interview testing excel - should be fun

[dwbolland]

Hello all (good morning afternoon evening , whatever is applicable)

I think this will be a locely one for us all, I thought i'd throw it out there as i'm sure someone will come up with something better than me.

I have a role that i'm interviewing for. They will be working with me on developing all excel and visual basic in the fiannce department. I am potentially going to be recruiting graduates so no experience.

They all claim good with excel and logical thinking as that's what i've asked for (no surprise there).

I would like to give them (for 5-10 mins before I interview) a quick test to see if they can walk the walk as i'm sure they'll all talk the talk.

I'm open to all ideas from just a complex if statement and asking what the result will be to jsut about anything.

I'm not so bothered if can't use excel or vis basic as can train but only if their mind is logical.

I look forward to some interesting ideas folks.

 

[JazzSP8]

You could try searching the Internet for Logic tests sites such as;

http://allthetests.com/quiz11/quizpu.php?testid=1104985569&katname=

Should be able to help you out

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

I think this type of exercise is good for testing both excel skills, accounting knowledge and trouble shooting ability. Obviously dependent on what your finance department does, but you could for instance simply provide the candidate with an extract from the GL showing merely Period; GL Account and Amount. In a seperate workbook provide a list of all GL Accounts, Description, Category. Then ask the candidate to construct a P&L statement... This could, as one of many ways, be achieved through vlookup to retrieve Description & Category into the GL download table. Then a simple pivot table with Period as column segment, Category, then GL Account, then Description as Row segment and amount in Data. It could be made more sophisticated by changing the layout of the source data to use calculated fields to provide breakdown on the statement of e.g. Gross Margin, EBITDA, Net Contribution etc... The options are endless, but this way you can determine who delivered the most impressive statement within the given deadline. E.g. 15mins.

Regards,
Jon

 

[dwbolland]

thanks for both of these responses, it is in a finance dept but we don't touch any ledgers in our team so more analysis so just want logical ability rather than finance knowledge, like the test above but may scare people too much, i got 8/10! think the springs one is C then A, (25,26&27; then 34,35,36: and 3rd 54,55,56 -- so C and A)

was just going to give a big nested if statement and see if they could work out what the answer would be.

keep 'em coming though folks all good and sure people in future will use the post.