better hiring through … wait for it … handwriting!
March 20th, 2008
Forget about traditional background checks and assessment tests. All you need is a handwriting sample. Or so says Candidate Insight, a company that claims to help employers make better hiring decisions with just two short paragraphs. They promise to reveal hundreds of personality traits never before “available to employers prior to hiring.”
Says VP Ryan Vener, “Imagine the benefit of knowing, with 95 percent accuracy, that the candidate a client is about to make an offer to is argumentative, dishonest, moody and inflexible? We can even tell clients if the candidate is violent. No other hiring tool or other personality assessment even comes close to our accuracy and insight.”
Candidate Insight uses “artificial intelligence and a sophisticated relational database” to get acquainted with a candidate’s grey matter. However, others in the background check industry caution employers when utilizing such services.
Says employeescreenIQ president and COO Jason Morris, “Handwriting analysis is a highly contested way of analyzing someone’s psychological profile. Before a company utilizes something like this, I would first investigate if this type of analysis is supported by an organization such as the American Psychological Association. Employers should also seek the advice of their attorneys. Eliminating someone from consideration for employment due to these results could violate state and / or federal laws.”
Click here for more information or checkout a sample report.
March 20th, 2008 at 11:00 am
Good Job calling BS on that one Joel-
A well known study- “The Validity and Utility of Selection Methods in Personnel Psychology
Practical and Theoretical Implications of 85 Years of Research Findings ” by Schmidt and Hunter, ranked handwriting analysis dead last of dozens of methods as predictive of job performance.
Any HR “pro” who would make hiring decisions based on something like that should be fired and any candidates rejected should be able to sue the worthless company doing the ‘testing’.
FYI, what was most predicitive of job success ? GMA (brains) and Work Samples (duh).
March 20th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I must say I am a bit skeptical… I did some digging on their website and they indicate that handwriting samples have been ruled in the supreme court to be non-discriminatory. I’ll take their word for it and give them the benefit of the doubt.
What concerned me most was the absence of any job position analysis and a comprehensive identification of what traits are needed for success in what jobs. It would seem difficult to make a good hiring decision without knowing how the information identified in the reports serves as a predictor of success in the job.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
The handwriting analysis was used in Germany a couple of years in the past century. But with bad conclusions.
I am affraid to read that someone is shure to recognize that a candidate could be violent - only through his writing style. Of course, in the next step they will be shure to see by the lines of skin, who is beating his mate???
I believe it is like the discussions with the application forms and styles. The people who lives from that issues have to warm up old hats as a new idea. And the best way is to take a not profable test like this one. The best thing is, that nobody can demonstrate the opposite and hit ratio.
March 20th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Yeah, they can also tell how many caffeinated beverages and candy bars the applicant has had that morning. :)
March 20th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
Carnac the Magnificent
March 20th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
I agree that basing a hiring decision on a handwriting analysis doesn’t pass the smell test, but sometimes, just sometimes, an employer makes a great hire despite having a severely flawed hiring process. I only need to look in the mirror to know that employers do that from time-to-time. See http://www.CollegeRecruiter.com/weblog/2008/03/sometimes_the_b.php .
March 21st, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Can I take a typing test instead? Or better yet a texting test? I stopped ‘writing’ with pen and paper about 5 years ago.
March 22nd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Are they going to include tarrot card reading in the interview also?
March 22nd, 2008 at 8:34 pm
How can one use “artificial intelligence and a sophisticated relational database” in handwriting analysis? No one tool should be relied upon when making a hiring decision. Yes, we cannot rely on our gut feelings. That is why we do have psychological research to provide this kind of data. However, this should be only one tool in a comprehensive selection strategy.
April 1st, 2008 at 11:10 am
In this cyber era when the kids start there schooling with computers, I feel now a days we all are bit detached from paper and pen. I conducted an informal survey in this regard where I asked such questions to the professionals that revels there handwriting habits, when they used pen for the last time and now a days how much comfortable they are.
Though I believe in the said domain of graphology, but I really have a doubt about how much this method would be effective for IT and related streams of hiring where the candidates looses the touch with pen and paper and over the period of time almost looses the writing practice.
I do not know the details of graphology but I do believe that writing should be considered as an important element in candidate screening but on the other side we just cant rely on this stream only.
Thanks for this feast of knowledge