Get a Job at Salesforce: Interview Process and Top Questions

Learn how to prepare for Salesforce interviews with this in-depth guide.

Salesforce is a major player in the tech space and globally known for its CRM platform. As a values-driven company, Salesforce takes pride in its trust, customers' success, and innovation. To land a job at Salesforce, you’ll need polished technical skills, a comprehensive understanding of Salesforce products, and proof that you can add to its culture.

Below, we break down the Salesforce interview process and top questions you should expect to answer.

Salesforce Interview Process

The Salesforce interview process is fairly standard across teams. It starts with a recruiter phone screen for most roles or a technical screen for engineers. The initial screening call is followed by an onsite, which can take place virtually or in person, depending on your location and role. 

The Salesforce interview process typically takes about 3–4 weeks and involves:

• Recruiter phone screen or technical screen,
• Final round.

Recruiter phone screen

For your recruiter phone screen at Salesforce, expect a standard, short phone call with a Salesforce recruiter. You’ll likely get asked a few basic questions about your resume, qualifications, and background, and then a rundown of the interview process.

Expect to also get asked, “Why do you want to work at Salesforce?” The key to this question at Salesforce is to answer with a 30-second pitch that covers what you know about Salesforce, who you are, and why you’re excited to join the company. To answer this, get to know Salesforce’s products, current ventures, and core values. Notice what sticks out to you and what aligns with your background and career goals.

Salesforce’s core values:

• Trust
• Customer Success
• Innovation
• Equality
• Sustainability

Technical screen

The tech screen at Salesforce is usually the first step of the interview process for technical roles, like engineers. It’s a 45-minute phone or video call which involves basic questions about the role and your background. This conversation then concludes with a design problem and coding in a language of your choice. 

The tech screen call is followed up by a 1-hour coding challenge on HackerRank, which Salesforce calls its remote programming test. This is done as a take-home assessment on your own time. The coding challenge includes data structure and algorithm questions ranging from easy to hard difficulty. The test assesses your ability to write a well-designed, object-oriented program. Interviewers want to see that you can write scalable, well-formatted, easy-to-read code with sufficient comments so that an interviewer can quickly understand your program.

Final rounds

During your final round at Salesforce, expect 45–60 minute interviews conducted by a range of interviewers, including the hiring manager, team members, and other role stakeholders. The final round at Salesforce focuses on real-life, practical questions. Expect a mixture of technical, behavioral, and scenario-based questions. 

Salesforce expects candidates to have a foundational understanding of its products and business before interviewing. Salesforce recommends referencing Trailhead, its gamified learning platform, to prepare.

Top Salesforce Interview Questions

These are examples of real interview questions asked at Salesforce as reported by candidates.

Behavioral

• Tell me about yourself.
• Why do you want to work at Salesforce?
• Tell me about your past projects.
• Tell me about your greatest success.
• What is a skill you have that is not listed on your resume?

Coding

• Determine if a number is a power of two.
• What are the different types of software testing?
• Find the longest substring without repeating characters.
• Find the shortest subsequence of a cyclic string S that contains all characters of a pattern k.
• Explain the differences between an interface and an abstract class.
• Given a string S, determine if it can be converted into a palindrome by making at most one swap of two characters.

System design

• Design a system to schedule jobs in a distributed environment.
• Design a multi-tenant CRM system that ensures data isolation while maintaining scalability.
• Design a system that handles real-time lead updates and notifications across multiple Salesforce instances.
• Design a search feature that ensures fast response times for millions of records.

Machine learning

• Explain how you would handle imbalanced datasets in a lead-scoring model.
• How would you build a model to predict customer churn?
• What techniques would you use to detect fraudulent transactions?
• How would you build a model to classify customer support tickets into different categories?

Data science

• Given a table of sales transactions, how would you calculate the rolling 7-day average revenue?
• Write a SQL query to find the top 10 most engaged customers based on their interaction history.
• What statistical tests would you use to determine if a new feature increases user engagement?
• What techniques would you use to handle seasonality in a time series model?
• Salesforce wants to improve customer retention. How would you use data to find key churn drivers?

Product management 

• Describe a SaaS pricing and packaging strategy project you managed, detailing the objectives, challenges, methodology, data and tools used, and outcomes.
• How would you estimate the number of Slack users?
• Design a bookshelf for children.
• Tell me about a SaaS product you really like using.
• Diagnose a 35% drop in retention on Salesforce.

