Are you currently preparing for an upcoming interview with a Salesforce administrator? You’ve come to the right place as on this page, we’ve gathered the common Salesforce admin interview questions with answers. We’ll gladly share the Q&As that are favored by interviewers with you, as well as give some additional recommendations regarding what to have in mind.
Table of Content
Most Used Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers
Before we begin, it is vital to mention that the administrator job positions may vary by level of seniority and experience. Therefore, it is quite self-explanatory that the will most probably differ depending on whether the open position is for a Junior or Senior Administrator. Nevertheless, no matter if you’re seeking an or only a beginner, many questions will be similar.
For your convenience, below we’ve broken down the Salesforce administrator interview questions topic-wise.
General Admin Interview Questions in Salesforce
1. Q: What does a Salesforce administrator do?
A: The major responsibilities of an administrator revolve around:
- managing the current Salesforce org and its functionality,
- maintaining the data, its quality, and security,
- organizing the data relationships,
- keeping the users well-informed about how to use the CRM and offering to them to boost their productivity,
- as well as helping to meet the business needs and introducing new solutions and changes accordingly.
✎ Tip: For this reason, you shouldn’t ask too many in-depth Salesforce administrator technical interview questions. After all, coding and building new things is a developer’s job. Yet, if the candidate knows a little more about the SFDC world and the work that’s performed by a developer, that’s a plus.
2. Q: Which tasks does a Salesforce administrator perform? (Give examples)
A: Among the “musts” that an administrator should know how to do include resolving the occurring issues of users. This can be anything from changing passwords, fixing records, and dealing with accessibility and privileges to assisting with reports and emails, just to name a few. Of course, there are broader ongoing tasks to tackle as well, such as running tests and reports, conducting audits, managing logs and archives, importing/exporting data, working with dashboards, activating/deactivating users and assigning their roles, making system updates, troubleshooting, among other essentials.
✎ Tip: That said, apart from the technical knowledge base, it is important for your admin to have various soft skills, especially keeping in mind that an admin has to be able to communicate easily and clearly with other people. Here are a couple of sample Salesforce admin interview questions regarding this:
- How do you handle your own time management?
- Which tools help you to stay organized?
- In which ways do you keep up to date with the latest Salesforce trends and updates?
- How do you expand your knowledge of Salesforce?
- Do you consider yourself attentive to detail?
- Do you find it easy to communicate with new people?
Basic Salesforce Admin Interview Questions
In this section, you can find some examples of often asked Salesforce administrator interview questions on Salesforce basics.
3. Q: What are some of the advantages of the Salesforce CRM?
A: The customizable Salesforce CRM was designed for Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service purposes (including ), along with and other industries, company types, and their needs. It is used for growing sales, organizing the processes of obtaining clients, reducing loads of manual work and cutting costs, analyzing the work using comprehensive reports and dashboards, among other things.
The system combines the ease of lead and data management with automation processes that cover anything from email send-outs to creating tasks and notifications, not to mention the opportunities for collaborating in teams, including Chatter, cases, etc. Moreover, there are many apps available in the AppExchange which can broaden the out-of-the-box standard functionality.
4. Q: How does Salesforce.com differ from Force.com?
A: Salesforce is a cloud-based Software as a Service (SaaS) offering ready-made applications for customer relationship management. It was established on the Force.com Platform as a Service (PaaS), Force.com gives the opportunity to and tools of your own as well.
5. Q: Which editions does Salesforce have?
A: There are four major editions of Salesforce, including Essentials, Professional, Enterprise, and Unlimited.
6. Q: What are the advantages of migrating portals to communities?
A: First of all, communities encompass the entire functionality of portals. Plus, there’s no necessity in community licenses if you already have portal ones. Moreover, communities boast a broader variety of features, including the solutions, the opportunity to share files, make use of reports and customizable dashboards, work together with partners via groups and feeds, among other perks. Therefore, it makes sense to take advantage of communities.
7. Q: What is the basic structure of Salesforce?
A: The Salesforce architecture is composed of the Cloud, the customizable platform, the Enterprise Ecosystem, the CRM, and other apps that can be integrated, as well as the API suite.
8. Q: In which cases would you use a sandbox?
A: The sandbox should be used every time you’re building or testing something as opposed to doing so straight away on the production version. The sandbox is also useful for training users (to not fill the system with messy data). Optionally, you can use the for these purposes.
9. Q: What do you understand by “Data Skew”?
A: It’s an issue that may occur with performance when a single parent record has way too many child records linked to it, usually the number exceeds 10 thousand. Data skew can be of several types, including Account, Ownership, and Lookup.
10. Q: When would you use the Data Loader?
A: Data loader is a data management tool that is generally used when you need to upload a large number of records (from 50k to 5 million). It’s also used for preventing data duplication, for exporting data when making a backup, and for saving numerous mapping files.
11. Q: What can become the reason for data loss?
A: Data can be lost in numerous cases, including deleted data by mistake, data loss as a result of issues during integration or data migration, as well as when making changes in picklist types, dates and times, checkboxes, and other alterations.
