"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
It Is Written
What Handwriting Can Reveal About Your Job Candidates
I must have been nervous. When I parked the Grand Am outside Jane Hollis' office, I planted the front tire squarely on the curb. And left it there. Didn't even notice.
Truth is, I was fluttery. I wasn't certain what this psychologist would discover about me during the course of our interview. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.
Hollis is a graphologist -- a handwriting expert. Through her business, Career Development Consultants, her most common task is to help small and medium-sized companies weed out unfit job applicants -- and find good ones -- using samples of the candidates' handwriting.
And, as I was beginning to regret, I volunteered to have Hollis analyze my own script. It scared me, but it also intrigued me. Whom would Hollis discover lurking in the curves, loops and slashes of my handwriting? Ed Murrow? Or Mr. Ed?
"You already know," Hollis says while guiding me to her spare, quaint basement office in the Ramsey Profession Building on Ramsey Street in St. Paul. "You know what your handwriting will say. People always know." With that, I relaxed.
The first thing you notice about Jane Hollis is how utterly nice she seems. She is anything but imposing. Her soft voice is matched with equally soft eyes, a ready smile, a quiet, studious manner. Hollis is about the last person you'd guess might be involved in what some see as almost witchcraft.
Even though the FBI offers graphoanalysis as an elective class to agents in training and a handful of states allow it in court as evidence, doubts persist. How can handwriting reveal personality? Who decides that when a wirter crosses a "T" low on the character, that person lacks self-confidence, while one who crosses the "T" high atop the character displays strong willpower? Isn't this a lot like how criminals were once judged -- by the shapes of their skulls?
No, says Hollis. It's not about shapes. It's about motion.
Imagine you're watching a ballet. The dancer leaps onto the stage with a graceful, sweeping flourish and prances like a gymnasts. Her steps begin to skitter, like those of a cat. Suddenly, she falls into a fetal position, from which she rises, fluidly, once again. Look what this dancer has conveyed through her movement: personality, character, strength, fragility.
Through a roughly identical brain-to-motor-function mechanism, handwriting says all the same things about us, Hollis says. Samples reveal characteristics such as level of motivation, deceptiveness and modesty or ostentatiousness. The discipline involves learning to identify and analyze unique combinations of gestures and impulses that make up a person's individual handwriting style. "Handwriting is just a form of expressing yourself," Hollis says.
Although that might seem straightforward enough, the practice is all but rejected in the American psychological community, which categorizes it - along with astrology -- as a pseudoscience. Much to Hollis' chagrin. She thinks the practice could be of tremendous help to psychiatrists, counselors and teachers. But it remains unregulated in the United States, allowing the proliferation of damaging handwriting analysis by poorly trained analysts who focus on single traits without viewing whole samples.
"I have had to help people who have had a bad analysis based on a single trait," Hollis says. "It can be devastating to learn bad things about yourself, especially if they are untrue. People can go for years holding that in."
Despite the reservations, some believe firmly in graphoanalysis, and they have become Hollis' bread and butter. They are the small and medium-sized companies for which any hiring selection is a significant financial and corporate risk. And Hollis' judgments potentially carry enough weight to launch careers -- or wipe them out before they begin.
Despite the impact of some of her decisions, Hollis says she doesn't worry that her work lacks compassion. In fact, her use of handwriting analysis -- which says accurately and minutely gauges even the most guarded personality -- stems directly from her sense of caring.
"I don't feel bad about it at all," she says, pointing to one woman's handwriting sample, which, Hollis says, shows the woman is singularly unfit for a corporate sales position. "If this person were somehow to get this job, she would be miserable. She's not going to get this job, but she'd be much more unhappy in that situation if she did."
Her results aren't foolproof. Hollis refuses to work with any company that doesn't also use other measures to test a candidate's merits. And as it turns ouut, my own handwriting illustrates perfectly why this is necessary. It just so happens that I handed Hollis some of the most mystifying handwriting samples she'd ever seen.
