Free working document
The Match Criteria Worksheet
A working template for deciding what a good pair means in your program before the first application arrives.
Matching goes wrong before matching day. It goes wrong when the application asks for a biography instead of an ask, when availability is collected as free text, when nobody wrote down which criteria can be traded away, and when mentor capacity is never asked at all. By the time you are looking at two hundred rows, those choices are locked in.
This worksheet is the hour of work that prevents all of it. Fill it in before you open applications and you leave with your criteria, their weights, the exact application questions that feed them, and a rule for what lands in the exception queue. Coordinators who bring it to a program committee also find it settles arguments about who the program is for, because the weights force the question.
Stage one: define what a good pair means
Stage two: write the application questions that feed the match
Stage three: weight the criteria and run the first pass
Stage four: introduce, log and prove it worked
How to use it
Work through stages one and two at least three weeks before applications open, ideally with one other person from your program committee. The disagreements that surface while weighting criteria are the ones that would otherwise surface in front of a mentee who was matched badly.
Keep the completed worksheet with your cohort records and bring it out at the end of the term. Compare the exception queue you predicted with the one you actually had, and adjust the weights for next cycle. Two cohorts of this and your matching afternoon gets genuinely short.
Send me the editable copy
Send me the editable worksheet by email so I can fill it in with my program committee before applications open.
Questions about this document
Does this work for a first cohort with no history?
Yes, and a first cohort is when it helps most. You will guess some weights wrong, which is fine because the worksheet records what you guessed. After one term you have evidence instead of assumptions and the second round of weighting takes twenty minutes.
Can I use this with a program that already runs on a spreadsheet?
Absolutely. The worksheet is about decisions, not software. Fill it in, then encode the criteria and weights in whatever you already use. Coordinators often find the exercise cleans up their existing application form more than anything else.
How is this different from the launch checklist?
The checklist covers the four weeks before a cohort opens, across training, communications and events. This worksheet covers one thing in depth, which is how you define and weight a good pair. Use both, with the worksheet first.
After the worksheet comes matching day
Once your criteria, your weights and your exception rule are filled in, the rest is mechanical work: apply them across the closed list in one pass, confirm no mentor exceeded the capacity she agreed to, and log meetings from the introduction email onward. A demo shows that same worksheet living as application questions, suggested pairs and an end of term report.