How To Test A Candidate’s Excel Skills

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For job seekers, it’s difficult to accurately represent their Excel skills on a resume. As a hiring manager, though, it’s important that you know what a potential employee’s Excel skills actually are. Otherwise, you could be setting yourself and your new hire up for failure.

In this article, we’ll explain why and how you should test a candidate’s Excel skills. We’ll also show you what some of the common skills to test for are and give you tips on how to complete this process effectively and efficiently.

Key Takeaways:

• There are three Excel skill levels: basic, intermediate, and advanced.

• Assess candidates on the skills they’ll need for your particular position, not on all possible Excel skills.

• Decide which skills you’re willing to train candidates on and which ones you aren’t before you administer the assessment.

Why You Should Test a Candidate’s Excel Skills

You should test a candidate’s Excel skills to find out what they’re really capable of in this area. Microsoft Excel has become a mainstay of business, so employees in almost every industry need to be familiar with it in one way or another.

Unfortunately, this is one skill set that is difficult for them to represent accurately on their resumes and job applications. In order for your potential employees to show you what they’re really capable of, you need to administer an Excel skills assessment either as a part of their application or as a part of their interview.

How to Test a Candidate’s Excel Skills

1. Determine the Excel skills the candidate needs to have. This includes the type and level of skills, as well as which ones fall into the “must-have” or “would be nice” categories. You can train employees in Excel, so you have to decide which skills employees must have on their first day and which ones you’re willing to train them in.

   Discuss this with other hiring managers and even the employees who are going to be working closely with this new hire. They might have insight into which skills are really necessary and which aren’t.

2. Send them a customized skills test. This skills test should be specific to the Excel skills you decided to test for in step one. You can throw in a few additional skills to see what a candidate is capable of, but the majority of the test should be focused on the key skills you identified.

   There are a few ways you can make a test: create your own or use an online service.

   If you just need to test a few basic or very specific Excel skills, you could make your own test by sending the candidate a spreadsheet and data that needs fixing, organizing, analyzing, etc.

   For example, for an extremely basic assessment, you could send a spreadsheet with a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers and then ask the candidate to arrange them in alphabetical order and color-coded by area code.

   This may sound simple, but their ability to do multiple of these correctly and within a time limit can tell you a lot about their comfort level with Excel.

   If you want to test for more advanced or a wider variety of skills, you might want to consider administering an online test. There are plenty of companies that have Excel tests available or will make a customized one for you – just give it a quick Google.

3. Assess the test. Compare their test to the answer key or look at it to see how well they achieved the objective you gave them. Remember that there is often more than one way to do something in Excel, so even if you wouldn’t have chosen to complete the task in the same way they did, it doesn’t automatically mean it’s wrong.

Tips for Testing Candidates’ Excel Skills

• Give them time constraints. Whether you’re timing the actual test or not, you should give test-takers a due date for completing the assessment. This way, you can disqualify applicants if they take too long to get back to you. Otherwise, you could be waiting to get tests back for who knows how long.

  If you choose to send candidates a homemade test, you’ll need to schedule a time to send them the test and give them a time limit for completing it and sending it back to you.

• Let candidates know how they did. If practical and appropriate, let the candidate know how they did on their assessment. You can do this in their interview or by emailing or calling them.

  This is especially important for candidates who didn’t get the job so they know what to work on for the future.

• Remember to keep it position-specific. An administrative assistant typically won’t need the same Excel skills that a data manager will, so don’t give the same Excel skills assessment to both of them. Taking the time to customize it to the position will make the test much more effective and helpful.

Roles That Require Excel Skills

There are roles in every industry that require Excel skills. These include:

• Administrative assistant

• Accountant

• Auditor

• Cost estimator

• Data manager

• Data analyst

• Business analyst

• Marketer

• Market research analyst

• Financial analyst

• Office clerk

• Operations manager

• Operations research analyst

• Statistician

• Construction manager

• Sales manager

• Quality analyst

• HR representative

• Insurance broker

• Engineer

What Excel Skills Should You Test For

There are three levels of Excel skills you can test for: basic, intermediate, and advanced. The skill level you need to test for will depend on the role and what the employee needs to be able to do in Excel on a regular basis.

You may not need to test for every skill in a category if they aren’t all pertinent to your position, but knowing which skills fall into which level category can be helpful for figuring out what to test for.

1. Basic

   Basic Excel skills generally include:

   • Data management/organization

   • Excel formulas

   • Excel functions

   • Charts and graphs

2. Intermediate

   Intermediate Excel skills usually include basic Excel skills, plus:

   • Charts, graphs, and bars

   • Excel functions such as VLOOKUP, COUTIF, and SUMIF

   • Pivot tables

   • Data management and filtration

   • Creating macros

   • Keyboard shortcuts

3. Advanced

   Advanced Excel skills typically include basic and intermediate Excel skills, as well as:

   • Advanced conditional formatting rules

   • Data manipulation and validation

   • Visual Basic for Applications (VBA)

   • Advanced functions and formulas

   • Power Query

   • Statistical modeling

   • Forecasting and prediction

   • Model historic stock trends

Testing Excel Skills FAQ

1. What five essential Excel skills do employers look for?

   Five essential Excel skills employers look for include:

   • Data management/organization

   • Excel functions

   • Excel formulas

   • Charts and graphs

   • Pivot tables

   Not every employer will need their employees to have all five of these Excel skills, but these are some of the most common skills that many look for.

2. What are the two most commonly used functions in Excel?

   Two of the most commonly used functions in Excel are SUM and AVERAGE. SUM is widely recognized as the most commonly used Excel function, as it automatically adds up selected values and gives you the sum – a very handy feature.

   AVERAGE is also widely used, and it, as the name suggests, automatically averages values.

   Other commonly used functions are COUNT, which counts the number of cells in a selected range that contain numbers, and MAX and MIN, which find the largest and smallest numbers in a range, respectively.

3. What are three common uses for Excel?

   Three common uses for Excel are data entry, data analysis, and calculation. Excel’s spreadsheet layout makes it easy to store data, and its many tools for organizing and examining the information you input make it a valuable tool for data analysis.

   It also has the ability to present data in easy-to-read formats such as colorful and organized spreadsheets, charts, and graphs.

   In addition, Excel’s ability to create and use formulas to perform calculations also makes it a useful tool, especially where accounting, engineering, and statistics are involved.

Final Thoughts

Microsoft Excel is used in almost every office. Because of this, most employers want their job candidates to have Excel skills. The exact level and type of Excel skills required will vary based on the position and its responsibilities, but most employees will need to have at least a working knowledge of the program.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult for job applicants to accurately represent their Excel skills on a resume – even if they aren’t trying to be dishonest. So, to get an idea of what candidates are capable of, many hiring managers administer customized Excel skills tests.

These tests allow employees to demonstrate their skills and allow you, as the hiring manager, to see what exactly they meant when they put “Intermediate Excel Skills” on their resume. From there, you can decide if this person has what it takes, needs just a little more training, or won’t be a good fit at all.

References

1. Columbia Engineering – 10 Advanced Excel Skills You Need to Succeed Today

Author

Caitlin Mazur

Caitlin Mazur is a freelance writer at Zippia where she has written 140+ articles that have reached over 1 mil viewers as of June 2023. Caitlin is passionate about helping Zippia’s readers land the jobs of their dreams by offering content that discusses job-seeking advice based on experience and extensive research.