5 Most Important Qualities to Look For When Hiring an Employee

Hiring the right employees isn’t just about skills and experience, it’s about finding people with the right traits to succeed in your organisation. But with so much research on workplace performance and personality, it’s not always clear which qualities matter most.

To cut through the complexity, this article outlines the five most important traits to look for when hiring, backed by research and industry best practices.

When it comes to predicting real-world job performance, cognitive ability is the strongest indicator of success—especially for roles that require problem-solving, decision-making, and learning new skills quickly.

Cognitive ability refers to a person’s capacity to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, and learn from experience. It’s especially important in professional, technical, and managerial positions, where employees must process complex information and adapt to new challenges.

How to identify candidates with strong cognitive ability

Cognitive ability is best measured using psychometric tests, which assess key thinking skills such as:

• Verbal reasoning: Can they evaluate and interpret written information effectively?
• Numerical reasoning: Can they analyse data and make logical, numbers-based decisions?
• Inductive reasoning: Can they recognise patterns and solve unfamiliar problems?

These tests work best when used together to provide an overall measure of general cognitive ability—the single best predictor of job performance across all industries.

That’s where an online assessment platform comes in. Whether used as a standalone tool or integrated with your ATS, an online provider makes cognitive testing efficient, scalable, and stress-free.

• Easily select the most relevant tests from an extensive library.
• Mass-invite candidates to complete assessments online.
• Instantly review results to identify top performers.

Conscientiousness is one of the most important personality traits when hiring. It underpins how focused, diligent, dutiful, and thorough someone is in their work. In fact, it’s the most studied personality trait in occupational psychology, with strong evidence supporting its role in predicting job performance, reliability, and work ethic.

Many hiring teams look for qualities like “strong work ethic” and “attention to detail” in their hiring criteria. Both of these constructs are core aspects of conscientiousness. So when looking for qualities of a productive employee, conscientiousness is the trait to focus on.

How to measure conscientiousness in your candidates

The best way to assess conscientiousness is through personality questionnaires, particularly those built on the Big Five Model of Personality. Our personality assessments measure conscientiousness directly, breaking it down into five key sub-traits:

• Diligence: Do they follow the rules, uphold procedures, and fulfil their obligations?
• Discipline: Are they likely to stay productive and maintain focus during necessary day-to-day tasks?
• Methodical: Are they thorough and careful in their work?
• Self-confidence: Do they trust in their own abilities?
• Vigilance: Do they consider the consequences and avoid impulsive decision-making?

Unlike interviews, which often fail to measure personality traits reliably, online personality questionnaires provide a consistent, scalable, and data-driven way to assess conscientiousness. Breaking conscientiousness down into its five sub-traits offers valuable insights into each candidate’s character, helping you understand not just if they are conscientious, but how they demonstrate it in the workplace.

Resilience plays a critical role in both performance and well-being at work, making it an essential quality to look for in new hires. Employees with high resilience can handle stress, recover from setbacks, and stay focused under pressure, preventing burnout and maintaining productivity.

This trait is particularly valuable in high-pressure roles such as management, sales, and customer service, where employees frequently face challenges, rejection, or demanding workloads. Read our article on why resilience is important in the workplace.

What makes someone resilient?

Resilience isn’t a single trait—it’s built from a combination of personality factors, including:

• Emotional stability: Can they stay calm under pressure?
• Low neuroticism: Do they avoid excessive worry and overreaction to stress?
• Positive affect: Are they optimistic and able to maintain motivation?
• Core self-evaluations: Do they have confidence in their own ability to overcome challenges?

How to measure resilience in your candidates

Unlike other hiring criteria, employers have an ethical responsibility to ensure candidates have the resilience needed to succeed in their role. Hiring someone without the ability to manage workplace stress puts them at risk of burnout, disengagement, and stress-related illness—ultimately affecting both their well-being and job performance.

Test Partnership’s personality questionnaires assess a candidate’s resilience as well as their emotional stability. When hiring for a role that requires high resilience, you can easily identify which candidates have the personality traits best suited for the job.

By incorporating personality assessments that measure resilience-related traits, hiring teams can identify candidates who are better equipped to handle pressure, adapt to challenges, and thrive in demanding environments.

Emotional intelligence is a person’s ability to recognise, understand, and manage emotions—both in themselves and in others. It plays a crucial role in workplace success by improving interpersonal relationships, communication, and emotional regulation.

Employees with high emotional intelligence work well with colleagues, customers, and stakeholders, reducing conflict and strengthening teamwork. They also regulate their own emotions, avoiding counterproductive emotional reactions in high-pressure situations.

How to measure emotional intelligence in hiring

Although emotional intelligence has an interpersonal component, it is not effectively measured in interviews. Instead, personality questionnaires provide a more reliable, structured, and scalable way to assess this trait.

At Test Partnership, our personality questionnaire measures emotional intelligence across four key areas:

• Self-awareness: Recognising and understanding one’s own emotions.
• Social awareness: Understanding the emotions and needs of others.
• Self-management: Regulating emotions and maintaining composure under pressure.
• Relationship management: Navigating social situations and building strong professional relationships.

Industriousness refers to a person’s drive, motivation, and tenacity in working towards their goals. While it’s closely linked to conscientiousness, the difference lies in how these traits manifest:

• Conscientiousness is about organisation, reliability, and attention to detail.
• Industriousness is about perseverance, ambition, and a strong work ethic.

This trait is critical for roles with targets, quotas, or measurable performance outcomes, such as sales, management, or high-accountability positions.

How to measure industriousness

Industriousness is best measured using a personality questionnaire, as interviews will inevitably yield inaccurate or even deceptive results. Naturally, a highly skilled interviewee could convince an interviewer that they are driven and motivated, but in reality this quality isn’t measurable using an interview. Instead, a valid and reliable personality questionnaire is required, and will result in the best quality of hire.

When hiring, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the long list of desirable qualities in candidates. However, research has answered this question and consistently shows that the five traits covered in this article—cognitive ability, conscientiousness, resilience, emotional intelligence, and industriousness—are among the most important predictors of job performance.

While different roles may require additional specialised skills or personality traits, focusing on these core qualities will give hiring teams the best chance of selecting high-performing, adaptable, and reliable employees.