How to land your first board position: it's a complex process but not an entirely impenetrable one.

• Author: Peppers, Don
• Position: ENDNOTE

S0 YOU'RE NOW at the stage in your career where you think your judgment and expertise might prove valuable on a public or private company's board of directors, and you'd love to get a crack at it. But how exactly do you get considered for such a position? How does someone get chosen to sit on a company's board? And how should an interested candidate improve his or her chances?

Obtaining a board position isn't as straightforward a process as finding a new job, because board members aren't "hired" the way employees are. While search firms are often used, the selection and approval process for board members is quite different.

Gottenberg Associates' Norbert Gottenberg, for instance, says every new director has to be vetted among all the current ones, some of whom might have conflicting opinions. Gottenberg specializes in recruiting board members for such high-profile names as Intuit, Dun & Bradstreet, Google and Amazon. corn (where he's recruited six of that company's nine corporate directors over the years), and he says recruiting a board member requires the same kind of care that a doctor shows in treating a child, or that parents show in adopting a child. "It's like there's a family involved," he says, "and the family's interests have to be respected above all."

But while it's a complex process, it's not an entirely impenetrable one. In the end, you can improve your chances at a board seat by focusing on three key things: Network, Outreach, and Expertise.

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* Network: Most board appointments go to people already known to the CEO or some other key player on the board. Tuck Rickards, managing partner at Russell Reynolds Associates and a member of the firm's CEO/Board Services Practice, says that because of this, for all but the largest companies personal networking is perhaps the single most effective method for getting noticed in the first place. So be sure to refresh your connections with any current board members you know, or with others who know them. Join a LinkedIn group dedicated to boards and their issues, and participate in some of the discussions. Go to a governance conference, or to investors' conferences, and mingle with the crowd. Make acquaintances.

* Outreach: Executive recruiting firms with board practices all start their own searches by scouring their existing databases. John Wood, vice chairman at Heidrick & Struggles and a veteran of many board searches for Fortune 500 firms, says that even for the...