TY  - CHAP
A1  - Ladegard, Gro
A1  - Hansen, Katrin
A1  - Bührmann, Andrea D.
T1  - Exploring director recruitment. What characteristics constitute an appointable candidate?
T2  - Governance in Action Globally. Strategy Process and Reality
N2  - We investigate how professional recruiters perceive and assess potential board director candidates. Based on a human capital perspective, individual characteristics will represent certain human capital resources, perceived as more or less useful for the firm. We focus on what characteristics are critical for a candidate to be perceived as appointable to a board. We are particularly interested in the role visible vs. more hidden aspects of human capital in these assessments. The aim of the study is to uncover central actors’ ideas and assumptions of what constitutes the ideal board director. This will add 
knowledge as to how board compositions are created and 
changed.  
We conducted eight semi-structured, in-depth interviews with professional recruiters in Germany and Norway. The results show that formal competence is partly downplayed as selection criteria for board positions, while experience has a central role. Further, our results show that experiences have both a concrete and a symbolic side, where certain individual characteristics appear to represent an image of a successful director of a board. Further, our data show that symbolic capital, labeled “habitus”, is a crucial prerequisite for an individual to be appraised as an ideal candidate. The results indicate preferences for stability and predictability in recruitment processes, which may contribute to explain the persistently low 
proportion of women on corporate boards.
Y1  - 2014
UR  - https://whge.opus.hbz-nrw.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/2472
SP  - 177
EP  - 200
PB  - RossiSmith Academic Publications
CY  - Oxford
ER  -