HEXACO in Hiring: What Employers Read From Factor H

Emma has two finalists on her desk for a job in the accounts team. Their qualifications are almost identical, their experience comparable, and both handled the interview plainly and without padding. They differ on one number from a personality questionnaire the company added to its selection process after last year's audit.

One of them scored high on honesty-humility, the other low. Emma heard about that factor at a conference and remembers a sentence about its link to dishonest behavior at work. She has to decide by Friday.

What she does with that number will say more about the company than the rest of the profile ever could. And for the candidate who finds a link to sixty questions in his inbox, it is the single most useful thing to understand about personality testing in hiring.

Why a questionnaire slipped in between the CV and the interview

A bad hire costs a company more than three months of salary. Onboarding, the team's lost time, projects in motion that someone has to take over, and then the whole round of recruiting again from the top. So HR departments reach for anything that lowers the risk, and a personality questionnaire is the cheapest instrument on the shelf: running it on a hundred applicants is as easy as running it on three.

The second reason is more substantive. A structured interview and a work sample do a decent job of predicting whether someone can handle the role. They are weaker on a different question: how will this person behave on the day nobody is watching? That is the gap personality tests offer to fill.

A candidate can learn a great deal from when the questionnaire arrives. If it comes as the first step, before anyone picks up the phone, the company is using it as a sieve. Between the second and third round it works more as material for a conversation. And if it lands once you already have an offer in hand, it is a briefing for your future manager on how to work with you. Same tool, three completely different situations.

Of the Big Five traits, conscientiousness has held its place in HR the longest. Murray Barrick and Michael Mount reviewed the available studies in 1991 and found that across occupations it predicts job performance more consistently than any of the other four factors. That mattered to the field. But conscientiousness describes how carefully somebody works, not whether they play fair with you.

That is exactly the gap HEXACO fills with its sixth factor. It is the whole reason the model has been turning up in HR presentations over the past few years, even though academically it is nothing new.

The sixth factor first spoke up outside English

The Canadian psychologists Michael Ashton and Kibeom Lee went through the vocabulary of several languages around the turn of the millennium, looking for how many groups the words people use to describe one another naturally fall into. The method was not new; the Big Five rests on it too. The result was. In Hungarian, Korean, Italian, Polish and Dutch, a sixth cluster kept appearing, one that in English analyses had stayed hidden, scattered among the other factors.

That cluster was named honesty-humility, and it holds four things together: sincerity in dealings with others, fairness, the relationship to money and possessions, and how much a person needs to stand above everyone else. What exactly hides under that name is unpacked in a separate piece on factor H.

Why did the sixth dimension not show up in English analyses sooner? Part of the answer lies in how the original trait lists were assembled. The rest lies in the fact that in a five-factor solution, honesty-humility dissolves mainly into agreeableness and conscientiousness. For describing ordinary personality that is enough. But once the subject is behavior that lets someone gain at another person's expense, the most interesting piece of information is missing.

This is where most people get it wrong. High honesty-humility does not mean you are nice. In HEXACO, agreeableness is a separate factor and measures something else entirely: how easily you forgive and how much you tolerate when someone wrongs you. Honesty-humility asks about the reverse situation, namely what you do when you could be the one doing harm and nothing would happen to you. People with high H and low A exist. They will not exploit you, but they will remind you of a slight for five years.

What draws employers to that factor

What companies are afraid of has a technical name: counterproductive work behavior. It covers petty theft, hours billed that nobody worked, going around internal rules, an undisclosed conflict of interest, and running colleagues down.

Honesty-humility ties to this kind of behavior more strongly than the other factors do. Kibeom Lee, Michael Ashton and Reinout de Vries showed in 2005 that the six-factor model predicts workplace delinquency and integrity better than the five-factor one, largely thanks to a trait that has no scale of its own in the Big Five. Ingo Zettler and his colleagues in Copenhagen followed that line with a series of papers on how honesty-humility relates to unethical decision-making; their extensive 2020 review maps what the individual HEXACO factors have been found to relate to.

It does not matter equally in every role. Honesty-humility comes up most where a person has access to money, to data, or to a decision nobody checks afterwards: finance, purchasing, systems administration, work with sensitive records. In a job where every step is visible and somebody else signs it off, the same result adds far less to the decision.

One word from the previous paragraph deserves emphasis: relates. A statistical relationship between a trait and behavior, measured on thousands of people, says nothing certain about one particular applicant. Low H predicts theft no more reliably than low conscientiousness predicts a missed deadline. It describes a tendency, not an act.