My handwriting is almost schizophrenic: I have two completely distinct styles. One I have devised over time while taking notes as a reporter. It is written rapidly, often when I am not looking at the page but at my subject. It is curvy, rambling, disconnected and totally illegible to other people. It takes little account of the margins or lines of the page, and barely pays lip service to the proper shapes of letters. The only thing that it has in common with my everyday handwriting is that it uses rounded, connected, all-capital characters.
My other writing style is reserved for correspondence, for communicating with other people. This is a cleaner, more block-like formal style, though it still has some of the same curvy characteristics and is still illegible to some. But this style takes account of a page's lines and margins and it uses indents and careful punctuation.
"You're almost trading personality traits" between samples, Hollis says. "When you're just in listening mode, you're very relaxed and you're handwriting shows that. You weren't really trying to organize your thoughts, and it looked like that. Later [in the second sample], when your thoughts were more organized and analytical, that's what your handwriting showed, too."
Hollis analyzed samples of both styles, not from the perspective of a candidate going through the selection process, but of a professional seeking a career development appraisal (another of her services). She focused on my potential ability as a freelance writer, an easy choice since it's what I already do. She focused on 20 traits, including determination, originality, confidence and the like.
In the end, she found me hard to grade. I scored high in a few personality categories that are unusual in combination. For instance, according to Hollis, my note-taking shows me to be a flexible, receptive and adaptive person but apparently badly disorganized. She says I'm capable of lying back and absorbing information while a person is speaking to me, remaining largely open to my surroundings even while recording what I learn. But my formal style shows me to be much better organized, and strongly analytical and determined. I scored high, a total of 7.98 out of a possible 10 on her "Career Development Profile" scale.
The combinations were so singular that, three days after receiving my samples, Hollis called me back to tell me that she felt I really ought to be graded slightly higher in several categories, which would pull up my overall grade.
"Not everyone is like you," she says. "Usually I have not seen such an extreme -- that ability to go back and forth depending on what you need to do." But she also says my results reinforce her concern that employers should never rely solely on her judgments when selecting hires.
I admit that I went in a skeptic, and came out a skeptic, too -- at least as far as my own sample is concerned. But I am a far from confident critic.
I'm a writer doing a story on Hollis and her business, and someone in her position might be ready to raise my profile rating -- for the obvious reasons. Also, I interviewed her at length before the test, so she had a good opportunity to assess my personality before looking at a single letter of my handwriting.
But there are at least two things that make me want to suspend that judgment. First, I'm no scientist and I'm no more qualified to gauge the merits of this practice than I am to judge nuclear physics. But there is something more compelling.
With one glance at my handwriting, she nailed me with a shot that sailed out of the park faster than a Mark McGuire homer.
"You don't like to take orders, at least not without an explanation," she says. "By looking at the bucklings of your R's, I get the sense that you show some resistance to commands that come without explanations, and a lot of bosses don't like that." But that's not necessarily fatal to my career, she says. I just have to work around it.
"You'd be great as a freelancer. Or a newspaper editor, where it's probably necessary to ask a lot of questions," Hollis says. "I can even see you in marketing."
By her reckoning, there is only one area where I scored relatively low. That is in the area of tact. She says I could use a little work on that. But what the hell does she know?
Originally published in Ventures magazine, November 1998.
Kevin Featherly, a former managing editor at Washington Post Newsweek Interactive, is a Minnesota journalist who covers politics and technology. He has authored or contributed to five previous books, Guide to Building a Newsroom Web Site (1998), The Wired Journalist (1999), Elements of Language (2001), Pop Music and the Press (2002) and Encyclopedia of New Media (2003). His byline has appeared in Editor & Publisher, the San Francisco Chronicle, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Online Journalism Review and Minnesota Law and Politics, among other publications. In 2000, he was a media coordinator for Web, White & Blue, the first online presidential debates.
Copyright 2004, by Kevin Featherly