Director of L&D, Robert Half: People stay because of our mentorship culture

Recruitment giant Robert Half owes much of its global success to a workplace culture that celebrates mentorship, mutual learning, and the power of developing and retaining talented staff.

Beth Turner, Director of Learning & Development at Robert Half, has been instrumental in building this approach throughout her three decades at the agency.

Speaking to HR Grapevine, Turner outlines how mentorship at Robert Half balances structure with flexibility, blends formal and informal approaches, and encourages mutual knowledge sharing for employees at all career stages.

What is Robert Half’s approach to mentorship?

We take both informal and formal approaches to mentoring.

Informally, we have a culture of curiosity and collaboration. Formally, we've established structured mentoring programmes, strongly supported by all of the senior leadership team, which help us to identify individuals with the right skills to mentor in different areas. The mentoring programmes are continuously promoted and offered directly to employees, but they can also seek out support on an ad hoc basis.

Originally, our mentoring programmes and approach came from a lot of our leaders having gone through mentoring. We’ve been very proactive about expanding it, but we’ve realised that even the strongest managers can only give one perspective – to really support colleagues, you search for different perspectives and different viewpoints. Importantly, our managers are very comfortable with people going off to be mentored. It's not a threat to them.

Whenever we hear about people's career journeys, mentors are cited as pivotal. The relationships give them a clear purpose, direction, or a different take on things.

That's our ethos.

Can you take us through the formal-informal approach?

The informal is reminding people that there are mentoring options, so they can go and find their own mentor. Someone might be about to do a presentation and want some support; we might say, “This person's really good at presenting”; their manager might put them in touch.

We also have a strong network of ENGs [Employee Network Groups], and they provide informal mentoring opportunities as well, supported by the business, but very much employee-led.

For the formal, we offer a well-structured mentoring scheme. Mentors sign up and put in their language, location, interests, experience, and career journey. Even if someone’s not an experienced coach but wants to become a mentor, they can sign up. Mentees also sign up, and they’re matched accordingly. A dedicated team gives structure and consistency to the mentees going through and the mentors going through the scheme, so it’s not overwhelming for them.

We’ve got employees all over the world and a diverse pool of mentors – recently, I had a mentee from Brazil who found me; a colleague found a mentor in the US who had done a similar role to theirs – you can just go in and find your mentor. Someone can be recommended, or you can search for them as well.

What makes this mentorship approach so successful?

The key factor is the variety of approaches. One size doesn’t fit all. And again, the team that supports it because they tee the relationship up and make it beneficial for all.

Another really simple thing that makes mentoring successful – and I'd say this goes for L&D as well – as much as I'd like to think that people come to our sessions for the great material, it’s [actually] giving people permission and allowing them time to focus on themselves. We don't tend to do that day-to-day. By saying you can go and have a mentor, you're basically saying you can go and spend an hour thinking about yourself, your own personal development. That's a simple area of success, but a big one.

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And then I'd say being open-minded as to how it's going to develop. On the informal side, I wouldn't have anticipated the ENGs would have brought the benefits of people connection as they did. Let people lead that bit.

Are there common mistakes companies make with mentorship schemes? How can they be avoided?

Firstly, the “petering out” of mentoring relationships, which can be countered with a good kick-off and subsequent guided material that helps both mentor and mentee.

Secondly, if senior leadership have never experienced mentoring themselves and doesn’t see its value, I imagine that would make it very difficult to embed a successful programme. In our case, our leaders have benefited from mentoring. They talk about it. They're strong advocates of it. It would be really hard without that; you’d need to get their buy-in in a different way. Perhaps you have to illustrate what mentoring is to people – they might have received it, but not have named it as that.

Thirdly, when you launch a formal scheme without clear communication – we've done pilots in different countries –  that can be a challenge if you have interest in areas where the scheme doesn’t exist yet. The key is clear, transparent, and inclusive communication about what's happening where. We've experimented with different approaches, but we also always have the backup communication on the intranet or somewhere centralised. It needs to highlight the benefits and goals of the mentoring, because it's vital that all the managers understand mentoring is not undermining them, it's offering something extra, and it's open to them as well.