#5 Reasons To Hire A Handwriting Expert! Handwriting analysis can be a supportive hiring tool if the performance of the person you are hiring can directly affect your company's bottom line.

As per a human resource industry survey done in the US, turnover costs for one senior-level executive can go as high as $840,000 (considering that this person spends about two-three years in the organization). This is inclusive of the hiring cost, total compensation, cost of maintaining employees, disruptions costs, severance costs and lastly costs incurred by mistakes, failures and missed business opportunities. Even if we consider the cost in India to be as little as ¼ of the US standard it's still a considerable amount lost. What can be done? Can we use any method to work with leaders you have already hired? If yes, then how do you know which areas to work on? This is one of the great reasons to hire a Graphologist.

Graphologist — what's that?

A graphologist is not the graphic designer, who designs for your marketing campaign, is not a calligraphy artist who works at making handwriting strokes and alphabets look aesthetically beautiful by using different strokes through pen, brush and even digitally, nor is he / she a document examiner — who verifies forged documents & signatures to testify his findings in the court.

A graphologist is a professional who studies handwriting and signature strokes and their correlation with specific human behavioral patterns.

He/ she can understand the variation that occurs when people go through different stress factors, transitions, mind blocks, emotional issues and even physical trauma. The human brain is one mystical rabbit hole that we haven't fully understood and its like the moniker, "The more you see the less you understand."

Following are the five reasons to hire a graphologist:

Prevent Hiring Misfits

Handwriting & signature analysis can be a supportive hiring tool if the performance of the person you are hiring can directly affect your company's bottom line. There are only a few international firms that offer in depth compatibility assessment based on graphology.

Enhanced Assessment Centers And Performance Appraisals

Many organizations employ different psychometric tools to assess their employees. I prefer to use graphology assessment as a supportive tool with other psychometric tools in assessment centers or even appraisals. Many of these psychometric tests are based on one's response to several questions. These responses are later added to different personality models to derive the final result. Sadly these don't factor in two very tricky points.

1. Most respondents start guessing the probable desired answers in order to get a better score or even feel good about themselves.

2. Many of us have either some projections of ourselves or some unknown areas where we can be as blind as a bat as mentioned in Johari's forth window.

Here is where graphology, combined with some robust personality assessment tools, can be a great method to capture unknown spaces more accurately as the assessment is much more than good / bad, right / wrong, as the parameters for the assessment are not known.

GraphoTherapy In Developing Shared Values Of The Organization

I can't describe teams better in one sentence than this one: Birds of a feather flock together. It is true and evident that we like people either similar to us, or those who we know will align & agree with us. We limit the talent pool by our preference and comforts. Instead of creating teams that can operate from shared values, we value our comfort zones.

Values and behaviors take years to build and habits can take months to break. That is true because any belief or behavior is a pattern and our brain requires creating neuropath ways to process and duplicate it.

Many organizations list "respect for the individual' as one of the core values. If the leader or employee doesn't respect him / her or has never employed empathy in his/her interaction with people then trying to build this one core value can be highly challenging. GraphoTherapy is a way of reprogramming neuropath ways to rewire certain parts of the brain. Teams in IT and Financial sectors have gone through process where they were asked to practice some handwriting and signature therapy strokes for a short period of time.

Business Profitability

Enhance performance through coaching - Many people think their handwriting is very inconsistent and that's why cannot represent their entire personality. To my mind that is the most exciting part. Graphology divides handwriting in 3 parts:

Highly variable: Strokes that change everyday depending on your mood in that moment. E.g. Minor variations in the signature, baseline, size of the writing

Moderately variable: These strokes change over a period of time like a behavioral shift that one can see over 2-3 years. For example, "y' Loops, "t' bars, and style of "i' dot.

Fairly permanent: I have learnt an important lesson in my career spanning 14 years, "There is nothing permanent about people, nothing at all.' We all are unpredictable in different degrees. Thankfully we still have some behavioral patterns that remain consistent through the years. They can be captured through strokes. E.g. Pressure, spacing between letters.

An accurate, insightful feedback that can be applied to create a shift differentiates a great coaching session from a good one. Unlike psychotherapy, coaching is a more progressive, future oriented method that is based on course corrective actions and result-oriented choices. Graphology is a mighty GPS tool to help navigate CXO clients who are generally averse to feedback.

Logo Designing

Specialized application in the area of corporate identity – The logo of the company is its signature. Very much like your signature represents you, the logo represents the entire organization legally, in front of your customer (internal & external) and symbolizes your presence and consent to the activity.

Graphology has a specialized application in the area of branding. Though agencies and designers design company logos, owners and / or senior executives always approve them. This science of selection can be very insightful. Fonts, colors, shapes, symbols and even empty spaces used in the corporate identity can shed light on many aspects of the organization.

We tend to believe that profound and accurate things must be more complex and onerous, but what if we can find knowledge and wisdom in simple things like your signature on a scribbled note?

"The definition of genius is taking the complex and making it simple." - Albert Einstein