There is a difference between persuasion and wearing someone down, and this question is designed to find out which one you do. The weak answer is really a story about persistence: you wanted something, they resisted, you kept pushing, and eventually they agreed. Told that way, it makes you sound exhausting, and it entirely misses the skill being tested.
Real persuasion runs the other way round. You do not start by making your case louder. You start by understanding why the other person holds the position they hold, and then you make your case in terms of what they care about. The best influencers spend more time listening than talking, and a strong answer to this question shows exactly that.
The mechanism interviewers are listening for
A good persuasion story has a recognisable move in the middle: the moment you understood the other person's actual objection, which is almost never their stated one. People rarely tell you their real reason for resisting. They give you a surface reason, and if you argue with the surface reason you get nowhere.
So the answer they want has this shape:
- You wanted to change someone's mind about something that mattered.
- Instead of pressing harder, you worked out why they were resistant, the real reason underneath.
- You reframed your case around their concern, not yours, and they came round because it now served something they wanted.
If your story is just "I gave them three good reasons and they agreed", it is missing the middle, which is where the skill lives.
A worked example
"I volunteer with a student society, and I wanted us to move our main event from the usual lecture-hall format to something more interactive, because attendance had been dropping. The committee chair was against it, and kept saying the lecture format was 'what worked'.
If I had just kept arguing that interactive was better, we would have gone in circles, because that was not really her objection. So I asked her, properly, what worried her about changing it. And the real answer came out: she had run the interactive format two years earlier at a different society, it had been chaos, low turnout, technical problems, and she had been blamed for it. She was not defending lectures, she was avoiding a repeat of a bad experience.
Once I understood that, my whole pitch changed. Instead of 'interactive is better', I focused on the specific things that had gone wrong for her last time and how we would prevent each one: a tighter format, a tech run-through the day before, a fallback plan. I was addressing her actual fear, not my preference.
She agreed to try it for one event as a pilot. It went well, attendance was up by about a third, and we kept the format. What I took from it was that people almost never resist for the reason they first give you, and the fastest way to move someone is to find out what they are actually protecting."
Why it works
The candidate does not persuade by argument. They persuade by diagnosis. The pivotal moment is asking the chair what actually worried her, and the answer reframes everything: she was not pro-lecture, she was scarred by a past failure. Once the candidate addresses that specific fear, the resistance dissolves, because the objection was never about the format.
This shows genuine influencing skill, which is fundamentally about empathy applied to a goal. It also shows restraint: the candidate proposes a pilot, not a full switch, which lowers the stakes for someone who is nervous. That is a persuader who understands that making it easy to say yes matters as much as the case itself. The closing insight, "people almost never resist for the reason they first give you", is the kind of hard-won observation that makes an interviewer trust you have actually done this.
What to avoid
The war of attrition. If your answer is a story of pushing until they caved, you have described stubbornness, not influence. It also implies you damaged the relationship to get your way, which no interviewer wants.
Winning with authority. "I persuaded them by pointing out I was in charge" is not persuasion. If you had the power to compel, you did not need to persuade. The interesting stories are the ones where you had no leverage.
Manipulation. Persuasion and manipulation look similar on paper but read very differently. If your method was misleading someone or exploiting a weakness, it reflects badly. Genuine influence serves the other person's real interests too, and the best stories make that clear.
Skipping the diagnosis. If you cannot name the other person's real objection, your story is probably just "I made my case well". Fine, but ordinary. The diagnosis is what makes it a persuasion answer rather than a presentation answer.
Finding your example
Look for a time you changed someone's mind on something they initially resisted, and where you had no power to force it: a manager, a peer, a client, a committee, a family member on a shared decision. The competency approach works whatever the setting. The key ingredient is that you understood their position before you tried to shift it.
The part of this answer people most often miss when rehearsing is the diagnosis moment, because in their memory the resistance just melted. Say your answer aloud and check there is a clear point where you understood the real objection. If there is not, the persuasion is invisible. You can practise it and get that flagged before the interview.