Whether you’re participating in a panel interview in person or online, the struggle to remember everyone’s name who is going to be asking you questions is the same, and very real. According to research completed by Dr. Dean Buonomano, professor of neurobiology at UCLA, there’s a scientific reason we’re not good at remembering people’s names or long lists of numbers. “Because of the architecture of the brain. . We’re not very good at memorizing pieces of information that are not linked to other pieces of information.” The good news is, there are things we can do to workaround your brains’ hardwired tendencies.
Link their name to a profession
How is linking a person’s name to a job or profession helpful? Dr. Buonomano explains, “People are more likely to remember it in the context of the profession. One reason for that is because the brain has this associative architecture, we learn by making associations, by linking things that are observed or happen together.” For example, if one of your interviewers says her name is Jane Goodhue, you might link that to Jane Goodall, the world famous primatologist and archaeologist. That association could lead you to picture your favorite animal. Then every time you see Jane Goodhue’s name, or see her, you’ll picture your favorite animal and that would take you back to Jane Goodall and Jane Goodhue’s name. One piece of advice, try to make the associations positive, otherwise if you make a negative association, you’ll be more likely to dislike one of your interviewers, and you might not even realize why.
Sounds like. . .
When you’re receiving a new introduction, try linking a visual cue to a unique facial feature, body feature or accessory you notice. According to the scienceofpeople.com, this memory strategy is influenced by the EON-Mem (Ecologically Oriented Neurorehabilitation of Memory) program, that helps patients with neurological conditions rapidly build memory and enhance daily functioning. If you have an interviewer wearing a great jacket, you could remember this interviewer as “Mary, great jacket, Severson.” If another interviewer on your panel is really tall, you could remember this individual as “Karen, taller than me, Collins.” By assigning a characteristic or highlighting a physical attribute to your interviewer, it will help your brain to make a connection between the person’s name and something you immediately noticed about them.
Repeat after me
This one you’ve probably heard before. After an individual tells you his or her name, find a way to work it into a conversation, or something even more simple is to repeat back to them, “Hi (first name), it’s really nice to meet you. The expert opinions vary on how many times you need to repeat the person’s name to really remember it, they seem to vary between three and seven times, but if you’re meeting a lot of new people at once, like when you’re the subject of a panel style interview, you want to be careful not to constantly be saying or repeating someone’s name each time you start a sentence.
Write it down
You know the handy-dandy note pad that you’ve brought to the interview to jot down questions as they pop into your head? Or it contains the questions you have for your interviewers? Write down each interviewer’s name in accordance with where they’re located on the panel along with something you find interesting about them. It could be their title, or the name of someone you think you both know, or anything you remember from the pre-interview research you conducted on LinkedIn.
If you can start off each conversation when you meet someone new by paying special attention when they tell you their name, then follow up with one or more of the strategies above to remember someone’s name after the first time they tell it to you, you’re almost assured not to forget their name. If you try one strategy without success, switch it up during your next introduction to try and find your personalized name-remembering-strategy.