Excel skills test for interviews

Why test Excel skills before you hire?

For finance, operations, admin and analyst roles, spreadsheet skills decide how quickly a new starter becomes useful. Asking someone to rate their own Excel level tells you very little. A short test with practical questions tells you who can write a lookup, fix a broken formula or summarise a data set without help.

What this template covers

• Lookups: VLOOKUP, and when XLOOKUP is the better choice.
• References: relative and absolute references, and why $A$1 matters when you copy a formula.
• Conditional functions: COUNTIF, SUMIF and IFERROR.
• Analysis: PivotTables and tables for summarising data.
• Efficiency: the shortcuts people who use Excel every day rely on.

How to run it well

Match the test to the job. An admin role needs references, sorting and COUNTIF. A finance analyst role should add nested IFs, INDEX/MATCH and pivot questions. Use the difficulty tags in your bank to build both versions from the same questions. Ten to fifteen questions in about 15 minutes is a fair screen. Most hiring teams set the pass mark between 60% and 75%.

Send the link before the interview, not during it. People can take it from home on any device and you get the score straight away. In the interview you can ask about the questions they got wrong, which tells you more than another round of "talk me through your experience".

Who this test is for

Use it for administrators, bookkeepers, finance and operations analysts, sales coordinators and anyone whose job description says "strong Excel". Training providers also use it as a pre-course check, so people are placed in the right class instead of sitting through basics they already know or struggling in an advanced group.

Make it yours

Edit any question to match your own workbook conventions, add a Google Sheets version, or use the AI generator to draft questions about Power Query or charts. Every attempt is timed and scored on the server, and the results page shows which formulas candidates struggle with most. That can also tell you what to train new starters on.