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During a recent panel, there was a question about how search firms are using AI to surface candidates. My answer points to a shift most board candidates haven’t fully grasped. Executive search firms now use AI tools to find candidates, and AI builds its picture of you from what’s published about you, much of it outside LinkedIn.

The Search for Your Next Board Seat Has Two Audiences: Humans and AI (Audio Deep Dive)

Last week, I was fortunate to be part of a Private Directors Association (PDA) panel, Reapproaching Your Board Search: Define, Scale and Amplify Your Personal Brand.

My fellow panelists were Alyssa Gelbard, whose company, Point Road Group, helps aspiring board members and teams clarify and strengthen their personal brands, and Matt Schwartz, a practice lead at executive search firm Hunt Club. Amber Hilliard of KPMG brilliantly moderated the discussion.

Alyssa spoke from a personal branding perspective, Matt from an executive search perspective, and I connected the dots through digital marketing and AI.

Amber asked me what an effective digital presence looks like for someone seeking board opportunities. I told the audience that it comes down to taking baby steps with what you’re comfortable doing, whether that’s writing blog posts or simply commenting on posts, and understanding that it’s a commitment. The low-hanging fruit is commenting on LinkedIn or in relevant industry publications—not just “great point of view,” but commenting with purpose—i.e., why you agree, or why you disagree. That perspective starts to uniquely position your experience, as opposed to people whose responses are formulaic.

How AI Is Changing the Board Search

Amber followed up by asking me: “How are search firms and directors actually using AI and LLMs to surface candidates today, and what should people be doing to make sure they show up well in that process?”

My answer was that recruiters are doing the same thing we do as consumers. When we want a short list of leaders in a specific sector, we go straight to ChatGPT, Perplexity or another LLM. Recruiters are using specific prompt criteria to find people with a certain experience, in a certain sector and category. Like traditional search or searching LinkedIn profiles, LLMs are one more tool that is being used to find candidates. That’s why your LinkedIn profile needs to speak to both humans and machines, especially since LLMs rely on descriptive, conversational text when deciding whom to cite.

What I didn’t have time to go into was how AI compresses you, and pretty much anything you search for, into a sentence or two, and why so much of your digital footprint sits outside of LinkedIn.

What AI Found Outside of LinkedIn

Your LinkedIn profile is still an important piece that defines your personal brand. But what about outside of this one platform? To better understand why it’s become so important to expand your presence beyond LinkedIn, and why you need to be clear about what you bring to the table and why you’re a fit for a particular board role, I ran my own hypothetical board search in ChatGPT using this prompt:

“I’m conducting a search for an independent director for a PE-backed healthcare technology company ($75M-$150M in revenue) serving health plans and provider groups. The company is entering a growth phase ahead of a potential exit. The seat focuses on go-to-market strategy, brand positioning, revenue growth and oversight of AI adoption. Ideal candidates have senior marketing, brand or growth leadership experience at B2B technology or healthcare companies, PE or venture-backed experience, and a track record of building the sales pipeline. Identify 10 potential candidates in the U.S. and explain why each is a fit.”

ChatGPT opened its response with this: “Yes. I would treat this as a board-level growth/operator search, rather than simply looking for a former CMO. The strongest candidates combine three things: healthcare-market credibility, measurable commercial/GTM experience, and enough board/PE/VC exposure to operate effectively in an exit-oriented environment.”

A few things about the findings: I only ran this through one LLM, and responses to the same prompt can vary by platform. I’m also not naming any of the 10 individuals on the shortlist or their current companies, since I don’t have their consent.

What I did find was surprising:

I then asked Alyssa and her firm Point Road Group,  if they had seen similar findings with their clients on LinkedIn:

“Many executives and current/aspiring board directors have weak profiles. We see this in our work every day. They think just having a profile and connecting with people is good enough. They don’t include enough information that would even have them come up in search. And PE is a perfect example. We’ve worked with a lot of clients in PE – both individual executives and portfolio companies – I can’t tell you how many people leave out the actual word’s ‘private equity’ in their profiles! This makes it hard to come up in a search on any platform if they’re looking for someone with PE experience if you don’t mention it. Another reason LinkedIn isn’t a source is because they don’t post on the platform. Commenting and Liking won’t help you show up on an LLM (at least not now), but posting will. But having a posting strategy that aligns with your personal brand and board value is key.”

