Salesforce’s Interview Process & Questions
Salesforce’s Interview Process for Software Engineers: 3 Steps
Mid to senior-level engineers interviewing at Salesforce can expect the following process:
- Recruiter call (30 minutes)
- Technical phone screen (1 hour)
- Onsite (usually 4 hours but might be more depending on the team)
Salesforce’s process is decentralized, which means that you’re applying to either a specific team or, sometimes, a specific org. Each of their orgs is called Something Cloud, so if you’re interviewing at the org level, it might be for, say, Marketing Cloud or IoT Cloud, and which team you end up on will be determined after you interview. That said, how each team or org runs their own process is up to them.
Finally, our sources tell us that while Salesforce is pretty quick to move for a company of their size once you actually start interviewing. The time from the first interview to offer can take as little as 3 weeks, but they may take a while to get that first interview scheduled.
Step 1: Recruiter Call
This is a typical recruiter call, where they’ll ask about previous experience, relevant projects, and why you’re interested in Salesforce and the specific team/org you’re targeting. They’ll also elaborate on the role and confirm that your experience and expectations are a good match.
One important thing – if you’re primarily a back-end engineer, let your recruiter know as soon as possible so they route you accordingly. If you don’t, and you end up saying you’re full-stack when you’re really not (or when you haven’t touched front-end work in a long time), you might be in for a rude awakening in your coding rounds when you have to traverse the DOM or build progress bars in JavaScript. Even though “full-stack” can mean any number of different things depending on the company, at Salesforce, they really mean it!
Finally, it’s really important, at this stage, not to reveal your salary expectations, your salary history, or where you are in the process with other companies. We wrote a detailed post about salary negotiation that lays out exactly what to say when recruiters pressure you to name the first number. Just don’t do it – when you give out information this early in the process, you’re painting future you into a corner.
Step 2: Technical Phone Screen
The structure and content of the technical phone screen at Salesforce is team-dependent, as is tooling. One tool you’re likely to see, though, is Quip (their answer to Google docs).
Step 3: Onsite
Salesforce’s onsite lasts roughly 4 hours and consists of the following steps:
- Coding (2 hours)
- System design (1 hour)
- Behavioral (1 hour)
Coding
Salesforce’s onsite usually has 2 coding interviews. As with the technical phone screen, tooling varies, but you might have to use Quip (their answer to Google docs).
These are the most important parts of the onsite – both the system design and the behavioral rounds don’t carry as much weight.
System Design
This round lasts 1 hour and may also happen in Quip.
Behavioral
The behavioral round is probably the least important out of all the onsite rounds. You’ll get the usual questions about past projects, your contributions, strengths and weaknesses, and so on.
That said, Salesforce really values the concept of Ohana (family), and you may get questions about the importance of community, supporting your team, the importance of customer relationships, and so on.
Types of Interview Questions to Expect at Salesforce
Coding
One unique aspect of this round is more of an emphasis on specific programming language skills (rather than the type of language-agnostic interview you might see at FAANGs and many FAANG-adjacent companies).
Moreover, if you’re applying for a full-stack role, you may get front-end or back-end questions, and which you get is up to your interviewer. One typical question is, “Build a progress bar in JavaScript”. If you’re primarily a back-end engineer who’s done some front-end work in the distant past, questions like this may be really jarring..
It’s less likely than at other companies that you’ll get LeetCode-style questions, but you might (again, what you get is team-dependent). However, if you do get them, they’re going to be easy to medium (rather than medium to hard, as you might see with other companies we’ve written about), and our sources tell us that if you practice the top 10 medium-difficulty questions on LeetCode, you’ll be in good shape.
Between the above and cross-referencing it with our own data-set of mock interviews, if you do get back-end, algorithmic questions in your coding interviews, these are the types of questions you’re likely to encounter:
System Design
The kinds of questions you’ll get here vary a lot from team to team and may be anything from database-related questions (including writing SQL) to design questions about CRMs (not surprising, given that Salesforce is a CRM company).
You should also study up on the internal tooling the org/team you’re interviewing for uses, as you are likely to get questions about that (e.g., technologies they’ve acquired somewhat recently like Slack, Quip, Tableau, etc.).
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