HEXACO and Careers: Which Work Suits Your Six Factors

Emma handed in her notice in May, walking out of a job she had spent two years chasing. A third more money than her previous role, a team she genuinely liked, a decent manager. When a friend asked what had happened, it took her a long time to find an answer. In the end she said: "Almost every day I promised deadlines I knew we would miss."

She was not bad at selling. She hit her targets, clients asked for her by name. Each of those calls simply cost her more energy than the job gave back, and after two years the sum came out negative.

This kind of tiredness has very little to do with workload. It grows out of the small friction between what a role demands of you every single day and what comes naturally to you. The six factors of the HEXACO model describe exactly that setting, and a few of them turn out to have unexpectedly direct consequences at work.

What matters more than the payslip

In 2010, Timothy Judge and colleagues pooled almost ninety studies on the relationship between pay and job satisfaction. The link between salary level and overall satisfaction came out at around r = 0.15, which is very weak indeed. People who earn more are on average a little more satisfied, except that the difference gets lost in the noise of everything else.

The second half of the finding is even more interesting. Satisfaction with your own pay was related to the size of that pay only slightly more strongly. So not even the question "am I happy with what I take home" gets as clear an answer from the number on the payslip as you might expect.

Most of the remainder is handled by things that fit into no questionnaire: your manager, your team, the stage of life you are in, the hours spent stuck in traffic. One item does stay on the list, though, and it happens to be the one you can work on in advance. How closely an ordinary Thursday in your role resembles the things you do without effort.

Careful, that is not the same as the job title. Two product managers at neighbouring companies can spend their days in completely different ways: one mainly in meetings and priority spreadsheets, the other in data and documentation. Same business card, two different operations, and the gap between them is usually wider than the gap between industries.

Six axes for reading the working terrain

The model grew out of language analyses that Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee carried out around the turn of the millennium in more than a dozen languages. Alongside the five factors familiar from the Big Five, the data kept throwing up a sixth one, describing fairness, modesty and a person's relationship to money and power. How the model is put together is covered in the piece on the HEXACO model.

For career reading there is one rule worth saying out loud: neither pole is better. A high score and a low score each have terrain where things almost run themselves, and terrain where the same result costs twice the effort.

Honesty-Humility: rules, or the hard game

The Honesty-Humility factor is what separates HEXACO from the Big Five, and at work it shows up before the other five do. People who score high on it function effortlessly where the rules are comprehensible and results are measured over a longer horizon: in accounting and audit, in public administration, in healthcare, in education, in research, in the non-profit sector.

In 2005, Kibeom Lee, Michael Ashton and Reinout de Vries showed that this factor predicts counterproductive workplace behaviour better than the other Big Five traits do. A lower score, on the other hand, does not mean dishonesty. It means that self-promotion, hard bargaining over price and the game of positions do not drain the person as much, so commission sales or a legal dispute is not a daily dose of discomfort. Emma from the opening almost certainly has high H and was selling in an environment that scraped against it every day.

Emotionality: sirens, or the bedside

Emotionality covers anxiety, sentimentality, the need for support and the fear of physical risk. A higher score is an advantage wherever the work is built on perceiving other people: in therapy and counselling, in social work, in palliative care, with small children, in HR. You sense what the person opposite you is not saying, and no methodology can replace that.

A lower score, by contrast, keeps a person calm where decisions are made under pressure and with real risk: in the emergency department, in an ambulance crew, in air traffic control, on a dispatch desk, in the fire service. This is not coldness, nor courage in the heroic sense; it is more that the alarm response arrives later and leaves room for procedure. Caring professions with higher emotionality pay their own price, because the work is harder to leave behind the door.

Extraversion: the stage, or the deep dive

Extraversion decides whether a day full of people charges you up or drains you dry. A higher score suits roles built on talking and being visible: teaching and training, sales, HR, marketing, leading teams, events and media. A lower score belongs to focused work where you spend hours drilling into a single thing: analytics, programming, editing, research, craft trades, closing the books.

And now the unexpected part. In 2013, Adam Grant tracked salespeople in a call centre, and the highest revenue did not come from the extraverts but from people somewhere in the middle of the scale. Pronounced extraverts talk so much that they stop asking questions; pronounced introverts never get into the conversation. The idea that sales belongs to the loudest person in the room rests on very shaky ground.

Agreeableness: negotiating, or making peace

Agreeableness in HEXACO describes something different from honesty. It is about forgiveness, gentleness and patience with people who have not treated you fairly. A low score does not mean aggression, but a lower threshold for criticism and quicker anger, and in certain roles that is functional equipment: procurement, debt collection, quality control, litigation, anywhere you have to tell the other side no and hold that line through the third phone call.

A higher score carries roles where the relationship is built over years and where you need to let go of things that would knock someone else off balance: mediation, long-term client care, education, the complaints desk, leading a team in a tense environment. The weak spot is predictable. Someone who forgives easily escalates with difficulty, and a broken working relationship survives half a year longer than it needed to.

