Inspirational quotes regarding preparation are plentiful. Bobby Unser said, “Success is where preparation and opportunity meet.” Alexander Graham Bell stated, “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” Finally, Benjamin Franklin declared, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Now you have done the challenging work to secure an interview, but the preparation does not end here. Nothing is worse than interviewing an unprepared candidate and it only takes about five minutes into the conversation to make this determination. Unprepared candidates not only ruin their chances of securing employment during the interview, but they ruin their chances to be considered for future opportunities at the company. Therefore, we recommend the following steps to ensure you are prepared for your interview.

Know your Stuff

Your resume is your story, and you should know your story better than anyone. Ensure you understand the job description fully and be prepared to talk about the details of your resume - how did you gather the requirements, how did you implement the solution, and what was the result of your work. Depending on the experience of the interviewer and the position requirements, you may get questions that are below or above your experience level. If the interviewer questions you about something you do not know or do not have experience with, do the right thing, and admit that you do not know. Employers are looking for honesty and providing completely wrong answers is much worse than admitting you do not know. In any case, you should be able to explain core concepts for the position for which you are applying. Some examples may include what is the difference between a master-detail vs. lookup relations, what are the different ways to secure data (organization-wide defaults, sharing rules, profiles, permission sets, etc.), when do you use flows vs. writing triggers, etc.

Prepare to Build Your Story with Questions

Salesforce interviews are typically a mix of technical and cultural fit questions. Though cultural fit is defined as whether your values, behaviors, and attitudes match those of the company you are interviewing with, determining cultural fit can be exhibited in an interview through how you communicate and interact with the interviewer(s). Typically, there is time built into the interview where you can ask questions which gives the interviewer the opportunity to evaluate what is important to you, how you communicate, and how you might fit into the organization. This time is a critical part of helping you differentiate yourself from the competition. We recommend preparing interesting, open-ended questions that allow you to respond with how you might be a good fit for the role.

In the following scenario, you can see how this type of preparation could elevate a candidates experience with a company who is utilizing Service Cloud:

Interviewer: “Do you have any questions for me?”

Candidate: “What are some of the current challenges your team faces in reducing case closure times?”

Interviewer: “We have increasing calls, but limited service representatives. Despite deploying web forms and Email-to-case, we have seen large increases in case resolution time in the last two months.”

Candidate: “Limited resources are a challenge for many organizations. In my experience deploying Live Chat, we were able to meet customer needs more effectively and reduced case closure time by 65%.”

In this example, the candidate is reinforcing that they can quickly add value to the company by engaging the interviewer to speak about their challenges. Do not waste your time on questions like “How do you like working at your company?” as they add little value and do not allow you to enhance your candidacy.

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