Landing your First Salesforce Job

by Allen Issac

Part 1 - Getting Certified

Hello Everyone,

Firstly, many congratulations for embarking your Salesforce Journey. You have definitely made the right choice. There were a lot of questions raised when I shared with my friends that I had started learning Salesforce a year back. Mainly from my friends who weren’t working in IT! At the time, I was working as a ICT Field Engineer – a year later and I had made my switch to a Salesforce Consultant.

At the beginning of my Salesforce journey, I invested 3 - 4 months to understanding basic Salesforce concepts and gaining some badges. While going through the Trailhead community I found Amber’s profile and simply sent her an invite to connect on LinkedIn. I found out about Salesforce Training from her page and saw that there were so many students from different backgrounds getting their first Salesforce jobs. I applied for the 0-100 Salesforce Admin Course called Summer of Salesforce. It was a great learning journey and I have not looked back since. I collaborated with so many talented other cohort members. Each session was a new learning day.

How to Land a Salesforce job

The course only requires your mind and a will to learn. I got all my understanding about core Salesforce concepts during the sessions. The best part of the course was “The Real-World Project”. I cannot stress enough how much this project helped me to gain solid hands on experience. Designing a solution for a real business from scratch, then testing and building a demo video gave me real insight into how things work in the real world. Throughout the course we were given one-on-one sessions to discuss about our journeys and see if we needed any assistance in the modules. Amber provided all the study material needed to succeed in the course, with a perfect blend of administrative support from Michael.

Finally, the D-Day arrived, and we took our Salesforce Admin exams.  We all passed with flying colours! I was so excited and happy to pass the exam on my first attempt. I was feeling very positive and started applying for jobs.

In Part 2, I’ll describe how I landed a Salesforce job, along with Interview Processes - just for reference, I joined the course on November 2021 and got my first job in April 2022.

Part 2 - The Interview Process

After completing the Admin exam, I was confident that I would easily crack the interview and land a job soon. I stared applying for jobs. I prepared a base resume and then started modifying it as per the job description, along with a cover letter aligning to the job profile. I started getting interview calls. Out of ten jobs that I applied in last two months, I got five interview calls. All the interviews that I attended had almost the same pattern, and based on my experience I have summarized them into three rounds as below:

Salesforce Interview Process

Round 1 - The Intro Call

The first round was a basic Intro round with questions like:

  1. Why you want to leave your current job?
  2. Salary Expectations.
  3. Your availability to start the new job, etc.

Round 2 - Behavioural & Technical 

The second (and main) round is Technical and Behavioural.

Behavioural:

S.T.A.R. – Most of the employers wanted to know how you deal with a situation by explaining it using the STAR model.

  • Situation
  • Task
  • Action
  • Result

Some of them gave me a scenario and wanted me to describe the process that I followed using the STAR methodology. When you have scenario, it is easy to explain and describe the situation, task, action and result. Some of the employer asked me to describe a STAR example of my own. At first I found it a bit hard to explain but later on as I gradually moved on with more interviews I started preparing more and got some answers ready in mind for when that situation arose. 

My Real-World Project, along with guidance from Amber, really helped me prepare the answers to all these scenarios. In addition, I felt improvising on the situation and explaining some problems that could have happened during the Project would not hurt for behavioural rounds.

Technical:

There were so many different questions asked based on the role that you are applying. Below I’ve listed some of the most common questions I was asked for Salesforce Admin and Salesforce Consultant roles.

Salesforce Administrator

  1. Security
  2. License
  3. Flows
  4. Version Control
  5. Assignment Rules
  6. Profiles, Permission Sets, Roles
  7. Governance Rules
  8. Change Sets

I also referred to many YouTube videos for Salesforce Admin related interview questions which helped me in some way.

Salesforce Functional Consultant

  1. Requirement Gathering
  2. Change Management
  3. Agile Methodology
  4. Releases
  5. Solution Designs
 

Round 3 - Cultural

The final round! This totally depends on the company you have applied. I only attended two cultural rounds out of five. In this round, they invite you to meet the team in person and check if you are the right fit for the team. You would probably meet the CEO or the Senior Management for this round. They asked me questions like:

  1. How would you like to be managed?
  2. What would you expect from your Team Leader?
  3. Why do you want to work for this company?
  4. How will you manage Work Pressure?

In the end, it totally depends on the company you have applied for and they will let you know before the Interview process begins and will explain all the rounds.

Overall, I would say the interview processes are really tiring. But the good news I will be starting my new position as a Salesforce Consultant in by mid-May. So technically I stared hard core training from November 2021 and got a job in May 2022. That’s like 6 months. Thank you! Moreover, all the best everyone. You can do IT!

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