For an employer with a job to fill, the selection process is a matter of weeding out the candidates who are wrong for the job, until only the right one is left. For you to be that successful candidate, you have to keep from being weeded out, and that means you must not come across in a way the boss believes is negative.

Consider the boss’s problem. He/she must take a group of, say, ten candidates and determine which one will become the new employee. The solution: Find reasons to weed out nine of the candidates, and hire the one who’s left. (Unless, of course, none of them makes the cut, in which case the boss must find a new group of candidates and start the game all over again.)

It’s a process that takes valuable time, and is costly to the company. The employer is often more interested in solving the problem quickly than he/she is in being objective and fair. Show even the smallest evidence of a negative in your background or your character, and you could find yourself disqualified.

When the boss is all done, there’s one successful candidate, and nine who are unsuccessful.

Even if there are just two candidates, the one who wins the job is the person who has given the boss no reason to disqualify him/her. The boss normally chooses to play safe, by choosing the candidate who has no major negatives, and thus, the boss believes, stands the best chance of being successful in the job. Your task is to convince the boss you’re capable and likable, and that you have no real liabilities.

You must find out what the boss wants, then show it what you’re offering. It’s risky trying to sell yourself, in a letter or an interview, on the basis of some personal quality or element in your background, until you’re reasonably certain the employer sees it as an asset. If he or she sees it as a negative, you could be weeded out on the spot.

After all, the employer is searching for reasons to disqualify people. Ten candidates – just one job.

Volunteer that you’re an independent thinker, and you could be cutting your own throat. This company may be built on strong centralized management, where all ideas originate at the top levels. Talk about yourself as an independent thinker, and you could brand yourself as a maverick, and that alone may disqualify you.

Volunteer that you voted as a Democrat, and you may find you”re talking to a staunch Republican who thinks you’re nothing but a liberal spendthrift. So you’re out.

There’s nothing at all wrong about being an independent thinker or a Democrat. If you were in the job, you’d do quite well at it. The point here is, until you understand what the company is looking for, keep extraneous information to yourself. It has nothing at all to do with how well you can do the job, but it can get you weeded out in a hurry.

Don’t volunteer extraneous information. Stick to those qualities that relate directly to the requirements of the job. Until you know what they want, don’t say too much.

At this point, it’s likely that what they know about you comes only from you. Unless you reveal something about yourself, it just doesn’t exist.