TY - JOUR AB - Purpose Inter-organizational mentoring (IOM) is a human resource development tool that is used when the mentor and mentee belong to different organizations. As mentees are the focus of the IOM process, the success of this type of program is highly reliant on their characteristics. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to derive the most desirable characteristics for mentees in IOM.Design/methodology/approach An intensive review of the literature on mentoring for managers and business professionals was carried out to identify mentee characteristics. These characteristics were then ranked for their importance to IOM using the Hybrid Delphi method (with 130 informants taking part in a Delphi survey and 19 expert IOM practitioners taking part in Focus Group and Nominal Group Technique sessions). An exploratory factor analysis identified the three main underlying factors behind the listed mentee characteristics.Findings In total, 17 relevant mentee characteristics were identified and ranked and then synthesized into three essential factors for the mentee. The results were discussed in the light of existing studies.Originality/value The mentee characteristics and factors identified in this study will be of great practical value to coordinators of IOM programs. Also, the review of the literature and the obtained results will help other researchers who wish to expand on this topic. VL - 44 IS - 4/5 SN - 2046-9012 DO - 10.1108/EJTD-02-2019-0022 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-02-2019-0022 AU - Gisbert-Trejo Nuria AU - Albizu Eneka AU - Landeta Jon AU - Fernández-Ferrín Pilar PY - 2020 Y1 - 2020/01/01 TI - Mentee characteristics in inter-organizational mentoring for managers: a hybrid Delphi survey T2 - European Journal of Training and Development PB - Emerald Publishing Limited SP - 369 EP - 389 Y2 - 2024/05/05 ER -