Technology Recruiting & IT Staffing Agency

A Salesforce BA should not be an order taker. Otherwise, you are paying someone to document how garbage gets into your CRM.

Business knows what it wants to achieve. But the current process may be exactly what prevents it. Sometimes a BA needs to ask the business to change when information is collected, who enters it, or how work moves between departments. That change can make proper validation and automation possible.

To have that conversation, a BA needs to understand both the business process...

You allow engineers to use AI at work. Then ban it in the interview. What exactly are you testing?

I would rather see how a candidate uses it. Give them a problem with a few details missing and let them work through it. Do they ask questions first, or immediately ask AI to build something? When it gives them an answer, do they check it, or accept it because it looks right?

Then change one requirement. Ask what needs to change and why. Can they explain their own solution without asking AI to...

A Salesforce Admin job is more than you may think.

I’ve worked with Salesforce for over 20 years, and now I recruit for these roles. When a company asks me to find an Admin, I want to know what the person will actually own. I also want to know how they think through a request.

Say the company wants a quote approval process.

An Admin should ask where the approval fits in the overall process. At what point while preparing or revising a quote should someone request it? What happens before that...

If you need this person, why does every interview require another meeting?

Everyone knows a long interview process can cost them a candidate. Then it’s their own hire, and someone says, “Let’s have one more person talk to them.”

Before interviewing anyone, the team needs to agree on what a good outcome looks like. What does this person need to accomplish in the role? Which skills are essential, and which can they learn? A simple scorecard helps. Decide what you will assess, who will assess it...

I give clients a six-month guarantee. If someone I placed leaves in that time, I find a new person at my own cost. So I pay close attention to what happens after day one.

Most of the time I know by month two if it's going to work. I can be fairly sure about skills and fit, because that's what the search is for. Apart from the odd personal thing nobody can plan for, that's usually not what goes wrong.

AI is now the top reason companies give when they cut jobs. In January it was about 7% of the cuts announced. By May it was near 40%, and it has led every month since March.

It helps to know what that number is. Challenger writes down the reason the company puts in its own announcement. It doesn’t mean a machine took over the work. It means someone wrote AI on the form.

Andy Challenger said the thing I keep coming back to.

Every resume looks good now, and people keep telling me this is a crisis. I don’t really think it is.

What I do see, more and more, is resumes sailing through the ATS screening, and that is usually the point where I start to get suspicious. A very high score used to mean a strong match. These days it often means the resume was written against the job ad, sometimes by someone who has never done the work.

“We’ll pay more for the right person.” I hear this a lot, and it sounds open, but it doesn’t help anyone.

Everybody thinks they’re the right person, so it filters no one. Good people read it as a bad sign. Either nobody has agreed on a number yet, or the number is low and you’re hoping someone strong turns up anyway.

When a job is frozen, the work is not frozen with it. It goes to the people who are already there, and most teams can cover it for a while before anyone notices.

A team with too much work does not miss dates right away. Good engineers protect what people can see, so the plan keeps moving and the reports stay green. What they drop is the work nobody counts.

Companies keep saying they cannot find qualified software engineers.

Then I look at who they rejected.

Azure instead of AWS. React instead of Vue. PostgreSQL instead of MySQL. GitLab CI instead of GitHub Actions. Java and Spring instead of .NET. Payment systems instead of insurance.

At some point, experience has to matter more than the exact name of the tool.

Everybody knows the job description is ridiculous, but it gets posted anyway... just in case that person exists.

It started as a backend engineer, then cloud was added, DevOps, security, data, architecture and, of course, AI. Maybe that person exists, but now you are looking for somebody who can do three jobs, with the budget for one.

Why Salesforce BA is such a specific role?

A Salesforce BA is not just a BA who knows how to write user stories and has some Salesforce experience. To be good at this job you really need to understand three things at the same time: Salesforce, the org you are working with, and the company's business processes.