The HEXACO Personality Test and What Its Six Traits Mean at Work

Take the Official HEXACO Personality Test Free

The official HEXACO personality test is free for personal use on hexaco.org, run by its authors, Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton. It comes in three lengths:

• HEXACO-60: 60 statements, about 10 to 12 minutes. The best pick for a quick read of your six trait scores.
• HEXACO-100: 100 statements, about 15 to 20 minutes. The version the authors recommend for most uses, and the one you can take online.
• HEXACO-200: 200 statements, roughly 35 to 40 minutes. Available from the authors on request, for sharper facet scores.

The authors time the 60 and 100 forms at about 12 and 20 minutes for students. The 200-item time is our estimate from its length.

The HEXACO personality test is a questionnaire that places you on six broad traits. Psychologists Kibeom Lee and Michael Ashton built it in the early 2000s after studying how people describe each other in a dozen languages, from Dutch and Korean to Turkish and Filipino. The same six clusters kept turning up. HEXACO is just the six initials: Honesty-Humility, Emotionality, eXtraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Openness to Experience. Search for a personality test HEXACO version and you will find long forms and short forms, but every faithful one hands back six scores, each with four narrower facets underneath.

The Six Traits a HEXACO Test Scores

Honesty-Humility covers sincerity, fairness, greed avoidance, and modesty. High scorers don't manipulate people or bend rules for personal gain. Emotionality covers fearfulness, anxiety, dependence, and sentimentality: how much you worry, and how much you lean on others when things get hard. Extraversion covers social self-esteem, social boldness, sociability, and liveliness. Agreeableness covers forgivingness, gentleness, flexibility, and patience, which in HEXACO mostly means how slow you are to anger. Conscientiousness covers organization, diligence, perfectionism, and prudence. Openness to Experience covers aesthetic appreciation, inquisitiveness, creativity, and unconventionality. Lee and Ashton keep the official inventory and its versions on their own site, and the encyclopedia entry on the HEXACO model lists every facet with its sources.

How HEXACO Differs from the Big Five

Three things change. First, HEXACO gives Honesty-Humility a trait of its own. In the Big Five, pieces of it sit inside Agreeableness, where they get mixed up with warmth. Second, a quick temper moves. The Big Five files anger under Neuroticism. HEXACO files it under low Agreeableness, so its Agreeableness reads closer to patient and forgiving than to simply nice. Third, Emotionality picks up sentimentality and the need for support, so a high score means you feel things strongly and want company in hard moments, more than it means you are anxious. The other three traits line up closely with their Big Five cousins. If you have OCEAN scores from a Big 5 personality assessment, four of your six HEXACO results won't surprise you. Honesty-Humility usually will, and it is the score most worth a careful look.

Every standard HEXACO form works the same way. You read a short statement about yourself and rate it on a five-point scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The official inventory comes in three lengths, 60, 100, and 200 items, and the authors recommend the 100-item form for most uses. Each trait score is the average of your answers on its items. Some items are worded in reverse, so you can't coast by agreeing with everything.

To give you a feel for it, here are three statements in the same style. They are our own examples, not items from the official form:

• If I found a wallet with cash in it, I would hand it in untouched. (Honesty-Humility)
• I plan my week before it starts. (Conscientiousness)
• I find it hard to stay calm when someone criticizes my work. (Agreeableness, scored in reverse)

The format is quick and well studied. Its weak spot shows up in the very first example. You can see which answer looks good, and so can anyone reading your results.

No Right Answers, and No Need to Prepare

Nothing on the form is scored as right or wrong. A low Extraversion score is no failing grade, and a high Openness score is no prize. Preparing makes no sense either, because there is nothing to learn. The most useful thing you can do is answer for how you behave in a normal week, rather than on your best day. People who study the ideal profile for a job before they sit the test tend to produce a profile nobody recognizes, themselves included.

Is the HEXACO Personality Test Free to Take?

Yes, if you are taking it for yourself. The authors' site lets anyone complete the HEXACO-PI-R online at no charge, and the printed forms are free to download for non-profit academic research. Commercial use, such as a company screening applicants, needs their permission. You will also find plenty of free HEXACO clones. Some follow the original closely, some are loose rewrites, and few tell you which they are.

Where to Take the Official HEXACO Inventory

The official version lives on hexaco.org, which Lee and Ashton run. If a site doesn't name them or say how many items it uses, assume you are looking at an adaptation. Its scores may still be useful, but they won't line up with published research. On accuracy, the original holds up well: the six factors have been replicated across many languages and samples. A HEXACO test gets less accurate in two cases: when a clone rewrites the items, and when the person answering has a reason to look good. Pigment's career test is a separate instrument. It does not score the six HEXACO traits.

How Accurate Is the HEXACO Personality Test?

Two numbers tell you whether a test is consistent. The first is internal reliability: do the items for one trait agree with each other? It runs from 0 to 1, and above .70 is the usual bar. In Ashton and Lee's 2009 paper introducing the HEXACO-60, the six short scales landed around .70 to .80. On the authors' published norms for the HEXACO-60 (1,126 college students), they ran .76 to .80. The longer form does better: the HEXACO-100 norms show .81 to .85 for the six traits.

The second is test-retest stability: do you get the same scores if you take it again? A 2022 study of the HEXACO-100 retested 416 people about two weeks apart and found a typical trait correlation of .88. Over months and years the numbers dip into the .70s, which is normal for any personality test, because people do change a little.

