Mentoring at Delivery Hero: How it all began

Delivery Hero’s mentoring program will be turning 4 years old this year.  In this article we reflect on how it all started, what has been built and what is next for the program.  

A grassroots initiative

The program simply named ‘Mentoring at DH’ started in early 2020 as a grassroots initiative from the employee resource group, Women Heroes. The idea was all about mentoring women and underrepresented groups at Delivery Hero. This idea was one of the most upvoted projects by the newly established female community and was shown so much support. 

3 volunteers from across the company put themselves forward to lead the community - looking for an opportunity to build something meaningful and connect with other like minded employees across the business. In the past, similar initiatives had faded pretty quickly,  but the community's enthusiasm about the initiative continued to grow and is now even stronger, almost 4 years later. 

The Vision: Empowering female Heroes in their personal and professional growth by exchanging experiences and building relationships

The pilot was launched in September 2020 with just 16 mentors and 16 mentees participating. Initially, mentees were offered a list of potential mentors and asked to pick their top 3 options based on their experience and backgrounds.

There was a varied selection of  mentors from across the company, both men and women, from different seniority levels, all eager to share their expertise and support other Heroes. With the COVID-19 pandemic conquering the world outside and hyper-growth adding to the workload inside the office, some of the most senior leaders in the company were committed - finding time in their packed agendas to prepare and run sharing sessions for our mentoring community on different topics. These topics ranged from communication skills to impostor syndrome!

The feedback from the pilot exceeded all expectations, both mentors and mentees loved it and we were inspired to continue rolling it out across the company. As the project team grew and new members joined, the program developed -  now with its own logo, growing Slack community, regular educational events and plenty of support materials to inform others about the details of the program.

Onboarding new technology

In March 2021, the program was launched officially across the company with 40+ mentees and 38 mentors participating.  However, the growing popularity also brought along challenges - for example, it was taking the team hours to successfully match mentees and mentors manually, with a few participants dropping out in the process.

The team quickly realized that in order to scale, they had to automate matching and communication. After checking different providers, the team settled on MentrocliQ, a mentoring platform that today not only helps with the matching and communication management, but, most importantly, allows us to measure the impact and collect data.

Finding your perfect match

In order to fine-tune the algorithm and collect consistent data, the team had to establish a consistent approach to matching. Initially, mentees would simply choose 3 preferences from the pool of mentors, but with the number of participants constantly growing year on year, this process was no longer feasible.

Potential mentees were asked about their pain points and growth aspirations. Here are just some of the examples that the team took into account: 

Trying to create consistency, whilst simultaneously addressing unique growth challenges, the team clustered all the different topics under four main pillar with a range of sub-categories, and asked both mentors and mentees to choose up to 5 categories across all the pillars.

The process worked well and matches were made based on the categories that participants chose. Many success stories began to emerge quickly - mentees were changing or enhanced their career track, with many growing into leadership positions.

2 years later

After 2 years of running a program specifically for female Heroes and underrepresented groups,  the initiative was opened up to everyone working within Delivery Hero Central in October 2022 and the new chapter began.