Attracting director candidates

Our board had a resignation and tonight I hope the majority will vote to fill the position until our next election in Oct. (bylaws don't require we fill it).

Our board--basically of 6-- just started together in late Oct. when three incumbents were defeated, and a 4th director, sharing their perspectives resigned.

We didn't meet in Dec., so tonight is only our 2nd open meeting. But, due to other matters, we've had 3 executive sessions and are really getting along well and share the same general philosophy of transparency, service to our community and respect for owners and their points of view.

Is there any reason we cannot seek certain personal qualities in our call for candidates?? The call will be posted in our elevators, on our website and in our Feb. newsletter.

We know we don't have to select any of them, yes, awkward, and that we can vote by secret ballot in the open meeting to select a new director.

Kerry,
I will tell you what we did last year to fill an vacated board seat when a board member moved out of our community.

We advertised the open seat and received 6 candidate Bios. We were lucky to have that many submit for sure. Once the time to submit was done we had the PM send all of the Bios to the board at the same time. I developed a spreadsheet and asked all board members to rate the bios based on a Yelp type rating from 1 to 5 but use 1/2 points when it was needed. I filled out my rating sheet as the President and told each board member that as soon as I received their ratings I would send them my ratings. This way no one member would know what the other rating was until theirs was submitted. Once all of the totaling was done I sent the spreadsheet to all board members. Of the 6 candidates we had 2 that were clearly the highest rated by all. We invited both of them in for a 45 minute meeting where we asked them questions and once we were done we voted blindly on a sheet of paper who we wanted to have sitting on our board. I think this was about as honest of a process as anyone could expect.

Funny thing about 4 months later we had our annual election and only 1 of the 6 candidates submitted a bio to run for the expiring seat. I guess they thought being selected by the board is easier than a vote of the community.

I would definitely try and fill the seat to get to a full board. You may all see eye to eye now but the odd number is always best.

I think this is legal and a good idea. I think George's suggested riff is great, too.

Your call for candidates should be in the same form as those one that puts their name on a ballot for the owners to decide. Otherwise you show bias.

Kerry,
One thing that I would consider is outlining what the average Board member does for the HOA. What is the time commitment? What is the expectation for responding to emails and how many board meeting you have annually. I know that every board member gives their time differently but you obviously have a minimum expectation.

It has always amazed me the lack of knowledge about HOA that the average homeowner has about what they are a member of in the HOA.

Once you get this information, I hope the board considers sponsoring a "meet the candidates" event, where candidates can answer questions about their background, why they want to serve, etc. Hopefully, people come and pay attention to the answers, so they can make a thoughtful decision. A summary of who the candidates are and their background can be published in a newsletter or community website, or handed out to homeowners to review before the meeting.

To Mark - after 10 years on my board and reading some of the stuff on this website almost NOTHING surprises me about homeowners in HOA land! I used to think our community was way behind in running things, and while we could use a few improvements here and there, in general, we have a good group of people. My fear is what will happen down the road when they step down (I may return, but right now, too many other things demand my time)

We hold a candidate's night, Sheila, before a our annul meeting and election. But this time, we're filling a vacancy and IF we decide to file it, the board will choose the new director. I aM thinking we might want to interview each, which we haven't done before but it might make sense.