How to Hire The Best Negotiators?

In our daily life, at least one, and most times more, the occasion calls for us to negotiate. Often these situations are rather simple and do not require advanced negotiating techniques or expertise. Such a need for skilled negotiators comes more often than not when complex business issues are involved. You might consider yourself good at acquiring some household items at favorable prices but when the stakes are higher, you are better served paying the big bucks to the people with the necessary negotiating skills.

The need for a skilled negotiator in business cannot be understated and when looking to hire one, it is pertinent that you look beyond the mere ability of a person to answer interview questions. Negotiations are practical matters and as such, the process of hiring a negotiator should be more practical than abstract. The candidate to be selected should at least have basic negotiating skills and should have taken a few negotiation courses. Such courses are a key part of the best negotiating seminars. the best negotiating seminars. Here are some skills and traits that an ideal negotiator for you should possess.

• Expertise: The ideal negotiator should possess, not just adequate training in negotiations but also,  a very good idea of what your business, brand and services entail. This would enable the person to think in ways that would only benefit you.
• Communication: Of what use are a million negotiating workshops and negotiation seminars if one lacks the ability to communicate their ideas? A good negotiator should be able to get his ideas across properly, oozing clarity when necessary and being ambiguous or vague when needed.
• Strategy: There are people whose abilities to acquire the best deals are natural. These people are, however, very rare. For this reason, you should only let yourself be swayed by potential negotiators who can outline strategies that attest to the fact that they have attended the best training classes possible or that they possess the negotiating skills that claim to possess.
• A good business sense: A good business negotiator is not simply the one with the best negotiating training but the one who has both the training and the business sense to perform well. The negotiator should understand business so as to avoid making decisions that would prove to be liabilities to the development of the business.
• Compatible style and approach: The negotiator should have an approach and personality that resonates with other members of your organization. His/her personality should be compatible with your idea of a perfect employee so as to avoid tainting the company’s reputation.

How to best conduct an Interview for a Negotiator

A regular interview usually involves asking direct questions of the candidate. This approach is not very effective when the position to be filled is as practical or human-related as that of a negotiator. The best way to conduct such a process it to give them a test run. This is the most practical way to see if the negotiating workshops and seminars actually made a good negotiator.

The ideal way to test the candidate is to create a situation in which they have to work with either you or an external party as the other party. Remember the scene from The Wolf of Wall Street, where DiCaprio asks his criminal minions to sell him a pen, this is very similar. The method is most popularly utilized in testing the skills of salesmen, but it works equally as well in hiring negotiators.

A test or interview like this allows you to see assess the skills of the candidate in real-time rather than as sheets of paper in the form of certificates from negotiating workshops. The candidate in turn has a chance to prove his/herself regardless of how low their qualifications might seem.

The trick to making the process work is to set up a scenario where your candidate is needed to get the best price for a service or product. The things to look out for are whether the candidate is asking the right questions, both of you (the client) and the other party. You have to observe how effective their line of questioning is and how well they use the answers they get. Monitor their strategy and approach; are they aggressive negotiators or are they the type to probe quietly and deceptively for weaknesses.

The scenarios used must put into consideration a variety of skills and settings. The decision making could be down to the opinions of multiple people or yourself. If it is down to you, it would be best to develop a scoring system by which you could easily rate performance. This process is needed because as I said earlier, of what use is the best negotiating training, if a candidate cannot put it to good use?

Visit or website at www.negotiations.com/training/ for more tips on hiring negotiators and personnel as well as human resource management in general.