Performance Demonstration for applicants

Faith Murray

Hello! I know that many people include a demonstration of skills as part of a new-hire interview process. Can any of you share what kinds of tasks you would select for this kind of screening, assuming that we would not expect applicants to have knowledge of RE, but would like them to be fluent in Office and be an adaptable learner who can quickly learn/intuit new database software?


I have a couple ideas, but would appreciate hearing from fellow admins. Thanks in advance!


Faith

Carrie Aranda

I have found that giving the applicant a scenario and then asking how they would accomplish it is better than a skills test.  For instance, someone may know how to do a mail merge but not understand when to use them.  My three favorite scenarios are sending thank you letters/acknowledgements, something around donor/gift research (a donor calls in asking about...) and you have a large stack of items that need to be entered into the database.  I have them explain their steps to complete the task, their logic behind why they are doing it that way and how they would handle being interrupted.  I can usually gauge their familiarity with Office tools as well as any type of database by how they step through the problem.  Another favorite question of mine is to ask "What are your 3 favorite or most used things in Excel, Word, Outlook, etc.?"  A power Excel user will  usually have a favorite formula, trick, etc.  Having someone actually perform a task never seemed to work out as well as giving them scenarios.  But, I am usually more interested in how someone approaches the problem more than their software skills.  I once had someone with great software skills but had no clue how to use them.

Jenna Anderson 2

This is a great question, here's some tests that I've had to perform in Interviews in the past:


1. Sort an event attendee list in Excel by different criteria

2. Look at a spreadsheet of data and identify errors that need to be corrected (ex: CA is ca, Inconsistencies in abbreviations: Drive vs. Dr; name improperly populated)

3. Run a mail merge for Letters/Envelopes from Excel spreadsheet of event attendees

4. Print a spreadsheet with titles, watermark, footers, headers, etc. (aka all the bells and whistles)

5. In Outlook I was asked to schedule a meeting for several attendees (Had to know to use Scheduling Assistant to check schedules for available time)

6. Composed a thank-you email for a group of donors after a tour and send it to all of them without the other recipients seeing who else received the email.


There were also some specific tasks I've been asked to do in RE (Query, Export) and in other software that the organization used, like GreaterGiving, but I know those really depend on the requirements for that position. 

Faith Murray

Carrie and Jenna, thank you both for your very helpful answers. Much appreciated!