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.)
All this takes a good amount of time, and can be quite costly to the company. The boss wants to get it done quickly, and may make decisions that don’t always constitute good sense. In many instances he or she is more concerned with getting the task finished than with fairness and objectivity.
When the game is over, there’s one new employee, and nine disappointed candidates.
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.
Remember, the boss is looking for reasons to disqualify people. There are ten candidates, but only one job.
If you say you’re an independent thinker, you may have found trouble. Because in this company, staff is expected to follow through on decisions made at the top..They like team players, not independent thinkers. They see you as a maverick, so you’re out.
Tell them you’re an active Democrat, and you may be talking to a red-hot Republican who believes all Democrats are tax-and-spend liberals who don’t know the value of a dollar. So you’re out.
Certainly there’s truly nothing negative about being an independent thinker or a liberal Democrat. If they chose you, you could do a first-rate job. The point is, keep extraneous information to yourself until you know something about the company and the interviewer. It has no bearing on your ability to do the job, but it can get you weeded out.
Don’t volunteer anything about yourself until you know the employer will perceive it as an asset. Until you know what he/she is looking for, keep your own counsel.
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.
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