Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft that is used by many businesses to automate their daily processes such as maintaining employee data, financial data, debit sheets, data analysis, and much more. This super easy to use software, therefore, is widely used in departments from human resources to sales, marketing, data analytics departments, and so on. The level of expertise may vary from basic to advance.
As a recruiter, depending on your job requirements you need to create an advanced excel skills checklist to assess the candidates. But do you have any idea of what skills to look for? What excel skills are employers looking for?
Here’s your quick guide to hiring excel experts for different job roles! Let’s discuss each case one by one from advanced to basic excel skills checklist:
Case 1: For Entry Level / Administrative Job Roles
Many administrative roles or entry-level job profiles demand basic level MS Excel expertise to perform certain tasks that are time consuming and repetitive.
Below is the list of Microsoft Excel skills that you need to look for while hiring the entry-level hires:
- SUMIF/SUMIFS
- COUNTIF / COUNTIFS
- Data Filters
- Data Sorting
- Pivot Tables
- Cell Formatting
- Data validation
- Excel shortcut keys
- Workbook
- Managing Page Layout
- Charts & its Analysis
To assess all these above skills, you need to ask candidates the application based questions that can actually check their fundamental knowledge of Excel. It will give you a fair idea of how they are going to solve the real-life problems in minutes. Still, the question remains unanswered, “How to check Excel Skills of candidates effectively? “ What if we say that we have a perfect solution to your query? Yes, we have! iMocha (online assessment platform) is ready to help you with its ready to use basic excel test for interview. The test contains questions that are created by our subject matter experts (SMEs). If you want to add your own questions, you can even create your own test specific to your job role. Our support team will be more than happy to create the test if you ask for. Our skill assessment test is created by global subject matter experts with all the parameters in place. This gives you a fair understanding of the candidate's excel knowledge.
You can also use this skill test to hire:
- PA
- Secretary
- Admin Assistant
- Office Administrator
- Any Entry level job roles (finance, accounting, data entry, business development, etc.)
Case 2: For Senior Level / Excel Specialists / Excel Experts
Though it is said that excel is only a data maintaining tool, it is used to crunch, analyze and get fruitful results for complex queries using advanced functions, formulas, and VBA programming. The job roles that require such data research, data analysis, programming or project management responsibilities, demands the advanced level of Excel expertise.
Below is the checklist for advanced Excel skills:
- Excel Worksheets
- Advanced Charting
- Functions
- Advanced Formulae
- Tool Bars
- VLOOKUP
- INDEX + MATCH
- Conditional Formatting
- PIVOT Tables & PIVOT Reporting
- VBA & Macros
- Data Tables, Simulations & solver
iMocha’s recruitment assessment tool allows you to test advanced Excel skills of candidates with its pre-built Advanced Excel online test. The instantly generated test reports will give you insights on how well the candidate has performed in a test, what are his strengths, where he has a room for improvements & much more. We ensure that you and your candidates will be getting the best experience with iMocha.
You can also use this Microsoft Excel proficiency test to hire:
- Accountant
- Bookkeeper
- Office Manager
- VBA Projects Developer
- Project Manager
iMocha’s recruitment excel skills assessment tools assessment tool allows you to test the advanced Excel skills of candidates with its pre-built Advanced Excel online test. The instantly generated test reports will give you insights on how well the candidate has performed in the test, what are his strengths, where he has room for improvements & much more. We ensure that you and your candidates will be getting the best experience with iMocha.
Case 3: Business Analyst Excel Skills
Business Analyst is a mediator or communicator between the IT department of your organization and business stakeholders. The Business analyst is a part of almost all those responsibilities that includes defining the strategy, creating enterprise architecture, defining requirements or goals of the project, identifying the new opportunities and thereby improving their business. In order to achieve all these KPIs, a Business analyst must have hands-on basic to advance excel functions, their functionalities.
Below are the Excel skills that Business Analyst must master:
- VLOOKUP
- Pivot Tables
- SUMIFS, COUNTIFS
- SUMPRODUCT
- IFERROR
- MATCH
- Charts & Chart Analysis
- MACROS
- INDIRECT
- Merge Data
- IF Function
- Conditional formatting
- Histograms
- Regression
- Data Validation
- Data Analysis
Visit Business analyst excel test designed by global subject matter experts of iMocha (skills assessment software) to assess Excel as well as business analyst skills of candidates.Our online assessment software is super easy to use. In case, the candidate is not comfortable with a skill test in English, you can use our multilingual support platform to create a test in a language he/she is comfortable with.
Case 4: Excel Skills For Data Analyst
Data analysts always play with the data in order to fetch the highly important information related to the business that can be used to make better and right business decisions. Their main role is to evaluate the business risk, get the data, and finding out what’s harmful to your business.
Let’s take a look at the essential excel skills for a data analyst that you must check:
- Functions for data cleaning and manipulation: Concatenation, LEN, Find & Replace, Filter & Sort, Conditional Formatting, Index Match, Remove Duplicates, Logic Functions, IfError, Short-Cut
- Macros
- Pivot Tables
- Cross Reference Table
- LOOKUP Functions
- Flat data tables
- Data filters
- Advanced Charts
- Data Interpretation
- Graphics Data
- Number Series
- Worksheet
- Operators
We have created Data Analyst Excel Test to help recruiting teams and hiring managers to assess the above-mentioned skills of data analysts effectively and efficiently. As stated earlier, you can create your own test and can even add Audio/Video questions, descriptive questions along with MCQs and MAQs.
You can visit our Microsoft Excel Pre-employment Test category page to explore our Excel skill test library.
Case 5: Auditor Excel Skills
An Auditor is responsible for planning & performing audits, examining the financial records. He ensures that the records are bug-free and the timely payment of taxes. For this reason, they need to analyze the financial reports, create documentation of audit tests, audit work papers, etc.
Here are the Excel skills for Auditors you need to look for:
- Internal Audit of Inventories
- Internal Auditing
- Balance Sheet Audit
- Worksheet
- Charts
- Operators
- Functions
- Conditional formatting
- Pivot Tables
- Macros
- VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP
iMocha’s Auditor Excel Test evaluates the skills of candidates on how effectively they can use this tool while working on Audit information.
You can also use the test to hire:
- Audit Clerk
- Internal Auditor
- Auditor Associate
For your convenience, we have also created Microsoft Excel 2013 Test and Microsoft Excel 2016 Test that contains basic to advanced level questions on MS Excel.
We hope this guide gives you a clear idea of what to look for while hiring Excel Experts who meet your job criteria. Online assessment tools provide an insight into the candidate's abilities and are a good way of sourcing the right candidates.
You can also check our rich library of pre-employment assessment tests to explore the various tests that we have.
