"Needed organized individual." In the workplace, organizational skills are often extremely important, and "organized" is one of the most common words used in job advertisements. But how can you tell if someone is organized? It's often a case of hire them, then wait and see.

Resumes don't help. It's very easy to put that magical word in any resume. Interviews don't help, or at least not if the person being interviewed is in the least astute. It's easy to either say "yes, I'm organized" or tell a story where you seem organized. I used to teach resume writing and interview skills, I know first had that what you see/hear is not always what you get.

References are becoming less and less valuable as previous employers become nervous about saying too much about their unsatisfactory past employee.

So what can help? Ask for a sample of writing of the candidate.

Yes, you read that correctly. Ask your job candidate at the interview to write down why they want this job, why you should hire them, or the answer to some other typical interview question. Make sure they write quite a bit, because the more writing you can get the more you can tell.

Now, firstly, you can just look at the writing. Is it legible? How is the spelling, grammar, punctuation? These things are telling.

But then for the fun part. You are now going to analyze their writing to find out if they are organized!

This system of assessing job candidates (and marriage candidates, business partnership candidates and candidates for any other part of your life), extremely common in Europe and parts of the Middle East, and Asia is now growing fast in North America.

Graphology or Handwriting Analysis reveals the entire personality of the writer, but for our purposes just now, we are looking for organization.

Look at the lower case "f". Is it split in two equal halves? It can be written in any style apart from block capitals, so just look to see where it is split in two. If both upper and lower part are equal in size, then the writer possesses organizational skills.

But it does not end there. There are other things that can diminish the influence of even the most even split "f". Are the lines of writing overlapping each other - do strokes from the first line of writing touch or go over any strokes from the second line of writing, and so on. The more overlapping, the more confusion of interests is present. Confusion reduces organization.

There are of course other traits that will have an influence too, but if you have a writer with evenly split "f"s, showing organization and no overlapping lines of writing showing confusion, there's pretty good chance you have someone who can be organized.

Check it out on people you know. You'll prove it to yourself in no time!