The mentor-shopping advice you will find on page one of Google says: check the chemistry, clarify expectations, meet regularly. Forbes even has five C’s for it. All true, none sufficient. Chemistry is how bad mentors get hired: the pleasant conversation is exactly what they are selling.
So score instead of feeling. Ten criteria, 0 to 10 points each, 100 total. Run every candidate through it, mentor or coach. Run it on me too; I put the links where you can check.
The 10 criteria
1. Seat time. Have they held the role you are growing into, at a comparable scale? 0 = they read about it. 10 = they lived it recently enough that their playbook still matches today’s tooling and org sizes. A mentor without the scars is a podcast. This is the one criterion that is mentor-specific; a coach plays a different game and is exempt.
2. Specific situations, on demand. Ask: “Tell me three situations like mine you have personally handled.” 0 = frameworks and adjectives. 10 = three concrete stories with what broke and what fixed it, told in under five minutes. No question I know filters more candidates than this one.
3. Answers, not only questions. 0 = every answer is a question back. 10 = you leave the intro call with one move you can run tomorrow. Good mentors also coach when the moment calls for a mirror, but they can always produce a move.
4. Willingness to disagree with you. 0 = they validate everything, you feel great, nothing changes. 10 = the first conversation already contains one thing you did not want to hear. You are not buying agreement; agreement is free at home.
5. Pattern volume. How many people like you have they worked with? 0 = you are the experiment. 10 = your situation matches dozens they have seen. Careful: volume without seat time just repeats the criterion-1 failure at scale. Watching 500 people struggle from the outside is not the same as operating. My number is 3,400+ sessions with 300+ leaders, and you should demand the equivalent from anyone.
6. Transparent pricing. 0 = “let’s discuss your goals first” and the price appears on a call, sized to your budget. 10 = the number is public before you ever speak. Mine is on the pricing page, including the guarantee: a session you rate below 7/10 is not billed.
7. A milestone by session 4-6. 0 = open-ended journey, progress measured in feelings. 10 = a named, checkable outcome inside the first two months. Across my mentees the first big milestone typically lands in 4 to 6 sessions; if a candidate cannot name what yours would be, they are selling a subscription.
8. An exit design. Ask: “When does this end?” 0 = visible confusion, or “development never ends”. 10 = a straight answer about making themselves unnecessary. Mentoring that never ends is a retainer wearing a mentoring costume.
9. Checkable references. 0 = anonymous logos and initials. 10 = named people with faces and titles you can look up, ideally reachable. Mine are here, with names, and the average session rating behind them is 9.17/10.
10. Knows their own edges. 0 = takes every topic, including the ones that belong to a therapist. 10 = says “that is not my lane” out loud and refers you. Burnout that needs clinical help, legal trouble, personal crises: a great mentor names the boundary before you cross it.
Scoring
| Total | Verdict |
|---|---|
| 80-100 | Hire. This is rarer than it should be. |
| 60-79 | Take a trial session with a concrete situation and re-score. |
| Below 60 | Keep looking. A mediocre mentor costs more than no mentor, because you stop searching. |
Three rules while you score. First, score criteria 2 and 4 live, in the intro call: ignore what they claim, watch whether they push back and get specific. Second, when you are vetting a coach, drop criterion 1 and score out of 90; the bands become 72 and 54. Third, for mentors no criterion compensates for criterion 1 below 5.
Nine points of charisma do not buy one point of having been there.
Where this list comes from
I built the engineering org at Mews through Series C, from 8 teams to 80, and I have been full-time mentoring since 2019. The criteria are reverse-engineered from the other direction too: 52% of my mentees arrive in their first leadership role, and the ones who were burned before describe, almost every one, the same three failures: no seat time, no milestone, no end.
Since I told you to run it on me: on criterion 1 my score depends on your seat. I held VPE, not public-company CTO, so if you run a 2,000-person org, my seat time is partial and I say so on the intro call. That sentence is what a 10 on criterion 10 sounds like.
If you are vetting an AI-specific mentor, the trap list is different and I wrote it separately: how to find an AI mentor.
And if you want to run the scorecard live on someone: my intro session is free, bring the checklist. Candidates who suggest that make it easy for you, which is itself a data point.