There is no need of creating a function to throw out the names from list as list.remove(name)
does the same thing in a single line.
import difflib
employeeNames = ['Colton','Coltron','Colty','Jayne','Barb','Carlene','Dick','Despina']
employeeNames.sort()
userEmpName = raw_input("Please enter the employee name you're searching for. We'll return the best match on record.")
while True:
global Answer
pickedName = difflib.get_close_matches(userEmpName, employeeNames, 1)
print(pickedName)
print employeeNames
if len(pickedName)==0:
break
userNameOK = raw_input("Is this the name of the person you're looking for?\n\n Type 'Y' or 'N'.\n\n")
if (userNameOK=='n' or userNameOK=='N'):
employeeNames.remove(pickedName[0])
else:
Answer=pickedName[0]
break
print Answer+" is the right choice"
However using a global variable is generally bad practice so you can make a function to do all this thing and return the correct Answer
Also as employeeNames
is modified every time a Name is removed from it should be better to create a copy of the list and work on that particular list