Why a Forced-Choice Format Beats Self-Report for Honesty-Humility

Honesty-Humility is the trait people most want to look good on, so it is the easiest to inflate when a job is on the line. Rate yourself one statement at a time and nothing stops you from claiming to be honest, modest, and fair all at once. A forced-choice format groups statements that look about equally desirable and has you choose the closer match. Cao and Drasgow's 2019 review of forced-choice studies found that forced-choice personality measures showed much less score inflation in hiring situations than single-statement measures did, especially when the options were well matched. It is still self-report, so it can't make shading the truth impossible. It does make a spotless profile much harder to build. Pigment uses this format for all 120 of its questions, for the same reason.

Your HEXACO results usually arrive as six scores between 1 and 5, plus facet scores, and sometimes a percentile for each. The raw number is the least useful part. On the authors' own norms for the HEXACO-100, the six trait averages sit between about 2.9 and 3.5, and most people score within about 0.6 of the average. So a 3.6 tells you little on its own. The percentile shows where you sit next to other people, and that is what any reading of the result should rest on.

hexaco.org does not publish cutoffs for high and low. A rough rule of thumb we use: above about the 70th percentile reads as high, below about the 30th as low, and most people land in the wide middle. On those norms, the 70th percentile sits only about 0.3 points above the average, so small differences in raw scores matter. A middle score isn't bland. It usually means the trait shifts with the situation, which is worth knowing. Read the facets before you trust the trait score, too. A middling Conscientiousness can hide very high Organization and very low Prudence, and those two point toward different kinds of work.

What a High or Low Score on Each HEXACO Trait Means for Work

Honesty-Humility. High: you play it straight, don't chase status, and do well where trust is the job, such as audit, compliance, finance, or any role with access to money or private data. Low: you are comfortable negotiating hard and promoting yourself, which can help in sales or deal-making, as long as clear rules sit around it.

Emotionality. High: you notice risk early and feel other people's distress, which suits caring and safety-minded roles. Low: you stay steady under pressure, which suits crisis work, trading, and emergency response.

Extraversion. High: you come alive in front of groups, pitching, and running meetings. Low: you work best in long stretches alone, such as research, writing, or engineering.

Agreeableness. High: you forgive quickly and keep conflict down, which helps in service and team-heavy roles. Low: you push back and hold a line, which helps in editing, quality control, and negotiation.

Conscientiousness. High: you plan, finish, and double-check, which fits operations, project management, and regulated work. Low: you prefer to improvise, which fits early-stage or fast-changing work, with someone else minding the details.

Openness. High: you want new ideas and variety, which fits design, strategy, and research. Low: you prefer what already works, which fits roles that reward consistency and depth.

These are tendencies. Two people with identical scores can do well in very different jobs, because HEXACO describes your temperament. It doesn't show which working conditions keep you going, or how you like to decide and learn. Most career questions sit in that gap, and a trait profile can't answer them.

A HEXACO personality assessment is most useful when you want a well-studied picture of your temperament and are willing to do the work of reading it. Three groups get the most from it.

People weighing a career move. If you are a few years or a few decades in and wondering whether the work still suits you, six scores can explain friction you have felt for a while. A low Agreeableness score in a job built on constant consensus, for example, explains a lot of tired evenings.

Students and early-career readers. HEXACO gives you words for your temperament before habits set. It won't pick a major for you, but it can rule a few out.

Managers building teams. Knowing where people sit on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness helps you hand out work and see friction coming. The scores belong to the person, so ask before you collect them, and never use them to rank colleagues.

How Employers Use HEXACO Test Results

Most employer interest comes down to one trait. A 2019 meta-analysis by Pletzer and colleagues found that Honesty-Humility predicted counterproductive work behavior, such as theft, rule-breaking, and slacking off, better than any Big Five or other HEXACO trait. Low scorers did more of it. That is why trust-heavy employers pay attention: banks, insurers, retailers with lots of cash handling, and firms where staff can reach private data. In practice, a HEXACO test for employers shows up in three places. It can be one input when screening for trust-sensitive roles, next to interviews and reference checks. It can guide leadership development, where the facets give a coach something concrete to work on. And it can help a team talk openly about how each person works. If you are asked to take one as a candidate, answer as you are. A profile that looks too perfect tends to raise questions rather than settle them. For more on how hiring tests get used, read our guide to personality assessment for recruitment plus our guide to the Hogan personality assessment, a common workplace alternative.

HEXACO in Plain Terms

It is a well-researched questionnaire that scores six traits of temperament, including Honesty-Humility, which most popular tests leave out. It describes you well. It stops short of saying where to go from here.

So the right pick depends on your question. If you want a free, research-grade description of your temperament, take the official 100-item version on hexaco.org and read your percentiles with the guide above. If you want a type to compare with friends, an MBTI test is lighter and more fun, though less stable. If your team wants a shared language for communication, a DISC personality test is quick and made for that. If you are weighing frameworks against each other, our comparison of DISC and Myers-Briggs shows where each one helps, and our career personality test guide compares the options built for work.

Using HEXACO Results for a Career Move

A trait profile is the start. Knowing you are high in Conscientiousness and low in Extraversion still leaves you to work out which roles, which teams, and which pace will hold up over years. Pigment picks up there. Its 120 forced-choice questions look at the way you make decisions, pick up new skills, talk to people, and share work, and at which sorts of work last for you over years. Your report ends in role suggestions you can hold up against your HEXACO scores. Pigment rests on established research on how well people match their jobs and on using strengths at work, and the formal study of its own instrument has not reported yet. Pigment is for your own decisions and isn't built to screen job candidates.

Turn Your HEXACO Scores Into a Career Direction

You know your six traits. The Career Self-Discovery Assessment shows the sorts of work that suit how you think and team up, and which roles to look at next. $79, paid once.

See which work suits your traits