Handwriting Experts Used for Screening Potential Hires

HARTFORD, Conn. – Crossing your T’s and dotting your I’s have major employment consequences.Graphology, the study of handwriting to determine personality traits, is rising in popularity among companies seeking to screen prospective employees and match the right person for the job.Handwriting Research Corp. of Phoenix works on about 40 or 50 handwriting samples a day, and that’s just from one of 1,600 clients.“Our business is growing,” said Mark Hopper, president of the company. “The difficulty is handling the volume.”Interest is growing from pharmaceutical companies, banks, insurance companies, and even a small furniture store in Phoenix as chief executives seek ways to cut hiring costs while finding the best candidate for the job.Graphologists look, for example, at how job candidates cross the “T” in their handwriting. The stroke, known as the T-bar, tells a lot about a job applicants who cross the letter high or low, centered or to the right or left, Mr. Hopper said. Graphologists can pick out 68 variations of measuring the T-bar.“We’re moving it away from art and closer to science,” Mr. Hopper said. “The handwriting is a behavior and it’s relevant to work performance.”Graphology is even moving into the realm of public relations.Ron Shaw, chief executive of Pilot Pen Corp. of America, recently established the position of chief graphology officer to promote the pen manufacturer.“We were sitting around with a public relations firm and looking for ways to continually promote the name of our company,” he said.The decision to hire Sheila Kurtz, who owns Graphology Consulting Group in New York, could generate more publicity than the annual New Haven tennis tournament the Trumbull-based company has sponsored since 1996, Mr. Shaw said.“This probably makes more sense than tennis because it gets us at the root of what we do, using a pen,” he said.Ms. Kurtz said she does not analyze a signature or small samples of writing, instead examining a page of writing to analyze personality traits to evaluate job applicants.Job applicants are told their writing will be analyzed, with their writing providing insight into emotions, stress, fears, aptitudes, imagination, and scores of other characteristics, she said.“It’s the study of the strokes in the writing. We can do any language with Roman letters, the slant of letters, the spacing of letters and the loops,” Ms. Kurtz said. The analysis determines what she calls “brainwriting,” or impulses sent out by the brain that reveal personality traits, she said.

Handwriting Experts Used for Screening Potential Hires

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