• How to Hire an Excel Expert

Most hiring managers give their candidates an excel skills test before recruiting or hiring them. This is especially important if you are looking to hire a financial analyst or fill a post in the accounts office. Working with excel for these positions is an everyday task.Excel makes working with numbers faster, easier, and more accurate which is why every candidate should be well versed with it. As a hiring manager, there are many places you could find professionals to hire for this post. But before you take this leap, here are some factors to consider;

Factors to Consider When Hiring Excel Professionals

Knowledge

Most people, even those that are not professionals in this field can easily run multiple basic functions in excel files. But if you are looking to add a professional to your team, you are looking for someone with more advanced knowledge of the advanced excel functions. So a person who has already completed Microsoft Excel traianing course will be the your best option.

There could only be multiple functions in excel including combining spreadsheet files, and all of these are meant to make work easier and run smoothly. You want to make sure that your candidates not only are knowledgeable of these functions but can also seamlessly apply them in their daily duties. 

Experience

Even if all job recruiters ask about experience, there are definitely more things most people tend to look at over experience. One could have all the papers and certifications in the world but if they don’t have experience, it could be as good as not having any qualifications at all.

Don’t just look at papers as qualifications. Ask about their experience; how long they have been working, where they have been working before, their ability to solve some hard excel tasks, and more. Remember if you are looking for an expert, then experience is the key; Expertise comes with experience and time. 

Skills

You are not just looking for someone to fill your excel sheets. You are looking for someone who will add more value to your business. Hard skills are easy to define and measurable. These are applications candidates have studied in school. Soft skills are quite the opposite.However, they are just as important as hard skills. They are often looked at as personal traits. This may be hard to measure but they are just as crucial in any working space. They include being a team player, communication skills, work ethics, and such.

Important Questions to Ask on an Excel Interview

There are multiple tests you can use to test your candidates. This includes both basic and advanced skills tests. And it also depends on who you are testing. For example, it could be administrative job roles or entry levels, the senior level or excel specialists, and such.Besides the tests, there are also important questions that you should accompany them with, to determine who to choose. Here are some of these questions;

Years of Experience

This comes naturally and is like a written rule of thumb. It is hard to come out of an interview meeting without the questions having been brought up; how many years of experience do you have in this position? Or how long have you been in the industry?

It comes and goes in different variations but it simply means the same thing; years of experience. There is a good reason for that. As a hiring manager, you already know that expertise and professionalism come with experience. And if that is what you are looking for then the question is inevitable. 

Explain how to Approach Hard Excel Tasks

Every professional, especially in the accounting offices has definitely experienced those moments when a task seemed undoable. Working with excel at one point feels the same, especially with all the advanced functions in the system. And recruiters are well aware of this. You can ask about their experience and the hardest excel tasks they have had to complete in the past. Ask how they tackle such tasks. After all, you are also looking for a resilient problem solver. Not someone who will just throw in the towel and cause incompetence in the middle of a workflow. Remember being an excel specialist isn’t just knowing a bunch of excel functions. It is about building excel tools even from scratch, solving hard tasks, and helping in your business’s development.