“These graduates were largely Full Stack Engineers and as new entrants to the tech world, many of them wanted to do the shiny thing in industry—machine learning, or A.I., for example,” says Paul Shepherd, VP of Salesforce Engineering at a Fortune 500 financial services corporation.
“If you’re taking this kind of wide approach to hiring Salesforce professionals from other broad computer science backgrounds, you have to be a little wary,” advises Paul. “There are a lot of candidates out there who are Java professionals; they can do a Salesforce course to up their market value, but they aren’t invested in the point and click aspects of Salesforce. They might apply for your Salesforce job, but they’re Java people. Those candidates who don’t have a passion for the platform don’t tend to stick around.”
The company also tried creating pipelines from other large companies, taking on candidates referred to them from peer businesses; professionals who were ready to move into a new role. They took contractors from other companies too, but few converted into permanent employees, making it unscalable.