Get ready for a Salesforce Admin interview

You’ve just received an email inviting you to interview for a Salesforce Admin role. Congratulations! How should you get ready? Below are some tips to better prepare you for a Salesforce Admin Interview.

Step 1: Determine the type of interview you are preparing for.

There are three common types of Salesforce Admin interviews you might encounter in the hiring process:

• Behavioral interview: A behavioral interview asks candidates to draw on their past experiences to demonstrate desired behaviors, knowledge, skills, and abilities for a future role. You may also be asked to explain how they would handle a hypothetical business situation.
• Technical interview: A technical interview asks candidates to demonstrate their technical knowledge or analytical skills by solving a business or numerical problem. It’s less about getting the right answer than demonstrating critical thinking and problem-solving skills. A technical interview is most commonly used in business analyst roles but can also sometimes show up in the hiring process for Salesforce professionals.
• Trial task: A trial task is a take-home task that a candidate completes demonstrating they know how to do the type of work that the job would require. In some cases, companies will compensate you for this work. In other cases, they will request that you spend a finite amount of time completing the task. They will pay attention to the overall quality of the work you submit (including how promptly you respond, how neatly you format things, etc). Still, companies will also often not expect the work to be perfect since you won’t have all the context or much time to complete it.

Step 2: Use the job description to come up with Salesforce Admin interview questions.

We always recommend that you look specifically at the job description. Pay particular attention to the “responsibilities” section, which might look something like this:

You can take each bullet point and turn it into a potential interview question. For example:

• Tell me about a time you’ve had to manage Salesforce data feeds and integrations?
• If we asked you to run internal system audits, how would you got about doing that?

Preparing to specifically address the tasks and requirements described in the job description is the best type of interview preparation you can do!

Step 3: Practice answering Salesforce-specific interview questions.

After you’ve practiced coming up with questions based on the job description, you can also practice some of the more generic questions that frequently come up in Salesforce Admin interview roles. These include:

• Why are you interested in being a Salesforce Admin?
• Tell me about your experience configuring Salesforce to solve a specific business problem.
• Tell me about a project when you’ve used Salesforce and what Salesforce helped the team achieve.
• Tell me about a time when you customized a page layout in Salesforce. How did you customize it, and why did you customize it that way?
• Have you used process automation tools in Salesforce? If so, which ones? Describe the use case(s) where you used process automation tools and how your process automation solution solved an important problem.
• Imagine that you need to build a new lead and sales dashboard for our business development team. How would you go about designing and building the dashboard? What questions would you ask before getting started?
• What is the difference between profiles and permission sets? How would you approach setting up a profile? How can a permission set be used in support of profiles?
• Can you briefly describe field-level security? What are the different types of Sharing Rules in Salesforce, and explain them?
• How do you think you might be able to use Salesforce to help this company if you were hired here?
• What questions do you have for me [interviewer]?

For further practice, check out our general interview tips here!

We also put together a list of the Top Salesforce Admin Questions and Answers to help you. Good luck!