Someday soon, you may be asked to give a prospective employer a handwriting sample - not so much as a demonstration of your penmanship but as an indicator of how you'll perform on the job. And instead of looking to a professional analyst, these employers will gaze into the screen of a WinTel PC to glean clues about your personality.
A new software package, Sheila Lowe's Handwriting Analyzer, claims to take the guesswork out of hiring for companies. "We had an accuracy rate of over 90 percent in our beta tests," said Lowe, the handwriting analysis expert who helped developer RI Software design the program.
Of course ... "I'm not guaranteeing 90 percent for everybody," Lowe added. "I'm just saying that's what we tested at."
Handwriting Analyzer boils down the "more than 2000 variables" graphologists look for in handwriting to 48 elements and characteristics including slant, arrangement, and t-bar length. For each of these elements, managers choose, from a pool of samples, the one that most resembles the writing in the candidate's sample. Once the data for the analysis is completed, the program generates a report, which can come in narrative form or as a list of bulleted phrases, summarizing a candidate's personality and performance. The report covers as many as eight categories including social skills, self image, intellectual style, and work style.
These reports can tell a person's strengths and weaknesses in certain areas as well as point out "red flags," or the characteristics that indicate a potential problem for an employer, Lowe says. To help in the preparation for the analysis as well as the interpretation, Handwriting Analyzer includes explanations of how to handle samples, making sure that there is enough to work from to produce an accurate analysis.
The general use of handwriting analysis in the employment screening process is increasing, said Mark Hopper, president and founder of HRC Corp., a Phoenix, Arizona-based company that offers as a service, computerized graphology. "Personality is the most important factor in hiring," said Hopper, who noted that the demand for his company's services from corporations for employee screening has tripled in the past 18 months.
Left with an interview, personality test, or personal references, employers often don't have much insight into personalities of job candidates until it's too late, Hopper said. People can make great first impressions or can lie on a personality test. And past employment references have focused increasingly on verifying facts such as dates of employment rather than releasing subjective information such as performance evaluation - all to avoid litigation.
Hopper and other graphologists see handwriting analysis as the way to help give companies a window into people's souls. And they're going to lengths to promote it. They point to reports from around the world that claim people's handwriting can give clues as to how they'll perform on the job or fare in a personal relationship - even whether they might fall ill to diseases such as alcoholism, cancer, or schizophrenia.
For his own part, Hopper appears on television news programs and travels around the country to give presentations to corporate chiefs, many of whom enter an auditorium skeptical, but they show up nonetheless. "After a presentation, I've changed some minds," he said.
But those steeped in experience of human resources and recruiting tell a different story. Laura Tyler, who has 20 years of experience in human resource departments for large and small companies says that she hasn't heard of the practice of graphology and is skeptical of its viability. "Hiring is not an exact process. There is no foolproof method because you're dealing with people, and people are not perfect," said Tyler, director of the career center at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley.
And longtime examples of the respected use of handwriting analysis are beginning to fall. For example, France is often looked to as a country where graphology is taken seriously. There, analysts must receive advanced degrees and corporations have uniformly used handwriting analysis as a recruiting tool - until recently. Earlier this month, Saint-Gobain, one of France's largest companies, dropped the practice, citing the lack of scientific proof of graphology's reliability, and the fact that job-hunters didn't like its use.
Information derived from these analyses points to aspects such as a person's confidence level and emotional state. Such information is sensitive, but there is no governance over a company's use. Nonetheless, graphologists regard it as a legitimate practice to evaluate people in this manner, partly because "handwriting is a form of public expression," Hopper said.
The struggle for wider acceptance will hinge upon graphologists' ability to bring the practice into respectability and to help companies establish guidelines for use of the information the analysis generates. Hopper believes respectability will come as computers are used more widely for the analysis - reducing the human factor that comes from subjective analysis.
For Lowe, there's a matter of setting down a code of ethics for users of services or software like Handwriting Analyzer, which also comes in a personal edition for people to analyze prospective mates. "[The corporate version] is for serious business use - there are a number of warnings and disclaimers in the personal version to prevent its use by companies. I don't want people using the software to check up on people's lives."
