The Salesforce Developer interview process (from 10+ interviews)

Here’s a sample of how interview processes for Salesforce developer positions that I’ve seen typically go:

Phone screen
Hiring manager screen
Technical round
Design round
Behavioral/cultural round
Take-home interview (sometimes)

Recruiter phone screen

Basically, do you have a pulse? Are you authorized to work in the United States?

They’re going to ask about your salary requirements.

You’ll say something like:

You: “Thanks for the question. I haven’t thought too much about compensation at the moment, do you mind sharing the range they’ve provided you?”

R: “It depends on experience”

You: “Great, so what are the ranges for different years of experience?”

R: “How many years of experience do you have?”

You: “The number of years at the top salary band :)”

Then, they’ll move you to the hiring manager screen.

Hiring manager screen

The hiring manager will spend 5 minutes asking about your experience and motivations for applying.

Then, they’ll ask questions like:

What’s the most fun project you’ve worked on? What kind of teams have you worked with? How do you handle noisy stakeholders?

Depending on how technical they are, it’ll also serve as a mini-technical interview. You might get a small programming question or design question.

Technical Interview

If the hiring manager moves you to the next round, it’ll be a technical interview panel with one or two developers or admins.

There’s a spectrum of technical interviewers. One side is the person who treats the interview as a conversation. The other side is the interrogator, who wants to find everything you don’t know.

Size up the type of your interviewer at the beginning. A word of advice: if you get an interrogator, don’t be afraid to fight fire with fire. The interrogator will respect you for it.

Example

Interviewer: “Suppose we want to replicate Salesforce and build an entirely new CRM. How would you think about the architecture at scale?”

You: “Great question - why do you ask? Is this something you face on the daily here at your company, or is that a question to try and rattle me? (smirk)”

Design Interview

An example question: let’s say you work at a company where many departments use the Account object for their workflows. As we all know, Account ownership is a huge deal in the Salesforce world. There’s lots of automation that hinges from Account ownership changes.

Suppose that when an account owner changes, we change several child objects’ owners. But, the child object also has automation that runs.

None of this automation is written in a scalable way. We haven’t even implemented a trigger framework and we haven’t implemented any sort of service layer architecture for our existing automations.

We don’t have time to refactor the code, but there is a new mission critical automation process that we need to build on the Account.

What do you do?

You’ll get open-ended questions like this for about an hour. The goal is to communicate to the interviewer your thought process.

Non-Technical Interview

This can show up in different ways.

Someone in an operations function will typically interview you and they want to know how you do things like: prioritize work, handle conflicting requirements, delegate work to others, deliver under pressure, how you push back, and other soft skills.

Despite all the anti-bias training, at the end of the day, they’re implicitly seeing if they can see themselves working well with you.

Take-home assignment

Thought this one was worth mentioning. The take-home assignment will usually fall between the hiring manager screen and technical or design interview. It will almost always be a question around a problem they are facing or a problem they have already solved. Theywant to see how you would tackle the problem if this came across your hands.

This is advantageous for the company because they’ve had time to encounter edge cases, weigh design approaches, and iterate over their solution.

You might propose a solution that is nothing like theirs, but would do better than theirs.

Pre-offer, offer

The recruiter will call you and tease you about a potential offer, but they want you to give a salary you’re comfortable with first. Just tell them you’re excited about the chance of working with them and you’ll look at the offer they send over.

Offer negotiations

Expect to negotiate with companies. There are some companies that say “their first offer is their best offer.” I can see this being the case with entry-level Salesforce positions, but with more experienced professionals, if companies play that game, it’s theirs to lose.

Candidates can expect 1-3 rounds of negotiations that could take anywhere from a day to weeks.

It’s up to you to accept/reject the offer.