Why the traditional approach to finding a board seat is fundamentally wrong, and why the relationships you build long before a vacancy appears may matter more than the application you eventually submit.

There is a statistic about board appointments that every executive aspiring to a serious board career should understand. It is not how many directors have completed the AICD course, how beautifully their board résumé has been written, or even how many years of C-suite experience they accumulated before making the transition. It is something much more fundamental: how did the people already sitting in boardrooms actually get there?

Research into board appointments consistently points to a reality that is uncomfortable for people who approach a board career as another executive job search. The overwhelming majority of board appointments are influenced by relationships that exist before the formal selection process begins. Research published in Economica, drawing on S&P 1500 board appointments, found that 22.7 percent of new independent directors were recommended by executive search firms. Once appointments arising from mergers were removed, almost 64 percent of the remaining nominations came from someone already sitting on the board.

Harvard Business School research tells a remarkably similar story. In its study Charting a Path to the Boardroom, researchers found that 31 percent of independent directors were introduced to their board through the CEO, 37 percent were already known to at least one director, and overall 63 percent were introduced through either a current executive or an existing board member. Executive search firms accounted for another 13 percent, rising to 23 percent for directors joining large companies.

Different studies produce different percentages, but they keep arriving at essentially the same conclusion: the pathway into the boardroom runs overwhelmingly through people.

If you are treating your board search as a CV distribution exercise, you are solving the wrong problem.

The hidden market is the real market

I have spent more than two decades working with senior executives, directors, chairs and boards, and one of the most persistent mistakes I see is extraordinarily simple. An accomplished executive decides they want a board career. They complete their governance qualifications, prepare a polished board résumé, update LinkedIn, register with various organisations and board databases, and begin watching advertised vacancies. Then they apply. And apply. And wait. After six or twelve months, they start wondering what is wrong with their credentials when, in most cases, there is very little wrong with the credentials at all. The problem is the strategy.

The advertised board market is the visible tip of a much larger ecosystem. By the time many substantial board opportunities become visible, conversations have already taken place. Chairs have spoken to directors, nomination committee members have canvassed their networks, investors and advisers have offered names, CEOs have made suggestions, and search consultants may already have people in mind. The question inside the boardroom is therefore rarely simply, Who has applied? More often, the conversation starts somewhere else: Who do we know? Who have we worked with? Who could do this? Who knows somebody? That distinction changes everything.

Australian research examining corporate networks has similarly described closed social networks as an important means of identifying prospective directors, encompassing professional relationships as well as longstanding social connections. Other research on board diversity has documented prospective directors being introduced to existing directors and informally assessed before any formal approach was made. The formal recruitment process may be what an outsider eventually sees, but much of the real market operates through conversations, referrals, reputation and trust that have developed well before a vacancy is announced.

The board vacancy may be new. The relationships influencing who gets considered for it usually aren’t.

Your C-suite network is not necessarily a board network

This becomes particularly confronting for highly successful executives because many people arrive at my door believing, quite reasonably, that they already have an excellent network. And they do. They know CEOs, CFOs, lawyers, bankers, consultants, suppliers, customers and former colleagues. They may have spent 25 years building enormous professional networks and have thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, of LinkedIn connections. But an executive network and a board director network are not the same thing.

I tend to test this by asking a different set of questions. How many chairs could you telephone today and reasonably expect them to take the call? How many non-executive directors would sit down with you for coffee? How many nomination committee members understand what you could contribute to their next board? Which directors would put your name forward when you are not in the room? Which board search consultants know you well enough, not merely to have your CV in a database, but to stake some of their own professional reputation on introducing you to a client? When we start looking at the network through that lens, even very senior executives can discover that their genuine board-level network is considerably smaller than they thought.

There is an even more important distinction here because knowing people is not enough. You need champions. A LinkedIn connection is not a champion. Somebody you met once at an AICD function is not necessarily a champion, nor is a former colleague who vaguely knows you are interested in boards. A champion understands your value, trusts your judgement, knows where you fit and, critically, is prepared to advocate for you when an opportunity emerges. That is an extraordinarily valuable form of professional capital because the most important conversation in your board career may take place when you are nowhere near the room.

The most important conversation in your board search may be the one that happens when you are not in the room.

The boardroom still has an insider problem

There is another part of this conversation that Australian business should be mature enough to discuss. Access to influential networks has never been evenly distributed, and although corporate governance has changed substantially over the past few decades, the social architecture surrounding senior business relationships has not simply disappeared.

One senior executive said something to me recently that stayed with me. He has built an impressive C-suite career and has some board relationships, although he readily acknowledges that his board network is not yet as deep as he would like. His observation was simple: “I didn’t go to a private school.” He wasn’t complaining or suggesting that his background had prevented him from succeeding. He was describing the ecosystem he could see around him: relationships going back decades, school and university networks, professional associations, private clubs, former colleagues who subsequently became directors and people who had sat across several boards together.

