Summary of Merchandise Planner test
This test checks how candidates apply retail math to create seasonal plans or identify risks and opportunities in sales and inventory data. This screening test will help you hire planning staff who will keep your stock and sales in line throughout the season.
Covered skills
- Applying retail math concepts
- Preparing seasonal plans
- Identifying risks and opportunities
Use the Merchandise Planner test to hire
Candidates who score high on the Merchandise Planner test can see through the numbers of a merchandise and act based on them. They also forecast seasonal demand, align stock levels with sales, define prices that protect margin, and revise the company budgets.
Give this retail math assessment to all applicants, so you can judge their planning skills and not just the job titles on their resumes. The test can save your hiring team interview time, because interviewers then spend time only on candidates who have already shown the essential math skills. It can also lower the risk of a mis-hire. And in the long run, hiring people who do well on it is likely to mean fewer errors at work, such as mispriced products, oversized orders, and unreconciled stock reports.
Job roles employers can hire using the Merchandise Planner test
- Merchandise Planner: They plan seasonal sales, maintain stock, and meet margin targets.
- Retail Buyer: They select products and order them within budget.
- Inventory Analyst: They track stock levels and inventory turn.
- Demand Planner: They forecast sales based on historical trends and seasonal patterns.
- Retail Merchandise Controller: They monitor budgets, reconcile inventory, and report on performance against the plan.
- Supply Chain Analyst: They match deliveries to expected demand.
- Category Manager: They manage assortment and pricing for a product category.
About the Merchandise Planner test
Merchandise planner fill the space between what the retailers buy and what they expect to sell. So inaccurate planning can lead to too much stock, which then has to be marked down, or to shortages when customers want to buy. Both ways, this distance can be really costly.
This role-specific skills test looks at merchandise financial planning, which is the process of setting sales, inventory, and margin targets for a period. It also covers the pricing, forecasting, and reconciliation work that has to be done to reach these targets.
Wetest provides this test at an intermediate level, and it only takes 10 minutes so you can easily receive the results within a short time.
Candidates who do well on this test can accurately perform planning calculations and identify deviations in sales and stock from the plan. For your organization, hiring people with these skills can help keep inventory investment in line with customer demand.
For a complete view, you should also see the candidate negotiating with vendors or communicating with stakeholders. To have a well-rounded decision, use this test besides a structured interview to check all of these qualities.
What does the Merchandise Planner test measure?
The questions are designed to measure the financial and analytical skills needed for retail merchandise planning in these retail math functions:
- Sales trends and forecasting: Candidates calculate combined sales trends across several months and predict trends for future periods.
- Inventory turn and stock levels: Candidates compute seasonal inventory turn and stock-to-sales ratios, analyze how receipts affect turn, and define stock levels that reach a target inventory turn.
- Pricing and markup: Candidates determine retail price adjustments when costs change and a target markup percentage must hold, and consequently they have to evaluate markup rates.
- Retail calendar shifts: Candidates account for holiday shifts in the retail calendar, which splits each quarter into months of 4, 5, and 4 weeks.
- Open-To-Buy management: Candidates need to know how to adjust the OTB ladder besides the month-by-month budget for new purchases.
- Inventory flow reconciliation: Candidates reconcile Beginning of Month and End of Month inventory so that opening stock, receipts, sales, and closing stock agree.
Each of these functions is tied to a decision that has a direct cost. A misread of inventory turn can lead to stock that sits until it has to be marked down. And a wrong OTB adjustment can leave your stores short of stock during a strong selling period.
FAQ
The Merchandise Planner test is set at an intermediate level, so it suits candidates who already have working knowledge of retail planning math. For an entry-level role, you can read the results as a guide to training needs rather than as a strict screen.
The interview is a good place to look at the reasoning behind the numbers. If you are hiring for a fast-moving category, for example, you might ask a candidate what they would do when sales beat the plan early in the season. That is something a timed test is not able to capture.
So by using the test and the interview together, you can see if a candidate is able to do the calculations as well as explain the decisions behind them. And this can help to keep your stock in line with demand.
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