Never recruit Doctors, lawyers or accountants. By disposition and training they are looking for what is wrong.
Try to avoid people who had ambitions to be a CEO. They will want to run your organization as a means of fulfilling their own unmet leadership dreams.
I am sure that the results achieved by you non-profit would double if your board was enabling.
Look for people that are really mature and fulfilled already but just want to help a good CEO succeed in addressing a need that the potential board member buys into.
Watch out for overly religious potential board members because they will be a brake on enthusiasm.
Universities are notoriously poorly run because they are run by academics. Good scholars generally have skill sets that do not match up well with the skill sets necessary to be a good manager. The same goes for many medical institutions because most of the time doctors have a skill set adverse to being good administrators.
You need good cheerleaders.
Most non-profits work their CEO to death because boards want to have their organizational CEOS do the jobs the board are supposed to do. That includes fundraising.
Too many Rescue Missions move away from serving the skidrow population because that work is so hard to do. They want to sexier things in the community at large so Board members can show off the non-skidrow projects to their friends.
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George Caywood 