Behavioral Interviewing: Assessing Influencing Skills

Being able to influence people is not critical for all jobs but it is for some and it certainly never hurts.  Influencing people is sort of an art.  It’s about knowing how identify the effective way to speak to all kinds of people on their particular level to gain support, rather than using a one-size-fits-all delivery.  If you are assessing a candidate’s ability to influence in a behavioral interview, start by explaining the concept to them.

Here’s one example of how you could do that.

Influencing is the ability to persuade and enlist others support in accomplishing your objectives.  To sell your ideas by using different approaches as necessary.

Sample Question

Tell me about a time when you needed to enlist the help of several people and you were able to use different approaches with each person in order to gain support. 

For the candidate:

When you are answering this type of question, the most important thing you want to demonstrate is that you get that people are different and therefore you must use different approaches to get what you need from them.  For example, one person may respond more positively to direct succinct orders while another person may prefer to hear an explanation of why you are asking them to do what you are asking them to do.

For the manager:

Interpreting the response to this question is simple.  If the candidate recognizes that you can’t talk to everybody the same way and is able (and willing) to change the way they deliver the message to suit the particular person, chances are they are good at influencing people.  If they do not possess this skill they will insist that the same message should work for all people and that, if it doesn’t, it’s that person’s fault, not theirs. 

This concludes the Behavioral Interviewing series, but don’t worry, I’ll be covering more skill sets over time. 

If you are a manager trying to think of a good question to assess a certain skill, leave me a comment and I’ll be glad to help you with that.  And if you are an interviewing candidate with a question about how to respond to a particular behavioral interviewing question, leave a comment and I’ll be glad to help you with that. 

Read more about Behavioral Interviewing from Interview-Chatter

Behavioral Interviewing: An Introduction

Behavioral Interviewing: Assessing Customer Focus Skills

Behavioral Interviewing: Assessing Problem Solving Skills

Behavioral Interviewing: Assessing Decisiveness and Judgement Skills

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