Salesforce Administrator Interview Questions

A Salesforce administrator should possess broad knowledge of customizing Salesforce, configuring the platform, managing and enhancing it’s capabilities for the users.

Salesforce administrator jobs are high paying and require the candidate to at least have  Salesforce Administrator Certification and a couple of years experience in the industry.

If you want to know exactly how much a Salesforce Administrators earns around the world, read this article.

Interview Structure 

Generally, an interview structure is as follows:

1. Introduction of the team and the organization by the interviewer.
2. Detailed description of the role applied for by the interviewer.
3. A short introduction of the candidate.
4. General behavioural questions
5. Salesforce administrator interview questions
6. Questions from the candidate

Introduction of the Team and the Organization

The interviewer generally starts with a greeting and a quick introduction of what the organization does and what are the responsibilities of the team the role is for, within the organization.

It is important to make notes, either on a pad or mentally, so that you can ask them later when it is time for you to ask questions.

Description of the Role

The interviewer would explain the main responsibilities and deliverables of the role. This is an opportunity to understand whether this role fits the career path of the candidate.

Making mental or written notes about the role helps to prepare for the last round of questions for the candidate.

Introducing Yourself

A well rehearsed introduction is the first impression you would make on the interviewers and it is crucial you talk about your career highlights without rambling on and going into too many specific scenarios.

Keep it succinct and focused.

General Behaviour Questions

After introductions, the interview goes into technical and general behavioural round of questions. Asking behavioural questions helps to predict candidate’s future performance. Examples of behaviour based are below which

1. Why did you apply for this role?
2. Describe a time you made an error. Why did you miss the mistake? How did you handle the situation?
3.  Can you tell me about a time when you felt pressure while making a decision? How did the pressure affect you?
4. Can you talk about a time when you motivated your team? How did you do it? How effective were your efforts?
5.  Can you describe the process you use to set personal goals?
6. When you have multiple requests from customers or co-workers, how do you prioritize them?
7. Can you describe the steps you take to develop a relationship with a customer/stakeholder?
8. Can you tell me about a time when you disagreed with a manager? What did you do
9. Was there ever a time when you weren’t honest at work? What happened?
10. Where do you see yourself professionally in five years?
11. Why did you choose to work with Salesforce?
12. Have you ever trained a junior/apprentice to use Salesforce?

Salesforce Administrator Interview Questions

Salesforce Administrator interview questions can range from simple straightforward questions to highly complex scenario based questions.

Below are examples for both:

Straightforward Salesforce Questions

1. What is the main difference between a workflow rule and a process builder?
2. Are sharing rules used to restrict or allow access to data?
3. What are the different ways of making a field mandatory on an object?
4. How do page layouts differ from record types?
5. Can data import wizard be used to load Opportunity data into the Salesforce org?
6. How many types of sandboxes are there? Name them all.
7. What is Experience Cloud and how can it be used?
8. Why is Salesforce Health Check important?
9. What are the the different types of reports allowed to be created?
10. How can a custom list view button be added?
11. What is Time-Dependent Workflow?
12. What is Analytical Snapshot in Salesforce.com?
13. Can we schedule dynamic dashboards?
14. How to create many to many relationships between two objects?
15. What are person accounts?
16. What happens to child record when a master record is deleted in Lookup Relationship?
17. How can you bulk delete users in Salesforce? (Trick question – an administrator cannot delete users in Salesforce)
18. What are the different types of cloud products available and which ones are you most familiar with?
19. Give an example of a process builder you created and what problem was it solving?
20. What are the different Out of the Box configurations that can be done to auto-generate Cases in salesforce?

Scenario based Salesforce Questions

1. In Partner Community, external user is having appropriate OWD and Profile Settings for Opportunity or consider any other Object. However they are getting insufficient privilege access, what might be cause of this error ?
2. While setting OWD (Organization wide sharing), can we change/modify the setting of child record in case of Master-Detail relationship?
3. Which permission is required to set the running user other than you in dashboard? What is the use of “floating report header”?
4. Suppose if a record meets workflow criteria for time based workflow action, the action goes in queue. Later, before the time based action is triggered, the same record gets modified and the criteria previously met is changed and now it does not meet the workflow criteria. What happens to the time based action placed in Queue?
5. After Exporting data using Data Loader, Some time it appears that data is on New Line (Carriage Return) when we open CSV file in Microsoft Excel. For example, Address Data separated on different lines. How can we override this problem?
6. If 100,000 Account records are owned by one user, what can be done to avoid data skews?
7. If I want Object level accesses then what should I use from Salesforce security model?
8. In how many ways can we store files, images and documents in salesforce.com? What are they?
9. Is it possible to change/modify the Child Record Settings of a Master-Detail Relationship, for setting Organization-Wide Settings?
10. Is it possible for users to create their own list views?

Candidate’s Questions

After the technical interview questions, it is usually time for the candidate to ask the questions to the interviewer. This is an opportunity for you to ask more about the role and the type of work you will have to do. Usually, the interviewers are closely analysing your questions. So, it is important to take this as an opportunity to impress.

Tips & Tricks

In conclusion, the best way to prepare for a Salesforce Administrator Job Interview is to log into a Developer Edition of Salesforce and play around in the setup area and do plenty of trailheads to ensure you have revised all the configuration and declarative tips and tricks.