💃 21 Questions with a Salesforce Consultant Hiring Manager 🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerd! A recent lunch turned into a compelling Salesforce discussion around a Salesforce hiring manager’s perspective.

Not only were there some golden nuggets dropped for Salesforce professional candidates, but they paid for lunch too 🤘.

Here are 21 questions the hiring manager graciously answered👇

BACKGROUND

Receipts, Please

Hiring managers of Salesforce come in all shapes and sizes. Here is a profile of the executive who answered our 21 questions-

🧾 20 years work experience, including 11 years in enterprise tech, 6 of which are in Salesforce delivery.

🧾 Responsible for $8-10MM in services ARR.

🧾 Has worked in consulting orgs ranging from 35-employee boutique agency to 3300-employee international services firm.

🧾 Responsible for 20+ Salesforce professionals, from business analysts to architects, local and offshore. Responsible for hiring, retention and exiting of US resources.

🧾 Interview style influenced by a required “Interviewing 101” course.

There are many hiring managers with more experience and many with less. Here is this hiring manager’s perspective👇

WHAT NEXT?

21 Questions for a Salesforce Hiring Manager

Are those job postings online real?

Ha! For companies I’ve worked at- mostly yes, a little no. There’s 3 dirty little secrets about consulting-

1. The churn rate for consultants is high.

2. Prospects can become clients overnight, and you’ll need to staff a $1MM project for a client who wants to kickoff yesterday….

3. Wise hiring managers always have a pipeline of quality candidates that they can tap into. And it’s when, not if, they tap it.

What makes a resume pop? What sends a resume straight to the trash can?

I like one-page resumes. I’ve hired people with two-pagers.

I like when people include work history that may seem irrelevant, like waiter/waitress, but, in that example, understand the value of being customer-facing.

I like clarity. I understand it’s a challenge to distill years of work experience into 3 sentences that need to influence a decision-maker/hiring manager.

In regards to straight to trash - ”SalesForce” will get you there 🙂.

How important is my LinkedIn profile?

I used to think not at all. But it was a dealbreaker (to not have one) for a former-CEO I worked with. I’ve been swayed to his perspective that in a digital world, having a profile on the professional platform is important. Treat it like an online resume, your brand, your digital professional profile…

How important are Salesforce certifications?

Very important! Accredited implementation partners are rated, in part, by how many, and which, certs their company has. If you have no Mulesoft-certified resources, Salesforce is not going to bring you any Mulesoft deals.

Presuming the follow up question of recommended certs, I like to see consultant certifications - Sales and Service. I like that these put a focus on empathizing with stakeholders and users.

And for senior functional consultants I like Data Architect and Sharing and Visibility Architect certs. Resources who understand Data, Schemas, and Security always have value.

Besides Salesforce, which other certifications move the needle?

Hmmm I’m personally not a cert-enthusiast, but if you’re going to spend the time and money, get ones that are universally recognized and respected, like the PMP, or on other enterprise tech platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and maybe even Google.

What are you looking for in line-items on a resume?

I like the Google XYZ framework. Be prepared to explain any line-items in an interview!

How do you differentiate between 50 applications with the same experience?

Great question. 3 things I look for to cut through the vanilla are-

1. Industry exposure - Legacy (like manufacturing) or new (like tech) and which verticals.

2. Company size - have they worked with hundreds of users? Thousands?

3. Enterprise experience - exposure to business complexity

What can an admin with no consulting experience do to look attractive to a consulting firm?

Having business analyst skills is the secret weapon. You can work in industry or consulting if you have the ability to breakdown business process into pieces and segments.

The ability to develop strong relationships is also a skill that will always be in style.

What is one thing most 0-1 year experience Salesforce professionals do not understand about the consulting business?

Leverage. The leverage model in consulting is the answer to a lot of the “why’s” that a frustrated consultant will have.

If you were in my shoes, with the knowledge you have, how would you approach your job search right now?

All of the things that will be doing the initial work for me - ie my LinkedIn profile, my resume, etc - I would get looking great. I’d use ChatGPT to help me polish it all up.

