How does this internship posting look?

[jillian728]

I am writing an internship job posting for a San Diego position. Aside from what we add about pay/schedule/etc. what do you think of the verbiage?

Excel / VB Programmer in Rancho Bernardo - Start ASAP

Description
Seeking an individual with intermediate level skills in Visual Basic for Excel to complete several small automation projects within the Human Resources department. Most projects involve developing macros to automate reporting processes. Macros will manipulate the source data and create pivot tables, charts, and sometimes kick off Outlook emails.

This is a summer internship position.

Requirements
Intermediate skill in Visual Basic for Excel is required. The ideal candidate will be able to hit the ground running upon hire due to project deadlines and the short duration of a summer internship. Macro development skills are far beyond what can be accomplished using the macro recorder feature.

Strong Excel skills are also critical (i.e.; pivot tables, formulas, etc.).

Candidates should have completed their third year of an Information Systems related degree.

 

[Richard Schollar]

Hi Jillian

Looks OK to me. One question: how are you going to assess potential candidates' abilities?

 

[jillian728]

That is a good question. We may do a two person interview - one for general skills and the other technical (from another dept). I work enough with VB/Excel to conduct the interview if I could find or develop some questions ahead of time to assess ability. That way, we could limit it to a one person interview since it is such a short assignment.

Of course, I'd rather find some questions rather than make them up.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

NOTE:After doing some searches for excel interview questions, I saw a post where someone asked if they could post a job opening on this board and the verdict was no. So, I saw that AFTER I posted this question. However, I really wasn't intending to recruit from the board. I just didn't want to post the internship at a local college and have it sound really stupid!

 

[Richard Schollar]

Given your requirements, I think it's actually pretty difficult to develop a meaningful test (especially if you want it completed on-site say within 60 minutes or whatever). I think it might be better to interview candidates on what they know and their thought processes on how they would go about solving a problem within Excel, and try to make a decision off of that (maybe some of them may have a portfolio of projects/achievements that you can review?). Of course, you or whoever conducts any such interview needs to be fairly savvy as far as Excel goes (and I would exclude pure programmers from this, as in my experience they overlook Excel's functionality and always want to rebuild the wheel if doing any programming within VBA).

I don't know what the US education system is like, but do students get much exposure to Excel? I didn't until I started working (altho I did a science degree and not a computer related one for example). I suspect though that whoever you get in won't be capable of doing what you specify straight off the bat, they'll need to learn on the job to develop what you require. Great opportunity for someone though

 

[jillian728]

I'm thinking of providing some code and asking the candidate to write down what each line is doing. I'm not sure if that is a fair request or not... One candidate who is interviewing today says that she can do multi threading using VBA for Excel. Given that, I'm not sure if this code is "beneath" that level... Maybe it would be better to have her talk through what projects she has completed instead of asking her to document code she didn't write? I still have some time to decide.

For Each Num In Columns("A:A").SpecialCells(xlCellTypeConstants, 3)
With Worksheets("Job Titles").Range("JobTitles")
Set c = .Find(Num.Value, LookIn:=xlValues, Lookat:=xlWhole)
If Not c Is Nothing Then
Num.Offset(, 1).Value = c.Offset(0, 2 ).Value
End If
End With
Next Num

 

[Richard Schollar]

Hmm, multi-threading using VBA for Excel? I could well be wrong here, but I thought multi-threading was limited to Excel2007 and, whilst there is a multi-threaded calculation object in 2007, I haven't seen a great deal on it. Potentially there may be some way to multi-thread in earlier versions via VSTO (Visual Studio Tools For Office) and .NET but I'm not aware of it (that could well be because I just haven't come across this before though).

I think asking to explain what;s going on in your provided code is pretty good - 'cos it's reasonably straightforward (without being ridiculously so) and so you would want whoever to have an understanding of what is going on there. I wouldn't feel at all bad about setting something "beneath" them - it's a job interview and if it is so beneath them, they should be jolly glad they will fly thru this part with flying colours. It's always harder to actually apply knowledge to something useful rather than simply regurgitate the theory too.

Now this is a very personal thing to me (learned thru hard experience) but I'd always be interested in what they'd have to say if you asked them what they'd do if they were asked to do something (in Excel/VBA) that they had no clue about: where would they look to find clues? How would they go about determining a solution? Extra points for anyone who suggests asking on MrExcel, naturally

Please keep me informed as to what approach you take - it's very interesting!

Richard

 

[dcardno]

I like the idea of providing some sample code and asking what it is doing (and perhaps a print out of the relevant page - don't give it to them live, or they'll just run it!). I would also ask what projects they have done in Excel using VBA - just in general terms; obviously they won't have the details right at hand. While they are describing it, listen (or probe) for what objects they utilized, what they did with them, whether the code was branchy or just the sort of stuff you could get out of the macro-recorder. The other thing to listen for is how comfortable or familiar they seem to be with the Excel object model; the better they know that, the more likely they are to be productive - as noted above, the pure programmers ignore the very fast routines built into Excel, while the good Excel / VBA users try to take advantage of them - but to do that, you have to know they are there. I would also start either with a typical problem you would want them to work on, or if they are all huge projects, with a small but non-trivial problem and ask them to describe how they would approach it. You can separate the programmers from the Excel users by -say- asking about a sorting algorithm; the programmer wants to implement his own; the Excel user will ask if he is allowed to define the range and then let Excel do the work (and that's almost always the right answer). I would think that reasonable tasks for these exercises might be: to delete unwanted rows from a range based on some criteria; to merge two lists of data, eliminating duplicates (bonus question - what do you consider to be a duplicate - all fields identical, or only some of them - and if the latter, how do you determine which one to keep); identifying all unique elements in a list; rearranging data by copying and pasting various ranges, either destructively or non destructively; warning a user if a certain condition ("out of balance") exists, either on a ongoing basis or before they save their work, etc. The more you can make the range of problems look like the sort of skills you expect them to bring to the job, the better for both of you.

 

[jillian728]

Thanks for all of the suggestions and interest!

We ended up interviewing 2 candidates. Both have worked projects more complex that what we will throw at them. So, we ended up not providing the code test. I guess I felt kind of weird about providing a test although I really don't think there would have been anything wrong with doing so...

In the end, I felt that I knew just enough about VBA to guage their ability to complete our projects. Here are the questions we asked during the interview:

*What were your favorite courses in school?
*Did you work while you were in school? How many hours?
*How did you learn VBA for Excel and how long have you been using it?
*What do you do when you can’t figure something out on your own?
*What is your proudest accomplishment with VBA for Excel?
*What are some of the Excel advanced features you have mastered?
*Please walk us through one of your VBA/Excel projects at a high level from conception, requirements, to implementation.
*Who maintains the programs you wrote at XXX?
What is their skill level?
Did they ever call you for help after you left?
What type of documentation did you provide?

We made an offer to one candidate who accepted and should start within 2 weeks.