I spoke with someone who has served on quite a few boards and often served on the Board Development Committee. She shared some thoughts on board recruitment, reminding us to be strategic, to look for gaps, to recruit in cohorts, and to prepare current board members, especially when diversifying your board.

Keep a Running Inventory of Your Board Members

As told by a Board Member somewhere in the US.

People hear “board development committee” and assume we just find new board members. I get why — recruitment is the visible part. The committee does a lot more, but let’s talk about recruitment. When a seat opens, the first instinct is to just fill it. But if you are doing board development right, unless someone leaves unexpectedly, you won’t have a completely open seat because you have thought ahead and you have someone lined up to fill it.

For me, recruitment isn’t filling a roster. It’s keeping a running inventory of who has what skills, expertise, or connections.  This is essentially succession planning for the board. Every board should have people with the time and skills to step into leadership roles, including Board Chair and Secretary. Every board also needs someone with a financial background to be Treasurer. It is also good to have board members with skills in law, fundraising, and governance.  

Ask yourself what skills, experience, and connections are going to walk out the door this year, next year, the following year? Then start recruiting for these positions and skills well in advance. If you plan ahead, you won’t end up with a vacancy you cannot fill from current board members. No one wants to join a board and step into a leadership role on day one. And no board should ask someone to do that.

Look for Key Skill Sets and Experience

On one board, a board member was terming off who was an attorney. So we weren’t just losing an engaged board member. We were losing the person who could actually read dense legal documents and tell us whether the outside counsel we’d hired was any good. You can hire a lawyer, but that doesn’t mean they’re a good lawyer, or an ethical one. Someone who’s in the field can recognize quality in a way the rest of us can’t. Not that the attorney who is also a board member should actually do the work. They are better used as a check on the outside counsel.  

I feel the same around financial expertise, because I’ve served as Treasurer myself without any formal training. I am pretty good at looking at financial statements. I know how to read a budget and look at variances. But I’m honest with myself that my experience isn’t the same as someone who is a professional. And that gap matters, because QuickBooks only knows what you put into it. Someone with deeper financial literacy will catch the wrong entry or the troublesome trend faster than I will.

Recruit in Cohorts, Not One Seat at a Time

People ask about diversifying their board. The first thing I tell them is to recruit in cohorts. When you bring on one person to represent whatever’s missing, that person usually ends up isolated, highly visible, and somehow not really listened to. Bringing someone onto a board to make it look good usually doesn’t work out well.

So, my fix is to stop thinking about individuals and start thinking about cohorts — how an incoming group of new members would relate to and support each other as well as what box each person checks on their own. It changes how you think about board composition.

In one case, we were trying to diversify a board that was all white. Going in, I assumed our whole cohort needed to be people of color. What we landed on, after working through it together, included someone who was white, but who turned out to be essential to how the group would function. You have to be ready to challenge your own assumptions.

My examples are about diversifying around race and skill sets. But diversity can also include gender, age, and geographic location. Consider all of these when developing a board.

Align Logistics to Make Everyone Feel Part of the Team

The Board Development Committee is not responsible for running board meetings or for sending out board materials in advance. But I think we have an important role to inform the staff, CEO, Board Chair, and others who are responsible. The Board Development Committee knows board members best, especially new ones.

Once you have chosen new board members, it is good practice to ask them if they have any special needs or requirements to be an effective board member. This information impacts some pretty unglamorous logistics: when board materials go out before a meeting, how much is sent, whether the format works for someone with eye fatigue or someone using dictation software. None of that shows up on an org chart. All of it decides whether the board is actually a team or just a group of people who show up to the same room.

For example, someone may have vision challenges or dyslexia. Or maybe English is not their first language. Sending out lots of complicated reading can be hard for them. They might need documents run through a speech translator. Think about how much reading you distribute and how it affects everyone. But it can be especially important to some individuals.

Likewise, getting the board book out in advance matters. Someone who works full time and has a couple kids is unlikely to read all the materials if they get them only a day or two ahead.

Train Before Bringing on New Board Members

Another important role of the Board Development Committee is board training. There are many types of training, but since we are talking about recruitment, I want to focus on training related to recruitment, especially when diversifying a board.

Help board members and staff to become aware of biases and assumptions. Explicitly name the things that quietly exclude people, such as judging someone’s contribution by how polished their grammar or speech is. Or automatically granting some voices credibility while others have to earn it. Or assuming that a nonnative speaker is not fluent in English.

Lessons Learned

• Plan ahead for gaps
• Consider key skills, experience, and connections.
• Recruit in cohorts
• Consider needs of all board members around board meeting logistics
• Provide training around assumptions and biases, especially when diversifying a board