I would become familiar with all the places jobs are posted, and I would understand that it’s a numbers game and apply for everything that interested me.

I would steel myself to expect no response from a majority of submissions; something like a 10% response rate is normal, and then a few interviews out of those.

So if you apply to 100 jobs, you may get 10 responses, and 3 interviews.

Do you care more about functional skills, technical skills, or soft skills? Why

Functional skills get your foot in the door, but soft skills keep you here.

In most consultancies, technical requests are managed by a dedicated individual or team, so they are a nice to have.

A mistake I’ve made more than once is the allure of a functional person who is also proficient technically. The thing is, their skillset demands a higher salary, but you can’t bill them at a technical resource rate (because they’re not enterprise developers), and they often lack the soft skills required to be great with clients…or even their own teammates.

If I have limited experience, what can I include on my resume to compensate for that and still be a desirable candidate?

A track record of being successful in new things. If you were a bank teller, then became a Tier 1 technical support, then Tier 2, then a Helpdesk Manager, then a Salesforce Admin - that’s a quality progression that shows you have the ability to elevate.

What can I do in the next 30-60 days to make myself more attractive to a hiring manager?

Here’s 3 things

1. Polish up your resume and Linkedin.

2. Turn your accomplishments into a story - “Salespeople hated the org, then I did this and that, and then they loved it and revenue increased 45%!”

3. Spin up a dev org and recreate the most value-add Flow you can and practice presenting it.

What skills or experience do candidates often lack that you wish they didn’t?

Empathy.

I think it lacks because the Salesforce journey can be very lonely, but you need to understand that you serve the users who use the org.

It’s not about you. It’s not even really about Salesforce. It’s the users, stakeholders, salespeople, etc.

What would make you walk away from interview saying “Wow, that was great!”

Ohhh that’s a good question. Hmmmm…

We had a candidate talk about their hands-on approach of a Field Service Lightning implementation, and how he rode with the drivers for months to make it the best solution it could be for them. And he made it his personal responsibility to onboard new field agents by going out to the field with them and training them on the app.

That wow’d me.

He didn’t get the job because we somehow got an even better candidate.

What has a candidate done to impress you, even though they lacked experience?

Ask good questions. Be curious.

Do you expect candidates to whiteboard or solution for you during an interview?

Personally, no. If a candidate wants to, though, go right ahead.

Solutioning is one of the easier parts of the job, I wouldn’t be doing my job has a hiring manager interviewing anyone who wasn’t capable of solutioning.

What are the biggest mistakes you see in interviews?

Being late isn’t a dealbreaker, but it’s a terrible start. If you can’t show up on time for something that may determine your livelihood, how can I trust you to show up for a client who’s paying $250/hr for you?

Test your technology before the interview. Download Zoom and run a meeting. Ensure the Teams webapp works in your browser.

Finally, be mindful of how you speak about your former coworkers. You’re interviewing with your possible-future coworkers…

Do I need to come prepared with questions to ask you? What questions have you been asked that have impressed you?

Yes! Be genuinely curious. The best questions from candidates weren’t prepared, they came from a burning curiosity that was evident throughout the interview.

I also appreciate when a candidate asks a question that I expect our current consultants to ask but often don’t, like “if I can’t hit my 80% utilization, then what activities should I focus on to continue to add value?”

Why would an otherwise perfectly qualified candidate not get the job?

I’ve interviewed a few over-qualified people who I felt would be a flight risk. They were interviewing for roles that were less money and more frontline work than their previous experiences.

If another candidate was progressing to the role, I had to decide which risk was greater - the experienced candidate leaving for a better opportunity that would definitely come, or the less experienced candidate who would have a longer ramp.

What is a good way to follow up with you after the interview?

OK: nothing at all. I’ve hired plenty of people who never followed up after an interview.

Good: a thoughtful “thank you” follow up. It takes 5 minutes (less with ChatGPT).

Great: a thoughtful value-add, like a link to a news article about something we discussed during the interview.

Call to Action-

What questions do you have for a Salesforce hiring manager?

Reply to this email and let us know, send as many as you’d like!

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