While matching individually gives the greatest amount of control, being able to run a Bulk Matching operation on available mentees and mentors can greatly speed up the process.

Using Bulk Matching is straightforward: The screen will display a record for each 'available' mentee on the left. There is a panel on the right which will display the highest scoring potential partner. You can scroll left and right to view alternative partners, or you can click the dropdown box to view available partners in list form. In both cases the % matching score will also be displayed next to the mentor name.

The records can be expanded to display the full profiles for the mentee and mentor and when you no longer need to view the full profile the details can be contracted again to the basic record.

Once you have scrolled through the options and have decided on the most suitable partner for an unmatched mentee, you can hit the 'Select' button to assign the partner. You now also have the option to create the partnership right away, by hitting the 'Confirm' button, at which point the status of the partnership (provisional or live) will be determined by the Matching flow on the Matching tab of Scheme settings, and this will also determine whether the partnership emails are sent automatically or manually.

If you choose not to hit the 'Confirm' button you can click the 'Clear' button to reverse the selection and continue looking at potential partners, OR leave the assigned ('Selected') partner and move onto to the next unmatched mentee, and so on until you have selected a partner for as many unmatched mentees as possible.

You can also go back and clear/change your selections, until you have the best overall set of partnerships that you can create with the current pool of mentors and mentees (which could be all of them, or not).

Once you are satisfied with the selected partners, you can click the 'Confirm # match' button (# = the number of partnerships that will be created) and all the mentees with selected partners will be matched into a partnership. The status of the partnership (provisional or live) will be determined by the Matching flow on the Matching tab of Scheme Settings, and this will also determine whether the partnership emails are sent automatically or manually.

If you have run automatic matching with the 'review' option, then the suggested partnerships will be pre-populated into the Bulk matching screen, and you can review then and update them in exactly the same way as above.

Find out more about how to change the email you send when clicking on the Match & Send Email button on our 'managing system emails' article.