Why the Best Candidates Make the Interviewer Feel Heard, Not the Other Way Around
Most interview and sales advice is about you: sound confident, tell a tight story, land the close. A book released this month flips that advice on its head, and the flip is exactly what makes some people instantly more memorable than everyone else in the room.
The research behind the idea
Zach Mercurio, an organizational psychology researcher, published The Power of Mattering: How Leaders Can Create a Culture of Significance on September 1. His research draws on the psychology of "mattering," the feeling of being noticed, valued, and needed by others, and he lays out a simple three-part framework for creating it in any interaction: Notice, Affirm, and Need. Notice means genuinely seeing and hearing someone, not just waiting for your turn to talk. Affirm means naming the specific way their contribution or perspective made a difference. Need means showing them, concretely, that you're relying on what they bring.
Mercurio's work is aimed at leaders managing teams, but the mechanism underneath it applies to any conversation where you're trying to be remembered, including interviews, sales calls, and negotiations.
Why this matters in an interview or sales call
Here's the counterintuitive part: the person conducting your interview or evaluating your pitch is having that same conversation five or ten times that week. Almost every candidate optimizes for being heard. Almost none optimize for making the interviewer feel heard. When you actually notice something specific they said, affirm it, and reflect back why it matters to how you'd approach the role, you become the outlier in a stack of otherwise identical conversations. The same logic holds in sales: a prospect who feels genuinely listened to, not just pitched at, is measurably more likely to trust the person on the other end of the call.
How to apply Notice, Affirm, Need in practice
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Notice out loud. When an interviewer or prospect describes a problem, reflect it back in your own words before you answer: "It sounds like the real constraint is X." This single habit, sometimes called labeling in negotiation research, signals that you were actually listening instead of rehearsing your next line.
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Affirm specifically, not generically. Instead of "great question," name what made it a good one: "That's a sharper version of a question I usually get, because it gets at whether I can actually execute, not just whether I've done this before." Specificity is what separates a real affirmation from a filler phrase.
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Show them you need their input, not just their approval. Ask a follow-up that depends on their answer to shape what you say next: "Before I answer, what does success in this role look like at the 90-day mark, from your side?" It reframes the conversation from a one-way evaluation into a two-way exchange, which is exactly the shift Mercurio's research says builds trust.
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Practice the delivery, not just the words. Mattering is communicated as much through tone and pacing as content. A flat or rushed "that makes sense" doesn't land the same as one delivered with a genuine pause first. Recording yourself, or running through likely interview or sales exchanges with an AI coaching tool like SpeechPlus, helps you hear whether your delivery actually carries the warmth you intend or just the words.
The bottom line
Being remembered in an interview or a sales call isn't only about how polished your own answers sound. It's about whether the other person walked away feeling like you actually heard them. Notice specifically, affirm concretely, and show them you need what they bring, and you'll stand out in a process where almost everyone else is only thinking about themselves.