Australian research into corporate director networks has discussed precisely these kinds of social structures, including exclusive clubs, professional relationships and the traditional “old boys’ network”. That doesn’t mean every board appointment is determined by who somebody went to school with, and it would be absurd to suggest it does. But it would be equally naïve to pretend that longstanding social and professional networks have no influence on who comes into consideration when senior appointments are being discussed.

Korn Ferry executive Bridget Gray has previously described the issue in the Australian context, observing that many board appointments proceed through informal networks rather than formal structured searches. That has consequences beyond the individual board candidate because, left unchecked, people naturally tend to recommend people they already know, and often people whose professional and social backgrounds resemble their own.

The governance implications are important. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency has encouraged organisations to use formal search processes rather than relying solely on personal networks and word-of-mouth recruitment because those practices can restrict the pool of people who ever get the opportunity to be considered. So there are really two conversations taking place at once: boards should absolutely be broadening the networks through which they recruit, but aspiring directors cannot build their careers on the assumption that this transformation has already happened.

Why cold networking usually fails

Once executives understand the importance of relationships, they sometimes make another mistake and start networking furiously. They identify prominent chairs and directors on LinkedIn and send messages explaining that they are looking to build their board portfolio and would appreciate the opportunity to meet for coffee and seek some advice. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach. It simply isn’t particularly compelling when you consider the request from the other person’s perspective.

A prominent chair may receive variations of that approach constantly. Everybody wants access, everybody would appreciate advice, everybody wants an introduction, and everybody promises they only need 20 minutes. The more senior somebody becomes, the more aggressively they have to protect their time. The objective therefore cannot simply be to meet board directors. It has to be to create legitimate reasons for relationships to develop.

Perhaps you share a sector or an area of expertise. Perhaps you have deep experience in a problem one of their boards is grappling with. Perhaps somebody they already trust introduces you. Perhaps you contribute to an advisory board, industry project or committee that brings you into the same orbit. Perhaps your thought leadership has made you visible around an issue that matters to their organisation. Perhaps an investor, lawyer, banker, adviser or director who knows both of you can bridge the relationship naturally. This is why sophisticated board networking looks very different from simply accumulating contacts. Access is not the objective. Relevance is.

Stop networking with everyone

This is where I differ quite strongly from some of the conventional advice given to aspiring board directors. I don’t believe most senior executives need to “network more”. In fact, for many of them, that is terrible advice. Time is finite, senior executives are already operating under enormous demands, and spending several nights a week at networking functions exchanging business cards with people who have no relationship whatsoever to your board strategy is not necessarily productive. The real question is not how much networking you are doing, but whether you are building the right relationships for the next board appointment you want to secure.

If your next logical board is an ASX-listed mining services company, for example, map that ecosystem rather than networking indiscriminately across every conceivable sector. Who chairs the relevant companies? Who sits on their nomination committees? Who are the influential directors? Which investors influence appointments? Which lawyers, bankers and advisers repeatedly sit around those boards? Which executive search consultants lead mandates in that market? Who in your existing network is one degree away from those people, or perhaps two degrees away? Where do these people naturally come together, what conversations are taking place in their sector, and, most importantly, what do you have to contribute to those conversations?

That is networking with an objective.

Do not build a bigger network. Build the right network for the board seat you are trying to secure next.

Headhunters matter, but not in the way many aspiring directors imagine

Executive search remains an important part of the board appointment ecosystem, and the research supports that. But there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what board search firms actually do that causes many aspiring directors to waste an enormous amount of time approaching them in the wrong way. Board search consultants work for boards. They do not work for candidates.

When a chair appoints a board search consultant, the brief is not to help an accomplished executive establish their board career. The brief is to find the best possible director for a particular board at a particular moment. The consultant’s reputation sits behind that shortlist, and the chair expects candidates who can credibly step into that governance environment. For larger listed-company mandates, that frequently means candidates with established governance credentials and, often, existing board experience.

This is why simply emailing every major executive search firm your résumé is unlikely to transform your board career. What matters is being known by the right board search practitioners before the relevant mandate lands on their desk. They need to understand far more than the contents of your résumé. They need to understand where you fit, which boards should find you interesting, what differentiates you from other directors with superficially similar credentials and, eventually, whether they are comfortable putting their reputation behind you.

Board careers are incremental

Perhaps the most important principle in building a board portfolio is also the least glamorous: board careers are incremental. The first credible board role helps create the second. The second changes how the market sees you for the third. Committee experience creates pathways to committee chair roles. A private company board can provide evidence for a larger private company appointment. An advisory board can expose you to investors, founders, and other directors. A substantial not-for-profit or statutory appointment can establish governance experience that did not previously exist. Each appointment adds something to your board capital and changes the conversation you can have about the next one.

