Tell Me About a Time You Persuaded Someone: Answers & Examples (2026)

Almost every role involves getting other people to agree, change course or commit resources, and most of the time you do it without any formal power over them. That is why “Tell me about a time you persuaded someone” appears so often in graduate schemes, consulting interviews, sales roles and management pathways. It is a core part of the competency-based interview used by large employers.

Behind the question, interviewers are checking several traits at once: communication, empathy, credibility, resilience when someone says no, and the judgement to know when persuasion is appropriate.

Persuasion questions also overlap with leadership questions and teamwork questions, so a strong story will usually serve double duty.

Most employers score your answer against a framework with behavioural indicators. A typical set looks like this:

Keep this table in mind when selecting your example. If the story lets you demonstrate four or five of these indicators in two minutes, it is a strong choice.

Use the STAR technique and give most of your time to the Action. A useful split is 15% situation, 10% task, 60% action and 15% result.

Situation and Task

Set up who you needed to persuade, what you wanted, and why they were reluctant. Keep it to two or three sentences: “Our team lead wanted to keep using spreadsheets for tracking, but errors were costing us about two hours a week.”

Action

This is the heart of the answer. Describe what you did in order:

• Understood their position. “I asked what worried them about changing.”
• Framed the benefit in their terms. “I showed how it would reduce the reporting errors she was accountable for.”
• Provided evidence. “I ran a one-week pilot and compared time and error rates.”
• Addressed objections. “I offered a 30-minute training session and a fallback to the old process.”
• Made it easy to say yes. “I prepared a one-page summary with a clear recommendation.”

Result

State the outcome with numbers where possible, and add a short reflection: “The pilot cut errors by 80%, the team adopted it permanently, and I learned that showing evidence works better than arguing the case.”

1. Persuading a manager to change a process

“At my part-time retail job, customer returns were logged on paper, so reports took hours. I asked my manager what stopped us using the tablet at the till. She was worried about training time. I built a simple shared form, tested it over one weekend, and showed that logging time fell from five minutes to one. She approved it, and the other branch adopted it too.”

2. Persuading a teammate in a group project

“A teammate wanted to cover the entire syllabus in our presentation. I could see we’d run out of time, so I proposed we check what the marking criteria rewarded. We reviewed them together, cut two sections, and used the time for evidence on the three highest-weighted criteria. We finished on time and received a first-class grade.”

3. Persuading a client

“A client wanted a launch date two weeks earlier than was feasible. Rather than just saying no, I laid out what could be delivered by their date and what risks the rest carried. They chose a phased release, and we hit both milestones.”

4. Persuading a sceptical senior colleague

“I believed we should survey customers before redesigning the app, but a senior designer felt we already knew what they wanted. I suggested a five-question survey to 50 users as a low-cost test. The results showed a feature we’d overlooked, and he asked me to run the next round.”

5. An attempt that did not fully succeed

“I suggested moving our weekly meeting to the morning, but the team preferred afternoons. I presented attendance data, but agreed to the group’s decision. I proposed a two-week trial of a shorter agenda instead, which cut the meeting by 15 minutes. The lesson was to ask earlier about constraints.”

Different situations call for different approaches. Showing that you chose a method deliberately makes your answer more sophisticated.

Most strong answers combine two approaches, for example a pilot (evidence) plus an offer of training (reducing risk). For help structuring a pitch in a timed setting, see our guides to the presentation interview and group exercises, where persuasion is often observed live.

You do not need a boardroom story. Many strong examples come from everyday contexts.

• University: group projects, society committees, student representation
• Part-time or summer work: changing a rota, improving a customer process
• Volunteering: persuading donors, recruiting volunteers, changing an event plan
• Sport or hobbies: convincing teammates to try a new tactic
• Internships: pitching an idea to a supervisor

Check that the example involves real resistance. If everyone agreed immediately, it is not a persuasion story. Early-career candidates can draw on the internship interview guide and first job interview questions for more ideas on where to find evidence.

Candidates lose marks on persuasion questions for predictable reasons.

• Describing a one-sided argument. If the story is “I told them I was right and they agreed,” it signals poor listening.
• No resistance. The question assumes the person was initially unconvinced.
• Manipulative tactics. Using pressure, flattery or withholding information undermines your integrity.
• Skipping the result. End with a concrete outcome and what you learned.
• Using “we” throughout. Interviewers cannot score your contribution if they cannot see it.
• Overrunning. Aim for two minutes; long answers lose structure.

More general errors are covered in our guide to common interview mistakes, and if the interview is by video, video interview tips explains how to make your delivery persuasive on camera.

Write out your story using STAR, then reduce it to bullet prompts instead of memorising a script. Practise aloud and record it. Ask a friend to challenge you with follow-ups: “Why didn’t they agree at first?”, “What did you try that did not work?”, “What would you do differently?”

Also build a small bank of stories that cover persuasion, conflict, leadership, teamwork and problem-solving. A single story can often be reused with a different emphasis; for instance, a persuasion story can become a conflict story, as explained in our conflict interview questions guide.

Finally, think about the question you might ask at the end: if persuasion matters in the role, you could ask how decisions get made across teams. See questions to ask at interview for more ideas.