So, you are looking for a Salesforce professional..but where do you start?
The first thing is to really identify what Salesforce skills you need, what you need the new team member to do, and what your environment looks like. Has your environment been heavily customised by a Salesforce partner? Or has it been built with only out of the box declarative tools? Have you integrated Salesforce to other platforms, or do you plan to soon?
As an end customer, the person that you’ll be looking to onboard would likely either be a Salesforce Administrator or a Salesforce Developer. These titles have different responsibilities and the profiles of each will be different, but there is some crossover and a lot of confusion created by an array of different job titles commonly used in the Salesforce market.
As your team grows, you may add more roles/titles, or if you have a complex environment and need to build a team quickly, your first hire may look slightly different, but Salesforce Administrators and Salesforce Developers are the most common roles in an end customer organisation, so we will focus on them for now.
In many cases, companies will have a team of Salesforce professionals, that includes both Administrators and Developers, so it definitely isn’t a case of one OR the other, but each role should be clearly defined so that you know who you should be targeting.
When would you hire a Salesforce Administrator?
- Your Salesforce users need a point of contact within the business, who they go to for any support requirements, process improvement requests or to discuss any challenges they face when using the platform.
- Your environment is not heavily customised, nor do you have any immediate plans to add any heavy customisation. This means that you have not already had a Developer writing lines of code to build out functionality, and the approach to date has been to use the declarative, out of the box features that Salesforce offers.
- Your typical support requests that are coming through range from setting up new users, customising reports and dashboards, automating processes (think automatically updating fields, sending automated emails or assigning leads to the relevant person) and adding/removing fields etc.
- You would prefer to keep adding functionality to the platform in a way that is easy to maintain.
The complexity of your Salesforce environment, and the number of products and users you have will all have an impact on the seniority of the candidate that you need to hire. The role could actually be a Salesforce Platform Manager position, if you are looking for this to be a more strategic role, but we will focus on the Salesforce Administrator role for now.
What Salesforce job titles you should be looking for ..
The candidates that you may want to attract to this role may currently call themselves a Salesforce Administrator or a Salesforce Admin, but could use alternate titles like:
- Salesforce Support Analyst
- Salesforce Functional Analyst
- Salesforce Analyst
Which Salesforce certifications does a Salesforce Administrator have?
Although not every singly Salesforce Administrators will hold certifications, most will, and the common ones for this type of role are:
- Salesforce Certified Administrator
- Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator
- Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder
Where do Salesforce Administrators work?
Salesforce Administrators tend to work for end customers, so companies that use Salesforce internally, rather than working for Salesforce implementation partners.
When would you hire a Salesforce Developer?
- Your Salesforce environment was built in a way that utilised lots of custom code. You may have heard your past employee or implementation team using terms like ‘Apex’ or ‘Lightning Components’
- You are looking to ramp up the complexity and customise Salesforce beyond the out of the box capabilities on offer from Salesforce
- Your Salesforce platform needs to send or receive data from other systems or platforms. Integration is becoming important
- You are happy to continue to add functionality to the platform through both “out of the box” features that Salesforce provide, plus custom code that will need to be supported by a Developer on an ongoing basis
Again, the complexity of your Salesforce environment, the different products and users you have, will all have an impact on the seniority of the candidate that you need to hire. The role could actually be a Salesforce Technical Lead role if you are looking for this to be a more strategic position, but we will focus on the Salesforce Developer role for now.
What Salesforce job titles you should be looking for ..
The candidates that you may want to attract to this role may currently call themselves a Salesforce Developer, but could use alternate titles like:
- Salesforce Technical Consultant
- Salesforce Engineer
- Salesforce Programmer
What Salesforce certifications does a Salesforce Developer have?
Although not every single Salesforce Developer will hold certifications, the common ones for this type of role are:
- Salesforce Platform Developer I
- Salesforce Platform Developer II
Where do Salesforce Developers work?
Salesforce Developers can be found working for any range of companies across the Salesforce ecosystem, including end customers, Salesforce implementation partners, Salesforce product companies and even Salesforce themselves.
Things to be aware of ..
The Salesforce platform is broad and there are now many areas that people can specialise in. Someone that can operate as a Salesforce Developer for Sales and Service Cloud, isn’t necessarily going to be comfortable operating as a Salesforce Marketing Cloud Developer, or may not have experience building a Salesforce Community, as an example. Likewise, a Salesforce Administrator will not have worked with every feature or Cloud that Salesforce offers, so understanding your Salesforce environment is important when you are speaking to potential candidates. Typically, a Salesforce professional will want to understand:
- Which Salesforce and AppExchange products you currently use or plan to implement.
- Who else is involved with Salesforce projects or support – E.g. do you currently also use a Salesforce Consulting Partner?
- Where Salesforce sits within the business, and the different teams that use the platform
- What the short, medium, and long-term Salesforce roadmap looks like, and what they can expect to learn if they join your business
- Which other systems are connected to Salesforce, if any
Hopefully this information has provided some clarity, and will help you in your search for the right Salesforce team member. If you require any further insight on other Salesforce job types and responsibilities, you can check out this article which goes into detail on Salesforce job titles – https://talent-hub.com.au/types-salesforce-roles/
For anything that we can do to help regarding Salesforce careers, please reach out to ben.duncombe@talent-hub.com.au
At Talent Hub, we are Salesforce careers specialists, and you can see some of the Salesforce roles that we are currently recruiting for currently here.