All of this is an example of how AI search compresses you, looking for short sound bites that mirror the prompt and get you found. While LinkedIn is table stakes, what gets you seen is how clearly and specifically the value you bring is described, in situations that a board and AI search would recognize.

How AI Is Helping to Determine the Candidate Shortlist

I believe that any board candidate, or job candidate for that matter, is being influenced by AI. The 2025 Talent Trends Report by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) confirms the shift that’s happening. HR professionals are using AI to screen job candidate resumes, with resume screening ranking as the second most common AI application at 44%, behind only job description writing at 66%. Leading executive search firms like Spencer Stuart and Korn Ferry have invested in AI tools to search their own databases and the broader market.

I asked my fellow panelist Matt Schwartz about how his firm, Hunt Club, is using AI, and he said:

“We’re not using it to ‘screen resumes’ in the traditional sense; it’s more about augmenting reach and pattern recognition across our network and the broader market. I’d estimate we’re using some form of AI-enabled tooling in 80%-90% of our searches now, whether that’s sourcing, initial outreach personalization, or mapping talent pools against role requirements.”

I then wanted to verify what I believe most board candidates may be missing when making their personal brand as discoverable as possible. I asked Matt if candidates understand that their resume and digital presence now need to be screenable and visible to both the human doing the search and the AI platform that is facilitating that sourcing through specific terms and candidate requirements.

Matt replied:

“Most don’t, honestly. The majority of executives still think about their presence the way they did five years ago; LinkedIn as a static resume, maybe an occasional post. Very few are thinking systematically about discoverability or how their digital footprint maps to the language that both platforms and searchers are using. The ones who do get it tend to be either in tech or have been on the other side of a search process recently. They understand that being ‘findable’ now means having a coherent narrative across touchpoints, using the right terminology in the right places, and showing up where the tools are actually looking. But it’s still more exception than rule. Most senior people assume they’ll be found through referrals or relationships, which is partially true, but they’re leaving a lot on the table by not being intentional about their digital presence.”

AI is no longer just the go-to for identifying the B2B solution or consumer search shortlist. It is now also doing the machine-driven filtering for board roles and regular executive searches. That is why board bios and resumes can no longer be a static “please look at me.” They need to shift to a “this is how you’ll find me, here, here and here” personal brand strategy.

The Brand Called You and What AI Thinks of You

One of the most cited articles on personal branding is “The Brand Called You,” by Tom Peters, which first appeared in Fast Company in 1997, long before the advent of social media and AI. Peters recognized a workforce shift. His father had worked for one company his entire career, moving up within it, whereas in order to get ahead, the next generation would need to build a network that broadened who they were and showcased their achievements. As a 25th-anniversary post on his website put it, the idea was about “how you can bring value through your work to those around you, and to become a trusted part of making excellent products and services.”

Peters later put it more bluntly: “Invent a persona for yourself,” which I interpret as your personal brand’s values, attributes and what differentiates you from the person vying for that same board role or job.

While researching this post, one of the LLMs I use pointed me to a 2024 study in PNAS Nexus showing that AI can already infer personality traits, to some degree, from how people write. That means your tone and the way you comment may shape how you’re described too.

In some ways, Peters anticipated how to set yourself up for success through traditional search. Now AI is searching the web in its entirety to find the most relevant answer to a question. If Peters were writing this article today, I think he’d call out how thin descriptions can hurt you, and how your situational successes—not necessarily your title—can help you.
That’s where the overlap comes in. You’re no longer writing just for a human, but for a machine that’s evaluating you on specific phrases and a consistent narrative that’s clearly visible where AI is looking.

A quick note for PDA members heading to the PRISM conference next month in Atlanta: I’d like to invite you to the panel I’ll be co-leading with Puja Agrawal, “From Defensive AI to Strategic Offense: Turning What You Know into Revenue,” a board’s guide to how AI is reshaping growth and perception, and why the answer is already known somewhere inside every company.

For more on AI search visibility and its business impact, you can reach me at mike@scheinerinc.com. As always, thank you for reading and/or listening.