing I always tell people, the Hindu image of life as a jar you fill with black and white stones, what you think, what you say, what you do. It's half the reason the platform exists.

The Show

Then he said the thing I'd never heard.

He said a mentorship session, for him, is like watching a show. He doesn't hand people answers, he hands them questions, then watches what they do with them, lean in or walk away. The mentee lays out the problem, what they like, what they can't stand, how they're coping, and in working through it they perform how they think without knowing they're performing. "They look up to me as somebody with more experience," he said, "but at the end of the day I'm learning about them, from how they draw their resilience out of the problem." He just enjoys the show.

A thousand interviews and nobody had ever described mentoring as a show before. And he didn't mean trivial. He meant you get to watch another mind work on a live problem in real time, and that alone is worth the hour. It put words on something I half-knew, that a lot of mentors come back for the data points, how other people think under pressure, and he'd found a better name for it than I ever had.

That's why I still do the calls.