We're looking to hire a business intelligence developer - knowledgeable in SSAS, SSRS, data warehousing, etc. My job in the interview process will be specifically to vet the candidate on SQL Reporting Services.
Assuming a 60 minute interview, what sort of questions or challenges might be effective in determining a developer's level of knowledge in Report Builder? What about for 30 or 45 minutes?
I might try to stub out a sample report with a dataset pre-generated, maybe a header and footer, but no primary report content; and maybe a mock-up of how a finished report ought to look with similar dataset: let the candidate work out how to get the dataset to roll up to detail, group, and total rows and see if they are fundamentally familiar with the process.
That will at least weed out anybody who's straight-up lying about having past experience with the toolset.
I don't see a good way to pose a challenging "toy" question that actually tests deep knowledge, but is also of suitable scope for a brief interview.
But I'd love to know if anybody out there has some more creative/intensive/clever ways to gather information about a BI developer's abilities.
One possible approach might be to ask the candidates how they would tackle a requirement to list the full details of a set of data in the main body of the report, then have a grouped summary at the end of the report - for example, a list of transactions followed by a breakdown of transaction values by product category at the end of the report.
The approach I would use in this instance would be to use the same dataset in two different report objects - for example, one table at detail level followed by another table at group level.
This approach would not necessarily be obvious to someone with experience in banded report designers, such as Crystal Reports or Jaspersoft iReport, or with Query tools such as TOAD or SQL.
On the other hand, it could also catch out experienced SSRS developers who have never needed to tackle this scenario.