As a young finance and real estate professional who witnessed mergers and acquisitions fail from the inside, Stephanie Manzelli realized that a critical component of a deal’s success was in the aftermath: how well the people were integrated culturally into the newly merged workplace.

With this revelation, she changed direction and embarked on a career in HR with an emphasis on talent management and acquisition. Now as the senior vice president of human resources and diversity, equity and inclusion at Lever, a talent acquisition suite and an Employ brand, Manzelli has developed key strategies for successful hires.

I spoke to Manzelli during From Day One’s webinar, Intentional Recruiting: Bridging Business Goals with Human Centric Hiring to Impact the Bottom Line. During this fireside chat, she shared insights and advice, particularly on how to map out a company’s goals and influence leadership.

Manzelli made it clear that knowing a company’s business goals is only one part of understanding its needs. She breaks down each business goal into a four-part roadmap that then allows her to analyze what skills and experience the company needs to meet its objectives. Manzelli calls this horizon mapping.

Horizon mapping begins with the ultimate goal and then reverse engineers the interim horizons to meet that goal. She gave the example of a company that wants to go public in a few years. She sets that as horizon four. The three horizons before that are big goals, or “rocks,” the company needs to achieve to successfully attain horizon four. So horizon two might be a successful series A funding round. “Underneath each of these horizons, every business unit has deliverables that they must achieve,” she said.

Once the horizon has been mapped, she does a talent gap analysis and develops what she calls a “make versus buy strategy.” ‘Make’ refers to developing skills within the current talent pool of employees at the company, whereas ‘buy’ is talent acquisition. Using horizon mapping, “we find the roadmap that we need to start to build out those talent pools and source the right candidates more proactively, so that we can fill those business needs before our business actually needs them. And that should be the North Star,” Manzelli said.

Sometimes it’s not easy to know what the business goals are, Manzelli acknowledged, that it takes one-on-one discussions with key business leaders and skill to build the right relationships within the company and communicate effectively. One of the most effective skills she employs is influencing without authority, which requires “flexing your communication style to meet the needs of your audience.”

Knowing the styles of your leaders is essential. For data-driven individuals, Manzelli comes to the conversation armed with reports, metrics and return-on-investment figures. Other leaders depend on their gut and intuition. Those conversations are easier, she says, and are based on relationships and trust. But to maintain that trust, she prepares the reports as backup.

“I always enter an organization or a conversation as slowly as I can. I really like to build the relationship before we dive into the tasks,” Manzelli said. “It's not a thing that takes me a long time to do, but it does pay off on the backend, and ensures the people that I’m partnering with have the bedrock of a relationship with me.” That relationship building then allows the leadership to have more open dialogue about their goals.

These skills, horizon mapping and influencing without authority, are key for any successful HR professional. “HR, right, wrong or indifferent, is oftentimes looked at as a highly administrative function where we’re often only engaged when people need help.”

But she said knowing what your company’s goals are and how HR and talent acquisition can get the company to meet its goals is always in the back of her mind. “You always have to make that connection point for the business. That’s our responsibility.”

Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner, Lever, an Employ brand, for sponsoring this webinar. 

Jeanhee Kim is an independent journalist who has worked for CoinDesk, Crain’s New York Business, Money magazine and Forbes Asia.