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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Company: AKT LLP CPAs and Business Consultants
Database skills needed are so specific to the database in question so I'm not sure how address that portion of your question. However I will address my opinion to the Excel side to your question.
I consider myself an above average user of Excel, and I too have found this to be a hard skill to assess in interviews. I have had quite a few people tell me that they use Excel often and I then upon hire I find they can barely to more than do simple formatting and a sum function.
I've started to ask what types of "functions" they have used in their previous experiences. Again basic users don't often list more than "sum", however advanced users will start saying "sumif", "vlookups", and "if".
I've also started asking what is their favorite/most useful advanced function. Very few say "pivot tables" or "macros" but I snatch those people up. However if they can't think of any at all that means their excel skills are probably not up to filters etc (which is a must for my department).
And finally I've asked if they've taken any classes and what tips/tricks they learned. Usually this helps me determine if they hated the class (thus will be resistant to learning how to manage some of my advanced worksheets) or if they enjoyed learning new ways of working in the program.
I do think that the best would probably be to give a test of some kind, and even if they don't know how if they can follow the direction to get the desired results then they would work. However we haven't started doing that (yet).
Company: Rexanto
DB/SQL is typically a logic issue, so having sample logic questions (a la google) seems to be reasonable.
For excel, I've asked for (and been asked for) samples...I'm not sure that's the most effective way, and is a time sink. An approach I prefer is to simply present an excel file prior to the interview and ask them to do something with it (that could be solved easily with a {sumif} as above)...and see what they actually do.
An alternative approach is to show a solution to a problem, and ask how they would have solved it...that reveals both their skills and their creativity. Caveat: I've erred on the side of presenting solutions that are well out of the league of my applicants...so have gotten "wow" as a response instead of an actual answer.
Company: Duke Manufacturing
Why don't you create a test for them to perform? Devleop a database and ask them to create a pivot table to extract out certain data. Or have them create a VLookup formula with the same database of information. Someone doesn't have to understand what the data means to create these formulas and such, they have have to know how the data is formatted and they should be able to create the forumla/pivot table to accomplish the task.