Salesforce Interview Loops

Behavioral

Behavioral questions at Salesforce are typically interspersed into each interview in your final round, rather than concentrated in a specific interview. Expect a hefty focus, though, on behavioral interview questions at Salesforce. 

Prepare for an emphasis on scenarios—questions that start with “Tell me about a time when… .” Get to know Salesforce’s values and the team you’re interviewing with to predict possible questions. Then, create a story bank of anecdotes from past roles that demonstrate various values you share and skills of yours, such as collaboration, leadership, and learning from challenges. Whenever possible, highlight your measurable impact in a situation.

Coding

Salesforce’s coding round involves solving coding questions—in a language of your choice—in real time on a whiteboard. Expect these final round coding questions to be similar to the technical screen, although they may involve a more practical application of standard data structure and algorithm questions. 

Be sure to articulate your thought process as you work through each solution so that interviewers get to know your problem-solving and decision-making approaches. 

System design

The system design round at Salesforce is included for all engineers, but expect it to vary depending on your role and team. For example, system design for MLEs will include designing an ML solution. Because of Salesforce’s emphasis on practical questions, expect a system design question that focuses on solving a real-life business problem at Salesforce.

To prepare, study design concepts related to Salesforce’s own products and architecture, such as scalability, high availability, reliability, real-time processing, APIs, microservices, event-driven architecture, and caching for large-scale data access.

Machine learning

Salesforce’s machine learning round focuses on applied ML concept questions, which assess your knowledge of ML fundamentals, your ability to use that knowledge in your day-to-day work, and your foundational knowledge of Salesforce’s platform. You may also encounter a case study or mini case questions during your final ML round. 

Data science

For the data science round at Salesforce, expect a SQL and Python coding challenge of data manipulation and ML implementation questions. You’ll also get a mix of applied DS fundamentals questions and business case questions involving product analytics. Study up on your data science fundamentals, but also study Salesforce’s platform and products to prepare. 

Product management 

The product management final round at Salesforce includes 2–3 PM-specific interviews. Prepare for standard strategy and product design questions but with a focus on real-life scenarios at Salesforce, involving its products. 

You’ll also get asked behavioral questions along the way to assess your ability to deal with different PM situations. Expect questions in the form of “Tell me about a time when…” so come prepared with stories from your past PM roles. Lastly, you may also receive a take-home case study to present to a panel. 

Salesforce Interview Tips

Salesforce values its values. 

Salesforce is a values-driven company, meaning its core values are central to how it operates—not just five words on a webpage that are largely ignored.

Salesforce specifies that it wants to hire new candidates who not only "fit" its culture but "add" to it. To stand out, highlight stories in your interviews that show off your own values in past roles. Discuss how you’ll lead this role day in and day out with the same values.  

Salesforce values trust #1. 

Trust is the top value at Salesforce. In your interview loop, demonstrate how you operate with integrity, too. For example, reference how you incorporate your own values into your leadership style or how you build lasting, trusting relationships with your co-workers.

Know Salesforce inside and out.

• Learn about Salesforce and its hiring process on Trailhead, Salesforce’s own learning platform.
• Get to know Salesforce’s products.
• Understand the Salesforce company.
• Find out more about the product & technology team at Salesforce.
• Read about current happenings on the Salesforce Stories blog.
• Look into Salesforce’s values.

FAQs

How competitive are Salesforce interviews?

Interviews at Salesforce are competitive. Expect a rigorous, multi-part interview process and coding questions that range from easy to hard in your technical interviews. 

Also, keep in mind that Salesforce recommends applying to no more than three roles within a year. Choose wisely and apply only to the roles you’re most interested in. Then, study and prep ahead of your interviews to land the job.

How should I prepare for my interview at Salesforce? 

• Before you apply, get a resume review.
• Brush up on your coding skills.
• Study interview questions asked at Salesforce.
• Prep for interviews according to your role: ML engineering, data science, SWE, system design, or PM. 
• Create a story bank aligned with Salesforce's core values.
• Get expert coaching ahead of your Salesforce interview.

Does Salesforce hire students or new grads? 

Yes! Futureforce is Salesforce’s university recruiting program. Futureforce offers internships for current students and full-time roles for new grads. Future Pathways also offers apprenticeships, internships, and full-time roles to young professionals disconnected from the economic mainstream.

More Salesforce Interview Prep Resources

Exponent has extensive resources to prepare you to feel your best when it comes time for your interview at Salesforce:

💬 Brush up on interview questions asked at Salesforce