

The Benefits of Arbitrary Questions - jack7890
http://jackg.org/screening-with-an-arbitrary-test

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Xcelerate
Well dang it, what was the Excel challenge? Of course we all want to try it :)

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jack7890
Would love your thoughts! I linked to it in the post, but here's a direct
link: <http://smooth-mist-1423.heroku.com/>

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droithomme
Interesting. I use Excel pretty often am and good with it but there's nothing
compelling enough for me to upgrade from my several-year-old license. The
linked .xlsx file isn't readable in the Excel I own.

So you are having a hard time finding qualified people, and you say that using
Excel is not an important part of the job description, but you chose to
arbitrarily filter out everyone who doesn't own a recent version of Excel.

Does this really ensure only the best and the brightest will apply?

(Spoiler: <http://www.zamzar.com/> is an online tool which allows conversion
from xlsx to xls; and the 6 questions are not hard, the hardest part is
dealing with xlsx.)

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jack7890
My fault: When I was actually hiring I used an XLS, but this evening when I
was writing the post I made a trivial change to the file and accidentally
saved it as an XLSX. I just pushed an updated version. Mea Culpa.

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maybird

      I tried to mitigate this by telling people not to
      bother writing a cover letter.
    

Aren't cover letters a dying art anyway?

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christianmann
I got all of them except the last one. Does anyone know how to apply a formula
to a range of cells and get back a range of results? (i.e. map)

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Xcelerate

        =STDEV('Raw Data'!C2:C252/(1*MID('Raw Data'!A2:A252,LEN("Customer "),LEN('Raw Data'!A2:A252)-LEN("Customer ")+1)))
    

It's an array formula which means instead of pressing ENTER, press
CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER

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CoolGuySteve
So what happens if they don't have Excel?

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vampirechicken
OpenOffice.org

