Chair and trustee recruitment
Recruiting chairs, trustees and treasurers for your charity board
Recruiting and retaining trustees for your charity or non-profit board can often present a significant challenge.
NCVO research shows that many charities are struggling to find trustees and fill the vacancies on their boards. If you are looking for new board members or need a new chair, then this page contains advice and resources to help you.
If you’re a member, you can find further resources on recruiting trustees in the members’ area.
Get access to more resources and support
As a member of the Association of Chairs you can download even more resources about chair and trustee recruitment, and all aspects of chairing, trusteeship, and governance. You’ll also enjoy access to our training, webinars, networking, and support.
Chair and trustee recruitment – where to start
Identify any gaps on your board
The first step to finding new trustees is to understand what sort of trustees you actually need on your board. Are you missing specific skills or knowledge? Conducting a skills analysis of your existing board members will help you identify any crucial gaps.
Here are two resources that may help:
- Reach Volunteering – Guide on how to complete a skills audit.
- NCVO – Skills audit tool
Plan your approach
Putting together an effective, motivated board team doesn’t happen by accident. It takes time, effort, and intention. Think about how you’ll approach trustee recruitment – who will be involved? You could consider a working group or sub-committee who can lead on identifying skills gaps and designing the recruitment process.
Plan out the key steps in recruiting including:
- Make sure you have reviewed the role description and recruitment pack so they are up to date and accurately reflect the expectations and responsibilities of the role. For template role descriptions see further down this page.
- Plan where you will advertise (there is a handy list of places further down this page), and for how long.
- How will you conduct the interviews – in-person or online? And who will be involved on the interview panel?
- Consider what questions you need to ask candidates (we have a template for interview questions – see more about this below).
- What happens after you find a suitable candidate? Will you invite them to shadow a board meeting, for example, or meet one to one with the chair? What induction materials will you need?
Resources: Our member guides Building your board and Working one to one with trustees contain more detailed information about board recruitment. Download them from the members’ area or find out more about membership.
If it’s time for a new chair, consider co-chairing
When you’re looking to recruit a chair, it’s also a good time to think about whether or not creating a co-chair role would be suitable for your board. Co-chairs can share the load and can make the role more attractive to a wider, more diverse range of candidates. Working on the role descriptions jointly helps to clarify any areas where there would be potential overlap and make sure the boundaries and expectations of each co-chairing role are clear.
Resources: If you’re a member, download our co-chairing guide from the members’ area, or find out more about membership.
Equity, diversity, and inclusion for your board
When you are looking for new board members, think about diversity – who do you want on board? Whose voices are not being heard? What could you change about your recruitment processes to make sure you get the widest range of applicants possible?
To find lots of useful tips and insights, visit our EDI page and download our free guide It starts from the top.
Template trustee recruitment materials
Role descriptions
Trustee, chair, vice-chair, or treasurer roles will vary depending on what your board needs and how trustees contribute to your charity. For example, in smaller charities, trustees may get more involved in the day to day running of the organisation, especially if there are few or no paid employees.
We’ve produced some template role descriptions for chair, trustee, and vice-chair roles, which you can download and amend according to what your board needs. Find them on the templates page
Interview questions for potential board members
If you’ve got some applicants to interview, then check out our suggested questions to ask them. You can download all the questions from our templates page.
Infographics about chairing
Chairing is an extraordinary volunteer role. We want to do more to showcase the value of chairing, the challenges and benefits of the role, and the impact chairs make across the charity and voluntary sector.
We’ve created these two downloadable infographics with an overview of the impact and benefits of chairing. Please feel free to use them for your own chair recruitment.
Where to advertise for new trustees
- Reach Volunteering – The single biggest source of trustees with professional skills in the UK (over 9,000 volunteers available). Check out the Trustee Recruitment Cycle with lots of tips and guidance.
- Honorary Treasurers Forum – Offers a service to promote treasurer vacancies.
- Third Sector Lab – A great platform to help find digital trustees.
- Charity Job – you can post volunteer roles for free.
- Advocate – Offers a service called Bar in the Community for charities that need to appoint legally qualified trustees.
- Institute of Chartered Accountants (ICAEW) – Free advertising for people with specialist finance and business skills.
- Action for Trustee Racial Diversity provides charities with knowledge, resources, toolkits, networks and specialist advice to increase the diversity of their boards.
- LinkedIn – Post your role and use the advanced search tool to find your ideal trustee. Tag people and ask them to share with their networks too.
- Young Trustees Movement – Can help to advertise roles to attract younger trustees.
- Women on Boards – Advertises board roles, starting from free but with paid-for packages for matching services.
- Trustees Unlimited – Paid-for advertising to find trustee candidates.
- Third Sector – it’s free to advertise a volunteer role.
- ACEVO – you can advertise trustee vacancies for a cost.
- Don’t forget local networks and businesses: churches and places of worship, solicitors, your local Council for Voluntary Service (CVS), newspapers, and Facebook forums.
Learn, develop, and connect
Become part of our collaborative community as an individual or as a board and access great resources, essential training, expert webinars, and more!
Other
relevant pages.
Equity, diversity and inclusion
Information and resources related to building inclusive boards.
Resources
More resources available to members and non-members.
Blog
Check out our blog for more inspiration and ideas.