“Could you draw up a profile for us?” It is one of the first questions I am asked when a supervisory board approaches me about a vacancy in its own ranks. The question is well meant and entirely reasonable. Even so, I rarely say yes straight away. Not because I cannot do it, but because the answer determines how the rest of the process unfolds and because the question reveals that something has been skipped.
A supervisory appointment is not a recruitment question
A board looking for a new member faces a governance decision. Whoever joins changes what the board notices, what it probes and which subjects stay on the table longest. That is not a personnel matter. It is a decision about the board’s own functioning.
Dutch legislators now take the same view. The revised Corporate Governance Code has been anchored in law through an order in council published in the Staatsblad on 2 February 2026 (Stb. 2026, 15). As a result, listed companies report under the tightened Code for the first time over financial year 2025, including the new risk management statement (accountant.nl, 3 February 2026).
For most of the organisations I work with, that Code does not apply directly. The effect is no less real. The expectation that a board can explain why it is composed as it is filters through to semi-public institutions, family businesses and foundations with no listing whatsoever. And that explanation cannot be outsourced.
What you may expect from Fornell Human Capital
Reach, to begin with. A board that searches on its own arrives at people it already knows. That is not a reproach, it is how networks function. In my own files, in three out of five supervisory assignments the appointed candidate came from outside the board’s own network. Without intervention, those three people would never have surfaced.
An honest reading of the market, too. What are you asking for and does it exist? If the answer is uncomfortable, you would rather hear it at the outset than after four months.
And above all, someone who will contradict the chair. That sounds obvious, in practice it is the scarce commodity in this profession. An adviser who merely executes assignments delivers candidates matching the picture the chair already held. An adviser doing the job explains why that picture may be wrong.
What you may not expect
That I will tell you who you want to be.
A search firm can establish whether your wish is realistic, it cannot formulate that wish on your behalf. The profile is not a document an adviser supplies and a board approves. It is the residue of a conversation the board has had with itself: about what is missing, about what supervision will demand in the years ahead, about which discussion has so far proved difficult to hold. Without that conversation, a profile written by me produces a document everyone nods at and no one feels bound by.
The figure that occupies me most
In a selection process for a supervisory director, the profile in my practice changes two to three times on average: despite in-depth conversations beforehand with every party involved in the appointment. Not at the margins. At the core: which type of experience is decisive, whether a sitting executive is required, whether international experience outweighs sector knowledge.
Each revision costs weeks. More importantly, each revision means the board is belatedly holding the conversation that should have taken place first. That is not a disaster. It is simply far more productive to hold it at the start, with the board’s own agenda alongside, rather than halfway through with three CVs on the table
Where it chafes
An example from practice. I was searching for a supervisory director with IT in portfolio for an internationally operating company: oversight of digitalisation, data management, cyber resilience and everything connected to it. The chair, together with part of the board, held a pronounced view. This called for a man with a solid technical background.
That view was not unreasonable. It was incomplete.
I held firm conversations, with the chair and with the shareholders, to widen the blinkers. Not out of principle and not to meet a target, but because the available field was demonstrably larger than the picture we started with and because a board that denies itself part of that field shortchanges itself.
In the end I put forward three candidates: two men and one woman. The woman was appointed.
What stayed with me is not the outcome. It is that the change did not lie with me. I did not find a different kind of candidate than the one requested, I got the board to ask its own question again. That part of the work cannot be captured in an assignment letter and it is precisely the part from which a supervisory board benefits most.
In regulated sectors the division is already settled
In some of the sectors we serve, the question of who is responsible for what has already been answered. For Dutch housing corporations, the Autoriteit woningcorporaties has, since the revised Housing Act took effect on 1 July 2015, assessed every prospective supervisory director in advance on suitability and integrity. That assessment concerns the individual, yet inevitably touches the board as well: suitability is judged against the profile and against the composition of the board as a whole.
The consequence is instructive. Precisely where an external regulator is watching, boards take preparation more seriously. Not because those boards are different, but because the optionality has been removed. Anyone supervising in an unregulated sector lacks that prompt and will therefore have to create it themselves.
From the other side of the table
Everything above concerns you as a client. There is also a candidate in this story.
Executives and directors approached for a supervisory role almost always ask the same question and early in the conversation: why this board and why now? The answer determines whether the conversation continues. A board that can explain what is missing and why it matters gets serious conversations with serious people. A board that cannot gets polite refusals, often from exactly the candidates who were most interesting.
If you are approached yourself, ask for the profile, then ask when it was drawn up and by whom. The answer tells you more about the board than the annual accounts.
Closer to home
A few kilometres from our office at Country Estate Beeckestijn, the Velsen municipal theatre carried out a governance change worth examining. The organisation moved from an executive board model to a supervisory board model, appointing a managing director in October 2025. The former board temporarily assumed the supervisory role to safeguard continuity. As of 1 May 2026 a new supervisory board took office, composed around complementary areas of knowledge suited to the organisation’s current phase (Jutter | Hofgeest, 18 June 2026).
What strikes me is the sequence. First the decision on the model, then the transition, then the recruitment. That is the exact reverse of what I usually encounter, where recruitment starts and the conversation about model and composition trails along behind it.
In closing
The division of responsibility between supervision and adviser is, at heart, simple. You determine who you want to be. I tell you whether that is possible, where it will chafe and who is walking around outside your field of vision who fits.
So the question is not whether a search firm can draw up a profile for you. The question is whether your board has had the conversation that precedes it.