STAR Answer Builder: Influencing Questions

What influencing means in an interview

Strong influencing at interview means showing that you understood your audience's priorities before you made your case, built evidence to support your position and changed tack when the first approach did not land. It is not the same as authority. The best examples involve someone who had no obligation whatsoever to agree with you. The STAR method is highly effective here. The Situation should establish that you had no formal power in the room. Your Actions should cover how you built the case, read the person in front of you and adjusted, and your Result should show that the outcome came from influence rather than instruction.

Questions to prepare for

Use one real example and adapt its shape to the wording the interviewer uses.

• Describe a time you persuaded someone to adopt an idea they were initially resistant to.
• Give me an example of when you had to influence a senior stakeholder without formal authority.
• Tell me about a situation where you had to change someone's opinion using data or evidence.
• Describe a time you built a coalition of support for a proposal that faced opposition.
• Give me an example of when you failed to influence someone and what you did differently next time.

A STAR example answer

Situation: As a supply chain analyst, I identified that switching to a regional supplier for one of our core packaging materials would reduce costs by eighteen percent and cut lead times by a week. However, the procurement director was strongly committed to the existing national supplier, with whom she had worked for over a decade.

Task: I needed to present the case for the change in a way that acknowledged her concerns, addressed the risk she was worried about and made the financial case compelling enough to warrant a trial.

Action: I started by requesting a thirty-minute conversation rather than sending a slide deck, so I could understand her reservations directly. She was primarily concerned about quality consistency and the relationship risk. I then proposed a limited three-month trial with defined quality checkpoints rather than a full switch, sourced a reference from another company that had used the regional supplier successfully and built a one-page summary showing the cost benefit alongside the risk mitigation plan.

Result: The director approved the trial. The regional supplier performed to specification throughout. At the end of the trial period, the switch was made permanently, generating annual savings of £210,000. The director cited the quality assurance framework I had built as the reason she felt comfortable approving it.

Common mistakes to avoid

Keep your personal contribution visible and name the result rather than stopping at what you did.

• Describing a situation where you presented information and the other person agreed. That is reporting, not influencing.
• Choosing an example where you could simply have instructed them. The competency only exists in the absence of authority.
• Failing to show that you understood the other person's perspective before making your case.
• Claiming you won someone round by being persistent rather than by changing your approach.

Tips before you practise

Fill in Situation, Task, Action and Result with your own experience, then say the whole answer out loud.

• Show that you worked out what the other person actually cared about before you built your case. That is empathy and strategy in the same move.
• Frame your approach in terms of their priorities, not your own: "I showed how this aligned with her goal of reducing supplier risk."
• If your first attempt did not land, put it in. Adapting after a knock-back scores better than a clean first-time win.
• Bring evidence: data, a case study, a reference from someone credible. Influence that rests purely on personality falls apart under the follow-up question.
• Practise on Voxxhire so the stakeholder dynamic still comes across when your mouth is dry and three people are taking notes.