How do you recruit mentors?

[Steven Smith]

I thought I'd make a follow up post, because as I reread this thread my half-joking response came across as a bit out of touch. I recognize there are a huge number of teams out there (including in my home city) that are struggling for mentors, and one of the things we're trying to do is drastically ramp up our mentor recruitment in the next 3-5 years to meet that need for our area teams (not just our own).

The point I was actually trying to make though... to sell anyone, on anything, you really need to come at it from their point of view.

Anticipate their concerns:
- How much will it cost them? (Varies by team)
- Time commitments? (Make sure they know how little they can volunteer and still be effective)
- Desire to work with students? (Is your team pretty mature? Let them know!)

Appeal to their interests:
- Do they like building things and challenging themselves?
- Desire to make a change for the good in the world?

And then also realize that everyone is human, and they get bombarded with requests constantly, and its easy for things to fall off the radar. It's hard to evaluate how awesome FIRST is from the outside. Get their foot in the door. Send them a follow up email/phone call to invite them out to a build day or demo event several months later... not to ask them to be a mentor, but to let them see what you're working on and whether it looks like fun to them.

Network... Network... Network...

Johnny's mom knows a guy who knows a guy? Get his number, invite him out. The whole reason I can recruit mentors is because I know a lot of engineers. 90% of the people out there might not be interested, but its a numbers game... never quit asking or quit looking.

Are there any makers organizations, ASME organizations, mechanical unions, in your area? Is there any organization that already brings together people that have some form of technical background? Can you go to a meeting and make a request for help? They've done the legwork for bringing together 10-100 people that do technical things, surely 1 of them might be interested?

Don't get discouraged. Know that once you do get 1-2 really good mentors one day, those mentors will be your most powerful tool to recruit new mentors... because they likely have many more connections established than you do with other technical people. It can just snowball from there.