How to Convince A Hiring Manager That You Are The Best Candidate

If you are seeking a new job, there are many important steps to ensure you are properly prepared for your job search.

Remember that regardless of the process, your ultimate goal is to convince a hiring manager that you are the best candidate for the position. This means understanding what hiring managers want to hear and learning to cater your job application to their needs.

According to a recent Twin Employment & Training survey, 33% of hiring managers knew whether they would hire someone in the first 90 seconds of the interview. This underscores the importance of first impressions and the challenges of convincing a hiring manager that you are the best choice.

This article will help you understand what hiring managers want to hear and provide the right resources to find the next best step forward in your career path.

Your Resume is the First Step in Convincing a Hiring Manager

Before you can convince anyone of anything, you need to get your foot in the door. This means you will need to get past gatekeeping steps such as resume filtering and pre-qualification checks to secure an interview. 

Your resume is critical in this sense, and without a strong CV, you are unlikely to get an interview with a hiring manager. 

Even more importantly, your resume becomes a foundation of an organization’s understanding of you as a professional. You need to ensure that you’ve set up your resume in a way that best represents you and provides opportunities for you to speak convincingly about yourself and your skillset in an interview setting.

Many qualities create a strong resume, but here are a few quick tips that you can use:

• Choose the right format
• Add a strong headline
• Focus on metrics, not responsibilities
• Use the same language as the job description
• Tailor your resume to the type of job position

Be Prepared for Any Interview With a Hiring Manager

Whether it’s a short ‘preliminary chat’ by phone, a zoom meeting, an in-person interview, or even a brief email exchange, successful job seekers will always be overly prepared to interact with a hiring manager. 

Through the interview process, there will only be a handful of opportunities to convince a hiring manager that you are the best fit for the position, so you need to maximize every exchange. If you are not careful with how you behave, you may be sabotaging your interview before it even starts. 

So how can you be prepared to convince a hiring manager?

Do your research

Before you start the interview process, you should take some time to research the company as thoroughly as you can. This is important for two reasons:

1. You should be evaluating the organization for your personal career growth goals
2. A deeper understanding of the organization will help you cater your experience to their needs

Search online, read business reviews, speak to previous or current employees, news articles, or anything else that you can find that can help you understand the company and its inner workings.

Identify Their Problems

Most importantly, job seekers should seek to convince a hiring manager by identifying their problems and presenting their skills and experience as the solution. Treat your job application like a sales pitch and use potential outcomes to convince a hiring manager that you will make the most significant positive impact on their organization.

Tailor Your Interview to What Hiring Managers Want to Hear

According to a LinkedIn survey, 75% of recruiters ask behavioral interview questions to assess soft skills, and 70% observe candidates’ body language in the interview process. This indicates that whether you are aware of it or not, hiring managers evaluate candidates on a wide range of subtle indicators, in addition to more obvious experience and hard skill questions.

Even if a hiring manager is unaware, they may subconsciously evaluate a candidate based on their initial feelings or reaction to small social cues. Furthermore, you are likely one of many candidates the hiring manager is interviewing. Hiring managers will often only recall their overall impression of a candidate rather than every conversation detail.

This means that you will be more likely to convince a hiring manager to hire you if you can tailor your language, behavior, and experience/skillset to their needs and personality.

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