658 - Why Board Members Are Never Chosen Through Applications
Jens Heitland looks at why job hunting and executive selection run on two entirely different systems. From high-volume applications to closed-door board committees, this Daily Hint unpacks how relationships, not applications, decide who gets chosen at the top, and what that means for anyone building a career strategy in a market flooded with AI-generated applications.
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Why Board Members Are Never Chosen Through Applications
A few months ago, I was on a podcast talking about what people are really looking for when they choose where to work. The conversation drifted into a distinction I keep noticing across levels of seniority, and it has stayed relevant every time I look at how careers actually move inside organizations.
Someone trying to find a job quickly is operating in one environment. There is a lot of noise, many open roles, and a volume of applicants large enough that individual attention becomes scarce. In that environment, applying to many companies at once is a rational response. The noise around each individual opening protects almost no one, so the strategy shifts toward reach over precision.
Senior and board-level positioning happens inside a completely different environment. There, the number of open seats is small, the number of people already inside the room is limited, and almost none of the movement happens through a visible process.
Take a board seat, for example. There is no application for it, and nobody submits a form to be considered for a board role. Instead, a committee makes the selection, and that committee sits inside a wider management ecosystem built on existing relationships. People within that ecosystem recommend others they already know. The candidates being discussed are rarely strangers to the room; they are already somewhere near it.
Positioning for consideration is built on proximity, which means being inside the relevant circles long before any seat opens, a different kind of work than writing a strong CV or tailoring a cover letter. The relationship has to exist first, and only afterward does anything resembling an application take shape, if it takes shape at all.
The two systems require two different kinds of effort, and confusing them tends to cost people time. Someone applying at volume to entry- or mid-level roles is playing a numbers game inside a system designed for that kind of engagement. Someone trying to reach a senior or board-level position through the same volume approach is playing a different game, because the system they are trying to enter does not select through applications in the first place.
More recently, the sheer amount of AI-generated material arriving in company inboxes has added another layer to this. Application volume was already high, and it has grown further, making it harder than before to stand out through a form at every level, not only the senior ones. That shift is pushing a reconsideration of how individuals present themselves to the market at large.
Underneath both systems sits the same factor, an individual's actual strategic advantage, and where it creates leverage. For someone sending out applications at volume, the advantage is often speed and range. For someone aiming at a board seat, the advantage is usually the relationships already built and the visibility already earned inside a specific circle.
Either way, the sequence tends to hold. The relationship comes before the formal step, when there is a formal step at all. What gets called an application at that level is often just a record of a decision made elsewhere.
Highlights:
00:00 How People Choose Employers
00:09 Spray and Pray Job Search
00:22 Senior Roles Need Positioning
00:32 Board Seats Are Selected
00:51 Get Into the Right Circles
01:12 Strategy Leverage and Relationships
01:38 AI Slop Changes the Game
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Transcript :
Couple of months ago, I was on this podcast where we discussed what are the people looking for when they choose the company to work in. So one side is you're really into job finding, and you need to find a job quickly, then you almost don't care. You apply to a lot of companies because there's so much noise out there. And then there are the people that are on a senior and top level, they need to be positioned to get into the possibility of even being considered. let's look at board level as one of the examples. It's not an application where you say, "Hey, I want to be a board member, and please hire me as a board member." It is a committee that is selecting certain people, and that committee, including the whole management team, is working on in an ecosystem. So they all work with the people that they know, and then they use the people that they know and recommend them. So if you want to position yourself as a potential board member, you need to get into that circles to be even considered, and that's a completely different strategy than just applying to any different job. So I think for both sides, it is you need to look into what's your strategic advantage from an individual perspective that will build the leverage to where you apply to and/or where you want to be chosen for, and then look into how do you get the relationship first and then the application afterwards. So the whole angle of that is changing dramatically, at least in my eyes. There's so much AI slop that is hitting the companies with applications that you need to restructure that completely as an individual who is looking for a job.