Now that you have selected a slate of candidates to evaluate further and potentially interview, what should you be looking for? Both technical capabilities and team fit are critical to identifying a great candidate that can not only do the work, but also fits within your immediate team and culture of your company. In the second blog post in our series, we examine tips on how to appropriately measure technical capabilities and team fit when searching for the ideal Salesforce candidate.
4. Understanding Technical Aptitude
When hiring technical talent, it is important to dive deeper than the resume when interviewing a candidate. We think the best companies have two parts to their technical evaluation: 1) a technical screen and a technical deep dive.
The screening should verify any certifications listed on their resume prior to offering a candidate an interview. Salesforce has a certification verification site to help with this . Unfortunately, we have seen instances of certification claims on resumes that are not verifiable and should be a point of clarification when interviewing a candidate. Look over the candidate’s LinkedIn and look for social verification of prior roles and skills. Finally, when screening a candidate, ask open-ended questions like “tell me about a time you solved a production issue?” or “why did you choose to build it that way?” and listen for their ability to articulate technical ideas. Good candidates should be able to answer these open-ended questions, but great candidates will articulate ideas and challenges in plain language allowing non-technical interviewers to understand the problem and the solution.
In the technical deep-dive, we recommend making the interview an interactive exercise – propose a real-world business problem and work to solve it together. This can be a traditional question-and-answer exchange or, as we have seen with larger companies, truly interactive with a live Salesforce sandbox for the candidate to build or configure. Pay close attention to how well the candidate articulates the solution and how they process the challenge. Great candidates will often verbalize their thinking process, be able to adjust with feedback, and will be honest when they do not know the answer. If you have a Salesforce team, we recommend engaging the team in a team interview to help assess the experience and technical skills and drill further into the candidate’s experience. Coming out of the technical interviews, the team should feel confident about the candidate’s experience and if the role is for someone junior, the team should have confidence in the ability of the candidate to grow into the role.
5. Evaluating Team Fit
No one wants to work with a jerk and determining team fit is critical to finding the right candidate.
Ask yourself these three questions:
a. Could I see myself working well with this person?
b. Could I see my team and stakeholders working well with this person?
c. Could this person represent my team to others without my assistance?
Additionally, if conducting a group interview, listen to if your candidate is addressing your team members differently – only addressing the manager, addressing different genders/ages differently, etc. If this is a case, this could represent a red flag in the candidate’s ability to work with others.
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