Similarly, Helena Wisniewski, a vice president of technology at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, was asked to join the board of medical-device manufacturer Greatbatch this past March—her first board seat. Wisniewski says that Greatbatch's recruiters told her that they found her using Google to try to identify someone with the right mix of scientific and entrepreneurial experience.

As both Wisniewski and Herbert learned, board recruitment has become more open since Sarbanes-Oxley and other rules mandated that the governance and compensation committees of boards run a much more formal recruiting-and-selection process. Gone are the days when boards would consider only a handful of candidates—typically ones already known by the C.E.O. or other directors. The average public company board now considers about 25 candidates for each open position, according to Spencer Stuart.

For executives interested in serving on a board for the first time, relationships are still key. Recruiters and other experts say that networking with board members who have a reputation for recommending executives to search firms helps—the world of corporate boards still holds echoes of the previous era and can be rather small.

"On any given board, there's probably a couple of people I know," says Debra Perry, a former senior managing director at Moody's who was recruited to become a director of credit-protection firm MBIA in 2004 (she stepped down from the board earlier this year to help develop MBIA's global-credit-risk strategy). On many occasions, Perry has referred interested candidates to a search firm or a governance committee of another company.

"It's all about making yourself visible and finding people to recommend you," says Ilene Lang, president of Catalyst, a New York-based research and advocacy group focusing on women in business. Covidien's Herbert attributes part of her attraction to the firm to the fact that she was well-known in the industry and had recently been named one of the top H.R. executives in the country in a trade magazine.

One other tried-and-true strategy is to start on smaller, sometimes private, boards, and work your way up. Irwin Kishner, chair of the corporate practice group at the New York-based law firm Herrick Feinstein, says many of his firm's private equity clients do a broad search to fill board positions at companies in their portfolio. Another stepping-stone is to join a nonprofit board, especially one that includes members who are also directors of big public enterprises.

Ultimately, for those up-and-coming executives who find that the networking and professional development potential of board membership outweigh the cons, there's never been a better time to step up to the plate.