Who Should Be on a Nonprofit Search Committee?

Search Committees play a key role in our search process.  They are reviewing job descriptions, developing interview questions, evaluating content of candidate responses, helping to organize staff engagement in interviews and, most important, making sure the search team understands the organizations and their needs.

But creating a search committee isn’t a science.  Talking to colleagues nationally, there is a lot of art to putting together the search team.  Some organizations and consultants only have board members; others have a mix of board and staff and some others include a donor or past board member.  As you can imagine, everyone has opinions on the “best way” to construct the committee.

Here are my thoughts:  if the Executive Director will be reporting to the board of directors, then they have to be involved in the search committee.  No one else should be selecting the staff person they supervise.  Then, understanding that the Executive Director’s job is to manage the board and manage the staff, staff need to be involved so that the job description reflects what needs to happen on a day-to-day basis.  I tend not to include donors on a search committee as they are, generally, once more step removed from the board and may not understand the daily needs of the organization. Clients have recently been suggested and that should be a consideration.  There isn’t a yes/no answer on clients—it really depends on who is already on the board and how the clients are engaging with daily decisions and operations of the organization.  In some cases, a search committee without clients will be a poor reflection of the Executive Director’s role and the nonprofits relationships.

Once the basics are in place, we talk through the people involved, the expectations of those involved and the relationship of the people involved.  All of these pieces play a role in how the search committee will work together, how open and responsive they will be to each other and how accurate their reflection of the work will be.

Just like the Executive Director role can be seen as the middle of an hour glass, so too does the search committee play a role of representing board, staff, clients, donors and community.