💃 Salesforce Job Interview Assignments - Yay or Nay?🕺

Good morning, Salesforce Nerds! A hiring manager recently took to Twitter to flame a candidate who expressed concerns about a 90min job interview assignment 😳.

Interview assignments for Salesforce professionals are common enough that even the mothership has some version of them for most of their roles.

Salesforce Account Executive candidates create a sales presentation. Engineers write a lil code.

Is this reasonable? Or is it exploitative?

There’s only one way to find out ⬇️

THE TWEET

Job Interview Assignments

The offending tweet was made by a real estate investor who was hiring for a financial analyst.

But that’s not what is important.

Rather, the soul of this scenario is that the company that is hiring is requesting that the candidate complete an assignment as part of the hiring process. 

In this case it was a 90 minute assignment.

But range is wide - this person had an 8 hour assignment 😳. Others have a simple 15 minute questionnaire.

Do you have an opinion on this practice?

Hold that thought! This controversial topic needs some steel manning!

BENEFITS

Benefits for the Company and the Salesforce Professional

Scenario: You’re a hiring manager, interviewing candidates for a Salesforce consultant role. You want the candidate to create an ERD document because you believe it is a good way to measure competency.

Benefits for the Company

👍 Free work! Why pay employees when you can get a desperate job seeker to do it for free 😘?!

👍 Tangible test drive of the candidate. It’s kinda crazy that after a few interviews, a Salesforce professional is given a high paying job where they’re responsible for clients with billions in revenue. By taking a test drive with an assignment, an employer will gain valuable insights about the candidate that a traditional interview could never surface.

👍 High-bar reputation. FAANG engineer interviews are notoriously challenging. From the outside, this gives an image of prestige. It’s like getting into an Ivy League school - they’re not gonna let random chumps attend. At best, the reputation creates a desire for the best and brightest to test their mettle. This generates a pool of smart, competitive people to hire from.

Scenario: You’re a candidate, interviewing for a Salesforce consultant role. The hiring manager asks you to create an ERD diagram for a Sales Cloud design that supports an international SaaS sales operation that sells bundled and unbundled products.

Benefits for the Candidate

👍 Exposure to new-to-you challenges. If you’ve been managing an org that sells energy in the state of California, then an opportunity to strategize an international SaaS sales org is great exposure for a complex business that requires a complex org.

👍 Meritocracy. If you deliver the best ERD document, you will presumably get the job, assuming all else was equal among candidates.

👍 It’s in your nature. Many Salesforce professionals LOVE to solve problems. You give them a problem and it’s like Pavlov’s dog hearing the bell - the Salesforce professional pounces on it. For you pure problem-solvers out there, this is fun for you…you want to do it.

RISKS

Risks for the Company and the Salesforce Professional

Risks for the Company

👎 Over-indexing on the assignment. You may have a good candidate who had a bad day and bombed the assignment. Or a good candidate that legitimately didn’t have the time to do the assignment. Personable, well-spoken, intelligent candidates that otherwise you’d have hired are rejected for an over-indexed indicator.

👎 Turnoff the candidate. Exactly how that tweet played out - the candidate was real meh about putting in significant work with no guaranteed win.

👎 No/bad reputation. Remember the aforementioned FAANG and Ivy League reputations? Well, those are storied institutions. Your $50 million dollar business is great, but it doesn’t quite have the charm of Facebook’s gourmet cafeterias or Harvard’s alumni network.

Risks for the Candidate

👎 Time and effort commitment. You could be a candidate with multiple interviews with multiple companies. At that point, you basically have a 40hr/week job interviewing and doing assignments. And you need not be reminded you are not being paid for this!

👎 One-sided stakes. You carry all the risk, ie you need a job so you can pay the bills. The company you are interviewing with has a thicc pipeline of Salesforce candidates to fill the role.

👎 The odds are against you. Related to the above point, you could be competing with tens or hundreds of other candidates. If you lined up 100 Salesforce professionals, could you have the best interview and best ERD doc of the bunch?

FINAL THOUGHTS

Takeaway

You’ve seen both sides of the coin.

The perspective of the company requesting an assignment, and the perspective of the candidate responsible for the assignment.

You’ve seen the benefits 👍 for each. And you’ve seen the risks 👎 for each.

So what say you? Are you willing to complete a two hour job interview assignment?

Final final thought

Here is an attempt at a win-win scenario - compensate the candidate for the completed assignment. Whether the candidate is hired or not, they are compensated.

This gives everyone stakes, and everyone walks away with something tangible.

SOUL FOOD

Today’s Principle

and now....Your Salesforce Memes