That is why I think the question How do I get on a board? is generally the wrong question. The far more useful question is: What is the next board I should be on? Those questions may sound similar, but they lead to completely different behaviour. The first encourages activity, applications, and broad networking. The second demands strategy.

Once you identify the next logical board, you can reverse-engineer the market around it. You can identify the 20 or 30 relationships that actually matter, determine which search firms operate in that space, identify gaps in your credentials, develop thought leadership around issues relevant to those boards, and create genuine reasons to be in conversations with the people who influence appointments. Suddenly the board search stops being random and starts becoming a deliberate campaign.

Board careers are built incrementally. Every seat should make the next seat more achievable.

The coffee-meeting test

I use a very simple test with executives who tell me they are actively pursuing board opportunities: how many chairs and non-executive directors did you sit down with last month? I am not asking how many people they connected with on LinkedIn, how many advertisements they answered or how many résumés they sent. I am asking how many real conversations they had with people who could conceivably influence a board appointment.

If the answer is none, there is usually a problem with the strategy. If you are genuinely in the board market, I would expect meaningful board-level conversations to be taking place regularly. These should not be transactional meetings in which you ask somebody for a job; they should be substantive conversations that build familiarity, professional relevance and, eventually, trust.

The reason is that sooner or later something changes. A director announces their retirement, a board begins succession planning, a chair decides the organisation needs greater cyber capability, an investor wants somebody with transformation experience, a nomination committee identifies a skills gap or a search consultant receives a new mandate. Somewhere, in a conversation you will probably never hear, somebody asks: Who do we know? Who would be good? Who should we speak to? Your entire board strategy should be designed to increase the probability that, at that moment, somebody says your name.

A board career is built long before the vacancy exists.

The uncomfortable truth about merit

None of this means capability doesn’t matter. It matters enormously. Boards carry serious legal, financial, strategic and reputational responsibilities, and the expectations placed on directors continue to rise. Contemporary boards need people who understand technology, AI, cyber security, regulation, capital, geopolitics, transformation, human capital and increasingly complex stakeholder environments. Nobody should be appointed to a serious board simply because they know the right person.

But merit does not operate in a vacuum. Before your capability can be assessed, somebody has to know you exist. They have to understand what you bring, recognise where that capability could be useful and, eventually, trust you enough to put your name into a conversation. When the opportunity arises, somebody needs to be prepared to say, We should talk to her, or I know someone who would be very good for this.

That is why visibility matters, reputation matters, thought leadership matters, and relationships with chairs, directors, and board search principals matter. It is also why waiting for the perfect advertisement to appear is one of the weakest board strategies an otherwise accomplished executive can pursue.

The real work happens before the application

There is a temptation when pursuing a board career to focus on the things we can easily see and control: the résumé, the LinkedIn profile, the governance qualification, and the application itself. All of those things matter, but they are infrastructure. They are not the strategy.

The strategy is positioning yourself inside the ecosystem in which board decisions are actually made. That takes longer and requires considerably more judgement. It requires generosity because relationships cannot be built entirely around what somebody can do for you. It requires discipline because not every prestigious person is relevant to your board strategy. And it requires patience because meaningful board-level networks are built over years, not weeks.

There is no shortcut around trust. What can be accelerated, however, is access to the right ecosystem, particularly when credible people are prepared to introduce you into it. That is one of the reasons I developed my Board Portfolio® methodology. After decades working across executive and board search, I became increasingly convinced that telling executives to simply “go and network” was nowhere near enough. The real value lies in identifying the right board ecosystem, determining where an executive can credibly contribute, and then creating meaningful introductions into it.

Very few people willingly open their most senior networks, and there is a good reason for that. Every meaningful introduction carries reputational capital. When I introduce an executive to a chair, director, investor, or senior search practitioner, I am not simply exchanging two email addresses. My own reputation sits somewhere inside that introduction. The same is true whenever a director recommends somebody for a board. That is precisely why these relationships carry so much weight.

And it brings us back to the fundamental point. A board career is not built by sending more applications. It is built deliberately, appointment by appointment and relationship by relationship. You need to know which board seat to pursue next, understand the ecosystem surrounding it, identify the people who influence it, build genuine relationships before you need them, become visible for something that matters, and develop champions who will advocate for you when you are absent. You also need the people who search for directors to understand exactly where you belong.

Because when the next significant board vacancy emerges, the most important question may not be Who applied?

It may simply be:

Who do we know?

And your job is to make sure the right people know you.

Kylie Hammond LLM Ent Gov is a board and executive search consultant and founder of Tiger Boards and Board Portfolio®. She has worked with senior executives, CEOs, chairs and non-executive directors for more than two decades, advising executives on building credible, commercially focused board portfolios.

Originally published on LinkedIn.