The Magic of Matching.

By: Anna Robinson

Ceresa behind the scenes.

Mentoring is at the heart of Ceresa… and people are always curious about how Ceresa mentoring works. So here is a sneak-peak behind the scenes look at mentoring and matching at Ceresa.

It is not only anecdotally accepted, but also now proven through academic research, that mentoring is transformative to people’s career progression, confidence and pay potential.

Yet the common narrative is that only organic mentoring can be effective… formal mentoring programs never work, and just become a burden on everyone.

This concept really took hold when Sheryl Sandberg said, in LeanIn “Instead of telling young people, ‘Get a mentor and you will excel’, we need to tell them, ‘Excel and you will get a mentor.'”

Sheryl’s approach works great if you already have the resources to excel. If you had the opportunity to go to Harvard, private school, or perhaps a great network already. If you had role-models in the professional world.

Mentoring had almost become a dirty word amongst women and under-represented groups that had gone through multiple formal mentoring programs that took time but failed on impact.

In founding Ceresa, we said “no more”. That is not acceptable. Let’s figure out how to democratize access to deeply impactful mentoring.

So what does it take to make mentoring effective, at scale?

At Ceresa, there are four critical pillars to mentoring effectiveness: