A conversation with executive search consultant José Ruiz of Alder Koten on how board expectations have shifted, why most outreach fails, and what actually gets candidates onto a director shortlist.
Each month, BlueSteps hosts small networking sessions where senior executives sit down with AESC search consultants and other industry figures for off-the-record conversations on what's actually shaping executive careers right now. The rooms are intimate by design, typically 15 to 20 people, and the value is the directness. Senior consultants share what they're seeing on their desks. Senior executives ask the questions they couldn't ask in a public forum.
Last week's session continued what's been a board-heavy stretch for our community, coming on the heels of the AESC Global Summit and BlueSteps' featured board panel. This time the topic was board service itself: what consultants are actually looking for in director candidates in 2026, and what most aspiring directors are getting wrong about how the search process works.
Our featured guest was José Ruiz, a Houston-based executive search consultant at Alder Koten who specializes in family-owned and private-equity-backed companies. José spent his early career as a manufacturing executive, becoming Managing Director by 32, before pivoting into executive search and increasingly focusing on board evaluations, governance restructuring, and the realities reshaping what boards expect from new directors.
Five of the things he told the room that everyone is still talking about.
Most aspiring directors plan their candidacy around an idea of board service that's now 15 years out of date. José's framing of how we got here:
"In the past 20 years, there have been two inflection points that have really shifted the expectation of what a board does and should do. The first was after the housing bubble crisis — the emergence of Sarbanes-Oxley and the realization that fiduciary responsibility was a real thing, that the board actually had to do a job, not just rubber-stamp."
"The second inflection point came in COVID, when essentially half of the rule book got thrown out the window. Companies realized that a set strategy was not a set strategy. From that point on, we have just been hit from left to right almost every single year with some kind of disruption."
The result, José said, has been a fundamental shift in the kind of director boards are actively looking for. Where 15 years ago a board recruited members to deploy a strategy that had already been laid out (by McKinsey, BCG, or the executive team), today's boards need members who can help question a strategy that may need to be torn up and rewritten every two years.
An attendee in the room raised a striking data point. The CFO of Walmart used to do annual IT budget planning but is now doing it monthly because of the uncertainty around AI investment. José used the example to describe what boards now need from directors: not just the ability to execute a strategy, but the ability to question and reset one at much higher frequency.
The translation for board candidates: heavy executive credentials and deep functional expertise are no longer enough on their own. The profile boards want now leans on stewardship, judgment, and the ability to operate inside guardrails rather than provide prescriptive direction.
A pattern José keeps seeing in his work: clients still ask for industry expertise even when what they actually need is something different. He pushed back on the room directly:
"If somebody asks you, what can you bring to a board? It cannot be pulling out your résumé and saying, I've done X, Y, and Z in the past. I'm an expert in logistics. I'm an expert in IT. Experts can be brought in and out. They can be consultants."
"It has to be about the kind of situations where you have faced uncertainty, and how you have worked with others to be able to deal with the amount of uncertainty that's bubbling up into the board."
The director's job, José said, has split into two distinct components. The first is helping the company drive forward: setting direction, resetting strategy, asking the questions that surface what needs to be addressed. The second is what he called the Sentinel function: being able to see what the company and the board currently cannot see, with as much time as possible to react.
He illustrated it with a joke that landed:
"A train conductor is being interviewed. The interviewer asks: you're on the tracks, your train is going 120 miles per hour, and you're notified by radio that there's another train on the same track going 90 miles per hour, six miles south. What do you do?
The conductor says, I call my sister.
The interviewer says, is your sister a conductor?
No, he says. She's just never seen two trains collide."
The point: a lot of board work involves spotting the inevitable far enough in advance to do something about it. Directors who can do that, through judgment rather than expertise, are what's in demand.
Asked how AI is reshaping board work, José described a moment that surprised the room. He recounted a board meeting from two days earlier where the CEO had spent 90 minutes presenting his AI governance framework:
"In the break, legal counsel picks up the phone. She says, I just got an email from Columbia. They're telling me there's this new law disrupting X, Y, and Z. And this is marvelous, because I just asked ChatGPT. She told me about the problem. So in 10 seconds, I responded to the email.
"What she did, and I was very clear about it, was an abdication of her judgment. And her duty. She essentially hid behind the judgment of an AI, totally outside what the CEO had spent 90 minutes saying was their AI governance."
The risk, José argued, isn't AI getting answers wrong. It's people across organizations quietly stopping themselves from asking questions because a tool already produced one.
"The biggest risk of these AI tools is the application of judgment, accountability, and responsibility. People making decisions because they feel they have the right information in their hands. Because AI told them."
He compared the governance challenge to cybersecurity: too many points of entry, too much happening at once, no way to absolutely block consumer availability of AI inside the organization. Boards are "frantically trying to figure out" how to write guardrails that don't suffocate innovation. None of them have it solved yet.
It's a thread our community has been pulling on across recent sessions, and one we expect will define more board agendas through 2026 than almost any other governance topic.
A second observation that landed hard. José told the room he wakes up every morning to "over 900 emails." His associates filter most of them before he ever sees anything. LinkedIn outreach, he said, is essentially a dead end at his level.
He was direct about the implication for aspiring directors:
"Your best friends in executive search are the people with the title Associate. They are the gatekeepers. They are the ones that decide who gets to speak to me on a daily basis. They're the ones scheduling my calendar. They're the ones who need to know who you are and when you would be a valuable board member."
But for the actual outreach itself, the moment when an executive wants to surface their candidacy directly, he recommended something almost no one is doing:
"I'll share my trick. I have a stack of books. Whenever I want to reach someone, I send the book with a personal note via FedEx overnight. That's how I get to someone."
"It bypasses all gatekeepers. It'll reach a desk. And the personal note will be read."
"We are back to paper. And if it's a book being sent through FedEx overnight, that's your 30 seconds of fame."
The deeper logic: 60% of board seats are filled by people already inside an existing board's network. Cold outreach, even at scale, doesn't break through because the format itself has been overwhelmed past the point of effectiveness. Specificity and inconvenience do.
The point isn't really FedEx. It's about doing one slightly inconvenient thing that the person on the other side will actually notice.
A related tactical observation, on documents: search firms now ask candidates for a one-page board résumé and a six-page backup document. AI synthesizes both regardless of length, deciding whether you make the long list before any human sees you.
"It doesn't matter if you do one page or you do ten. AI is going to synthesize that. And AI is going to answer the first question of whether or not you should be on the long list to be considered for a board role."
One of the most counterintuitive observations from the night, especially for executives who assume their best path is into a board in their own sector:
"A great majority of our clients will tell us, don't bring anybody from our industry. We know our industry. We don't want to get into conflicts of interest. We do not want to have those conversations. We want something that's adjacent. That will take us out of the echo chamber. And that will teach us something."
Adjacency, José explained, is often the actual fit. A search his firm ran recently illustrates how it plays out: a San Antonio developer rooted in restaurant and hospitality was expanding into casino and entertainment. They wanted an operator who had run a Las Vegas casino, with the loyalty programs, retail, food, and hotel integration that experience brings, not someone from their existing industry.
The implication: aspiring directors should map their experience by capability, not just industry. Decision-making under uncertainty, scaling operations, navigating regulatory complexity. These translate across sectors, and the boards that can use them best are often not the ones you'd assume.
A few additional rapid-fire observations from the conversation that are worth holding onto:
Pulled together, José's observations point at a single shift: the senior executives who land board seats in 2026 are the ones who can demonstrate judgment under uncertainty, framed in language boards listen for, surfaced through deliberate work that compounds over 18 to 36 months. A first board seat is rarely the result of one well-timed move. It's the result of slow, specific, slightly inconvenient work that real people on the other side of the table actually notice.
Two of the most concrete pieces of work José surfaced are exactly what BlueSteps was built for: getting your board documents right (the one-page board résumé and the longer backup), and building visibility to the AESC search firms who actually run director searches.
As the executive career platform from AESC (the global association of retained executive search firms), BlueSteps sits between board candidates and the consultants filling director seats. Our Board Candidacy Advisory team works one-on-one with senior executives on the same questions José described: how to translate executive experience into governance language, how to build the right documents, and how to become known to the search firms running the searches that matter for your career. It's a positioning no other advisory program can match.
Schedule a complimentary 30-minute Board Candidacy Advisory consultation. Our advisors will walk through your specific situation rather than give generic advice. You'll leave with a clearer view of where the work actually needs to go.
Or read the Modern Board Candidate's Playbook. Our 30-page tactical guide goes deeper on the operational-to-governance reframe, includes a 12-question self-assessment of board readiness, walks through the four blind spots that keep accomplished executives invisible to boards, and lays out what to expect in your first year on a board. It's free.
If you'd like to be in the room the next time we host a session like this one, BlueSteps members get first access to our monthly networking sessions, plus the AESC search firm directory, the eLearning library, and the Career Insider weekly briefing. Learn more about membership →
Most executives think the recruiter-candidate relationship works like a job board: you submit, they review, you hear back. It almost never works that way at
A conversation with executive search consultant José Ruiz of Alder Koten on how board expectations have shifted, why most outreach fails, and what actually gets