Conscientiousness: process, or improvisation

Of all the personality traits, Conscientiousness has the strongest evidence behind its link to job performance. In 1991, Murray Barrick and Michael Mount summarised research across professions and it was the only dimension that predicted performance in every occupational group they analysed. Extraversion worked only for managers and salespeople.

A high score is at home where a mistake is expensive and the process gets followed: in medicine, in logistics, in project management, in finance, in technical inspection. A lower score does not get lost in operations where the brief changes as you go and a rigid procedure would be in the way: in hospitality, in journalism, in early-stage business, out in the field. There is only one condition, and it is a hard one. The structure has to come from somewhere else, because it will not appear on its own.

Openness: innovation, or operations

High Openness looks for the new and tolerates an unclear brief. It suits development, design, strategy, content, science, roles where nobody knows for the first three weeks what the output actually is. A lower score is not a shortage of intelligence, but less appetite for changing what already works.

That is precisely why people with lower openness are the backbone of operations where novelty is a risk: in aircraft maintenance, in manufacturing, in a pharmacy, in security audits, in the accounts department. Try imagining a team where everyone has high openness and the methodology gets rewritten every quarter. The brainstorming is delightful and nobody is quite sure what today's rules are.

Combinations that say more than single letters

A single factor is a crude reading. What gets interesting is how two of them meet, because that is what produces the position in the team that most people recognise even without a test.

High C and low X gives you the reliable expert in the background. The work is done before anyone asks about it, and it never gets mentioned in a meeting. James has spent four years at an insurer building the scoring models the whole sales floor uses. He was passed over for promotion a second time, because his name simply never came up. The answer is not to learn self-praise, but to arrange for the outputs to carry the author's fingerprint: a two-sentence summary, one concrete number, your own signature under the report.

With the combination of high O and low C, the ideas never run out, but the finishing does. Freelancing with nobody setting the brief tends to be a trap. A newsroom with a fixed print deadline, an agency with a client date or a co-founder who watches the calendar, on the other hand, work wonders. This is not a question of willpower. It is a question of where the deadline comes from.

The pairing of high H and high A adds up to a person who gets trusted. Colleagues come to them with what they would never tell a manager, clients stay for years. The bill arrives at the moment the negotiation is about them. In 2012, Timothy Judge, Beth Livingston and Charlice Hurst showed that higher agreeableness is associated with lower earnings, and among men the gap was more pronounced. This is a statistical average, not a destiny, yet in a salary conversation it shows up quite reliably: you ask for less, accept the first offer and leave with a feeling that it was all rather decent. The defence is boring and effective. Write the number down beforehand, back it with a pay survey and talk about the market, not about yourself.

When you spend two years working against your own settings

A profile is not a ceiling. Low conscientiousness can be offset by a calendar and a checklist, lower extraversion can be overridden by a rehearsed presentation, and introverts often make excellent speakers who simply need to lie down afterwards. The difference is not whether it can be done, but what it costs.

Almost anything can be pulled off once. Done daily for three years, it becomes a quiet energy leak that looks from the outside like general tiredness or "I think I'm burning out". When did you last feel a Sunday evening reluctance that had nothing to do with the amount of work waiting for you?

A few signals worth noticing before they add up:

• The exhaustion comes from one specific part of the day, not from its length.
• Tasks your colleagues knock out in minutes get postponed to the morning, and then to tomorrow.
• The relief from a holiday evaporates before you reach the office.
• Your best days at work have something in common, and it only marginally overlaps with the job description.

The opposite extreme is just as unpleasant, though. A profile is easy to abuse as a sick note: my extraversion is not high, so I do not present; my conscientiousness is low, so I miss deadlines. Avoiding everything uncomfortable means staying exactly where you are. A sensible compromise looks like this: the uncomfortable things make up a minority of your week rather than its backbone.

Personality is half the equation, interests are the other half

The six factors describe how you work. About what you work on, they say almost nothing. And yet two people with practically identical profiles can pick a field the other one would loathe.

That second half is mapped by a model from the American psychologist John Holland, known by the acronym RIASEC. It sorts interests into six types depending on whether you are drawn to technology, investigation, creation, people, persuasion or order, and it works with the content of the job far more concretely than any personality model. You can find your interest profile through the RIASEC work personality test, which we offer separately.

Only together do the two pieces of information give you a usable pointer. High openness plus a technical interest heads somewhere quite different from high openness plus an interest in people, even though the first letter looks the same in the table.

Our HEXACO test has 60 questions and takes around eight minutes. Treat the result as a rough map, not a career verdict: it shows which factors make you stand out from most people, and the rest gets decided in a specific team and a specific operation anyway.

There is one thing you can manage without any test. For ten working days, put a mark after every larger block of work: plus if you came out of it charged up, minus if it drained you. No comments, just the sign. After two weeks, look only at the minuses and hunt for what they share. Occasionally it is the subject matter; far more often it is the form: conversations with strangers, work without a brief, guarding deadlines somebody else set. That shared name will tell you more about a suitable role than any list of occupations attached to your profile.