How to assess Excel and data management skills in a job interview
| Jan 25, 2012
Excel and data management (including working with large volumes of data and databases) skills are often assumed upon finance and accounting professionals. However, some positions are better served by those who are exceptionally strong in this area. How does a hiring manager assess (or maybe test) Excel and data management skills in an interview?
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Answers
Company: TSI-Transforming Solutions, Inc
I wish more hiring managers would do this (and also continue to encourage their staff to become more proficiency, including how to use ALL the features in the ERP system). You can address this a few ways:
1. Bring your IT colleague into the interview OR engage an Excel guru;let him/her ask questions and provide some feedback to you afterwards
2. Have a PC/laptop with sample data in the interview room and ask the recruit to perform some tests-engage an Excel guru to help frame some questions/tests.
3. Ahead of the interview, ask them to prepare some examples of their work in this area and bring it along on a flash drive. But, make sure the data is not confidential to their previous employer.
4. Remember to look at both experience and technique-someone may be a great data manipulator, but they have poor discpline/best practices when it comes to being entrusted with raw data and being relied upon to produce accurate information (e.g. version control, risky short cuts, etc).
5. Review your plans with HR/legal for any concerns.
Company: ClearView
I have a problem that you may be able to help. I want to do this, and how would you do it?
Listen carefully and if you can have him or her do it on the computer. You can also let the candidate draw on paper or use the white board.
Company:
Bob,
As an Excel MVP, I agree with the basic direction that Len suggests. Here are some thoughts about the points he made...
1. The IT department seldom knows much about Excel. As an institution, they typically dislike it. I would rely on them more for their opinions about a candidate's knowledge about your data management issues, and how Excel interfaces with the data. But I would rely on your own staff to evaluate Excel skills that involve using the data when it's actually in Excel.
2. A guru could suggest a use case that has nothing to do with your company's needs. Instead, I would try to get an internal guru to ask Excel questions that directly address your company's needs and technology.
3. Virtually every example of a candidate's work will represent a report or analysis that would need to be updated periodically. Really useful Excel people will be able to explain how their Excel examples were updated quickly and easily when needed.
(Warning: Most Excel users probably won't have a good solution for the update problem. And many who do will be able to express it only in terms of 3rd-party software that your company doesn't own. But if she starts to ask your guru questions in search of a potential solution, then you've got a candidate with the right attitude.)
4. There is wide disagreement about what best practice means in the Excel arena. I'd be more interested in finding a person who could discuss the issues intelligently than in finding someone with a rigid methodology that the IT department agrees with. In fact, using IT standards for Excel work can impose unacceptable delays in getting real work done.
Also...
...I would be very careful of people who are VBA enthusiasts. It's true that one can create a lot of great solutions with VBA. But I've seen many problems where an employee created poorly documented VBA systems, and then left the company. Then the company had to hire me or someone like me to make sense of it all.
If they want to show you something they did with VBA, ask them to show you their code. Look for comments in the code. (Comments typically have a green font.) If they don't write understandable comments their code, you don't want them to write VBA for your company.
(Many people say they don't comment code they write for themselves. But within a few months after a programmer writes code, he will have forgotten what he did and why. So comments ALWAYS are important.)
...Finally, here are three questions that could help you to find someone who knows how to work with data in Excel:
a) What are the relative merits of using VLOOKUP vs INDEX-MATCH? When would you use one technique rather than the other? (This is sort of a trick question. If the candidate knows about INDEX-MATCH, she'll have little good to say about VLOOKUP.)
b) What are the relative merits of using SUMIF vs array formulas vs SUMPRODUCT? When would you use one technique rather than the other? (If your candidate doesn't also mention the SUMIFS function, he's not expert in working with data in Excel 2007 or 2010. If he can discuss array formulas, he's at least an intermediate user. If he can discuss SUMPRODUCT with confidence, he knows quite a lot about working with lists of data in Excel.)
c) What spreadsheet functions would you use to pull data from a PivotTable? (Primarily, you're looking for her to mention the GETPIVOTDATA function. But it wouldn't hurt if she also mentions INDEX-MATCH.)
Company: SBA * Consulting, LTD
While Charley's questions were extremely good (I learned something), what are you hiring the person to do?
Is this person's sole duty to create masterful Excel spreadsheets or are the spreadsheets adjunctive to their job.
That would determine the depth of query.
Company: LogLogic
Thanks all for the very helpful commentary!
Company: rainier investment management inc
I look for someone to mention checksum totals so they can quickly identify errors.
Company: Allscripts
In addition to the great suggestions above, you always have the option of open ended questions if real examples are not available to testing. Example:
Give me an example of when you created a report from scratch for a [sales/operation/finance] executive. What was the problem to solve and what techniques did you use to prepare the report?
You can follow up with "How was the report received?" and "If you had it to do over again, what would you have done differently?"
Company: Consultant
Great suggestions above....however, you need to determine the depth of knowledge that is relevant to the job. Excel is not rocket science - it can be learnt. The key is to determine the adaptability of the candidate.
If I were interviewing, I will create some spreadsheets with raw data that the candidate will see in his "new" job and ask questions as to how the candidate will extract a report from the data in a particular prescribed format. Maybe creating some graphs - if the job requires it, etc.
Just by observing the candidate, you can see how much of excel he knows (i.e. does the person use the key board short-cuts OR goes through the menu all the time, etc.)