Hiring a reports analyst

Hello,

I’m in the process of hiring a reports analyst for a growing WFP department. I have some very promising CV's but feel we need to test the technical abilities of the applicants as part of the recruitment process. However the capabilities of me and my current team is below what we are looking to hire so I worry that any tests we come up with will be far too easy and not actually give us any idea of who's the most capable.

Are there generic tests/websites that have advanced excel and reporting tests available? If not has anyone any advice on how I should proceed. In the UK I would have used certain specialist agencies but I am now based abroad (Malta) and there is no scope for using foreign agencies (and these kind of positions just do not exist in Maltese agencies)

Thanks in advance for any feedback

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the response but perhaps I should have been clearer, it’s not a WFP type position I am looking to fill-I already have capable people doing these kinds of roles. It’s a role that is responsible for the reports we produce, so the tracking of performance and productivity, KPI’s etc.

We cover about 15 different languages and markets and each one has a set of daily reports, which at the moment are all collated and formatted manually on excel-this takes hours and hours a day so I want someone experienced thsat can come in and help us refine our reporting process’s and cut out a lot of the manual admin side of it. The role I’m looking to fill is also referred to as an MI analyst.

But like I said thanks for the response anyway...if you have any further feedback please let me know

Cheers

Luke

Hmmm that sounds like a good conundrum.

If you are looking to hire someone with skills you won't recognise, you either need to test what they are capable of (and this will be tricky, since you might not recognise the best solution) or perhaps see how quickly they can solve a series of medium difficulty problem.

As an example if there is a report that you currently do, that takes an hour, look for someone who can do it in 10 minutes. This will allow you to establish their skills to a point. Normally if someone has high skills, they will be fast using the more basic of those skills.

Alternatively if you want to test their creative skills a little more, you could take perhaps 4 existing reports and consolidate them into a single screen/page report, highlighting info which they feel is important. This is the approach I personally would take, as there is no point having someone who can run reports in no time, and have a high skill set, if they lack the analysis skills to identify the points of interest.

Hi Luke,

I think that you would do better writing a requirements document, and have put that out to tender with some web developer organizations. From the complexity that you describe you need a fairly robust database and with what sounds like loads of clients in different places access to the data might be much easier to accomplish via web based solution. This solution may be a lot less expensive than hiring an employee whom you may find difficult to manage as you don't have the technical experience to get the best out of him or her. You should look for some one with php and MySQL development experience. If you get stuck I may be able to recommend some people to you.