What the questionnaire can see and what it cannot

A personality test is not a lie detector. It is self-report. You answer statements about yourself, and the result is the picture you hold of yourself and have decided to show. No item verifies whether that picture is true.

It sounds like a fatal weakness, and it is only half of one. Self-reports correspond surprisingly decently with how a person is described by people who have known them for years. They fail where the answer has a consequence, and a hiring process is exactly that kind of situation.

Putting the result to good use looks different from what most people imagine. The interviewer does not learn an answer from the profile, they learn what to ask about. Low emotionality in a role with night shifts is a question, not a verdict. So is high openness in a job with a fixed procedure.

The rest lies entirely beyond the reach of a questionnaire. Expertise, reasoning ability, experience with a particular tool, speed of learning. Other methods exist for those, and a personality profile does not replace them even in part.

Can you game the test?

Yes, you can. And no, it does not pay off over time.

The phenomenon in question is called social desirability, the tendency to answer so that the result looks good. It is stronger among job applicants than among people filling in the same questionnaire out of curiosity, and psychologists have been accounting for it for decades. The practical effect on selection tends to be smaller than you would expect, because nearly the whole pool of applicants shifts in the same direction at once. The ranking stays similar, everybody just floats upward.

With honesty-humility, dressing up the answers carries a trap of its own. The statements that raise H sound a little too good: I would never take credit for someone else's work, a quick profit has never tempted me, my standing means nothing to me. An extreme score is therefore read by an experienced assessor not as proof of integrity but as a signal that the candidate answered as the person they wanted to appear to be.

Questionnaires also ask about the same thing several times over, in different words and in different places. Anyone who picks a strategy at the start and lets it slip halfway through produces a profile that does not hold together. The assessor may not spot where exactly you touched things up, but they will notice the result looks incoherent.

James applied for a sales role and answered according to what he thought the company wanted. Plenty of energy, plenty of drive, minimal doubt. He got the job. Four months in it dawned on him that the role rested on calling strangers all day and on ringing back a third time. He could do it. It just drained him to the last drop, and by evening there was nothing left at home.

When was the last time you spent a full working day in a role that did not suit you, and how much of that day was left of you? Which profile lasts longest in which kind of work, and where it burns out sooner, is what we go through in the piece on careers according to HEXACO.

How to prepare for testing without putting on an act

1. Find out your profile before a recruiter sees it. A result you already know stops being an exam and turns into a formality. Our HEXACO test has sixty questions and takes about eight minutes; besides the six scores it also gives you a comparison with the Big Five model. Treat the comparison with other people as approximate.
2. Pick one context and stay in it the whole way through. Most questionnaires ask in general terms, yet plenty of people behave one way in the office and another at home. Switch halfway and you get a result that fits neither version.
3. The first reaction is usually more accurate than the third thought. Getting stuck on one item generally means you have stopped answering for yourself and started answering for a character you are building in your head.
4. Assume somebody will ask you about the result. An answer that works has two parts: what you are good at, and how you keep an eye on the flip side of the same trait.
5. Ask questions of your own. What the answers will be used for, who will see them, and whether you get the output as well. The reaction to those questions is often more informative than the questionnaire itself.

What if the test hands you something you do not recognize? Say so out loud. A candidate who explains plainly why one number does not fit, and backs it up with a situation from work, comes across better than one who recites the profile description like a horoscope.

Where a personality test in hiring hits its limit

The first limit is arithmetic. No personality factor explains more than a modest share of how a person will do at work. Using one questionnaire as a sieve therefore means rejecting people on the basis of information that only partly determines the outcome.

The second limit is legal and concerns factor H above all. A low honesty-humility score is not a finding about a particular person's dishonesty, and treating it as one is quite bold. Under European data protection rules you have the right to know what purpose your answers are processed for, and a fair process means you see the result and can comment on it. A company that refuses both has just told you something about itself.

The third problem arrives slowly and quietly. Hire by one profile for two years and you end up with a department of people who share the same tendencies and the same blind spot. With honesty-humility it sounds harmless, since who would not want a team of fair people. But a team assembled around a single number loses precisely the differences teams are assembled for.

Back to Emma and her two finalists. The sensible move is neither to reject one of them nor to pass over the number in silence. It is a prompt for one more question during reference checks, and for a conversation about how the person handled a situation involving someone else's money or a rule nobody was checking anyway. The questionnaire offers a hypothesis. Someone alive has to test it.