Transforming the way businesses recruit board members

The recruitment industry at the board level is changing on a global scale. The demand for new board members with diverse and specific skill sets is increasing rapidly across all markets and, in parallel, activist investors are putting a much greater focus on board refreshment. 

With rapidly changing technology, consumer habits, and developing markets, it’s imperative for businesses to evolve in order to stay relevant. But this has to begin at the top with the ultimate leadership team: the board of directors. 

Since our inception in 2013, In Touch has been disrupting the market with the desire to transform the way businesses recruit in order to counteract the traditional, closed-group recruitment process--a goal that I personally am incredibly passionate about. 

Changing board trends

Traditionally, only the largest organizations have had the budget and requirement from investors to hire executive search firms to recruit at the board level. This has caused a wide gap to emerge in the industry and driven mid-size and small businesses to seek out board talent through their existing networks of professional contacts, investors, lawyers, bankers, and other board members because they have lacked the resources to seek out new talent through alternate channels.

From 2002 until 2014, I was in a role where I actively studied board-specific data including diversity trends and their relationship to board and business performance. Through my unique position, I noticed a significant issue: most organizations elected top leadership through the networking channels of their existing board members or C-suite executives, regardless of industry, company maturity, or size. There was almost no change in the composition of boards when considering ethnicity, gender, age, or skill-set diversity. This was significant because when there were obvious relationship maps between new board members to existing ones, or to the CEO, it often showed a stagnation in organizational progression and lack of adaptation to new trends and fresh ideas. 

With no budgets and no new ideas, it’s understandable that people turn to what and who they know. For businesses, this means either turning to people they have existing relationships with – whether they have the right skills for the job or not – or keeping the current group of directors in place for too long. If we look at struggling businesses in the current market, we can see that organization-wide issues originate at the highest levels due to lack of effectiveness among leaders. From this data, it is clear that a major factor affecting board effectiveness is a lack of diversity of thought - a direct result from recruiting exclusively inside existing networks.  

There is a solution though, and we are already seeing change emerge. If organizations are able to build a board of directors with diverse experiences, who can think like their consumers/clients, then they have an advantage.

A study conducted by Harvard Law School, in conjunction with ISS Analytics, highlighted US board diversity trends in 2019, reporting the number of new board directors being hired to boards and the percentage of women joining boards have both reached new record highs. The industry is now demanding refreshment and here at In Touch, we are helping do just this.

The future

At In Touch we have built a private, professional network of highly successful executives and board members who are all actively looking to take that next step in their career. We partner with businesses and allow them to recruit from our network at no cost. This is transforming the industry because it is directly countering the traditional in-network recruiting.

We are giving both individuals and businesses connections that didn’t exist before, and fostering diverse, skill-centric relationships that can provide businesses with the prime candidate, rather than the convenient contact. 

I’m so proud of the fact that, through our platform and services, our members are given the opportunity to reach their full career potential; something that may not have been possible when I first started working in this industry. 

We are able to reach people on a global scale, but have always had a focus on providing members with a personal, local experience. That’s why we opened our first US office in January 2019. We have built an incredible team of passionate, excited, driven and hard-working people who are operating on the ground in downtown Chicago. 

By bringing the right skill sets to the right boards across the US, we are naturally creating a more diverse pool of new board talent. Our mission is to positively promote change within the boardroom, and we are excited to continue that journey with our US expansion.

If you’d like to open up a conversation please contact me directly through LinkedIn or leave a comment below and I will contact you.