As a hiring manager, you must walk a delicate line.
On one hand, tangible recruiting results are produced when you persuade someone to make a change.
But pushing for a change often causes you to sound salesy and meet resistance.
How do you reconcile the two positions?
In their outstanding book Real Influence, Mark Goulston and John Ullmen provide some insight for overcoming this dilemma.
In interviews with more than a hundred high-performing influencers, the authors noticed a pattern:
Great influencers learn to communicate great outcomes.
When people paint a picture of a great outcome, they’re not trying to persuade people to do something important. They’re trying to positively influence them to get them to a better place.
Helping someone get to a better place requires you know something about their current situation and where they hope to be in the future.
Effective listeners make this the objective of their conversations.
With this information in hand, the positive influencer becomes an artist sketching out a hopeful future for a recruiting prospect who needs their help.