12. Q: What are the best practices of performing audits of a Salesforce org?
A: Some of the best ways of handling audits and understanding usage of the system is by logging record updates, login history, field changes history, optimizing code, simplifying page layouts by minimizing the number of required fields, making sure that stay up to date, and tracking recent setups by using the features of the Audit Trail. It is also important to conduct audits on a regular basis.
Product Knowledge Salesforce Interview Questions for Admins
13. Q: How are Roles and Profiles distinct from each other?
A: Both the user Roles and Profiles are interconnected, profile assignment to a user is obligatory, role assignment is not.
- Profiles (just as permission sets) are settings and permissions which determine the user’s privileges, i.e. which objects and features the user is permitted to access and what the person with such a profile can do with them (only view, edit, delete, etc).
- Roles, in their turn, define which records and data a specific user has access to. Role hierarchy is needed to restrict the data access of some users or user groups by level. This is also set up using .
14. Q: Which Profiles are there in Salesforce and how do they differ?
A: There exist Standard profiles offered by Salesforce and Custom profiles that are made by users. In their turn, Standard profiles are of these six types:
- Standard User (has the chance to create, read, edit, delete records);
- Solution Manager (usually someone with expertise in the product, introduces solutions in the Customer and Self-service portals plus has create, read, edit, delete rights for own records);
- Marketing User (has the same opportunities as the standard user along with the ability to import leads);
- Contract Manager (a profile type that also has standard CRED, and allows to work with contracts and manage them);
- Read-only (has access to the same objects Standard Users do, but only have the opportunity to view the data);
- System Administrator (this profile can modify and view everything, the person is responsible for customizing and managing the app).
15. Q: What are the benefits of using Permission Sets?
A: Permission sets are an enhanced way to give certain users who are assigned a Profile access to various Salesforce objects and features without the need of giving these permissions to all the users of a certain Profile. Permission sets have similar functionality to Profiles, yet allow a user to have up to 1 thousand permission sets (as opposed to having only one Profile). This means that Permission Sets are much easier to maintain than profile-based permission allocation, especially when it comes to giving only some people access, not everyone in the Profile.
16. Q: What kinds of object types are there in Salesforce? What are custom objects?
A: There are Standard and Custom Objects. Standard ones are offered by Salesforce (f.e. Lead, Account, Opportunity), whereas Custom ones are created by users based on their specific business needs (f.i. Toys Sold, Accessories, Giveaway Items).
17. Q: Which object relations exist in Salesforce and how do they differ?
A: Object relationships determine how information on one object is linked to another.
- Master-detail (the master-detail-subdetail relationship links objects closely, the master record is in control of the detail and subdetail ones in a parent-child format);
- Many-to-many (gives every record of a single object the chance to be linked to numerous records of a different object, and the other way around);
- Lookup (can link two objects, sometimes even with itself, in a child-parent way);
- External lookup (also a child-parent link but used to connect with an external parent item with an external ID);
- Indirect lookup (when a child external object is connected to a custom or standard parent);
- Hierarchical (used only with the User for hierarchy cases and associating several users).
18. Q: What data access levels of security are there in Salesforce?
A: There are several levels of security in Salesforce: the Organization level, the Object level, the Field level, and the Record level.
Salesforce Administrator Interview Questions on Reports and Dashboards
19. Q: What kinds of reports does Salesforce offer?
A: There are four types of reports in Salesforce:
- Tabular Report (can be compared to spreadsheets due to its format of a table, it is commonly used for viewing lists of records);
- Summary Report (is much like the tabular reports, but also gives the opportunity to group data, f.e. by rows, and to make charts);
- Matrix Report (gives the chance for grouping and summarizing the data via columns and rows in the form of a grid);
- Joined Report (allows to create up to 5 subreports via blocks of the report, each with various data views).
20. Q: What are bucket fields and what are they needed for?
A: Bucket fields are used in reports for categorizing and grouping report records simply. This means when using bucketing (fields of the types Picklist, Text, and Number), there’s no need in creating formulas or custom fields.
21. Q: What is the difference between static and dynamic dashboards?
A: Dashboards in Salesforce are used for visually and graphically displaying data from reports.
- Static dashboards (displays data from the perspective of an organization),
- Dynamic dashboards (although it contains the data of many users, this dashboard is used for showing personal user-specific data; what is more, in terms of security, dynamic dashboards will display the user only the data that they have access and permission to view; dynamic dashboards eliminate the necessity to clone dashboards when getting data for each individual).
22. Q: Which components are dashboards made up of?
A: There exist the following dashboard components in Salesforce:
- Charts (displays data using different kinds of charts, including Scatter, Line, Funnel, Vertical Bar, Donut, Horizontal Bar, and Pie),
- Gauge (can expose one or more value, it is handy when you need to see how much more should be completed to reach a goal),
- Metric (for showing only one key value),
- Table (displays data of a report using a table with columns and rows),
- Visual force Pages (allows to customize and create your own dashboard visualization).
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Salesforce Administrator Interview Questions on Workflows and Approvals
23. Q: What is a Workflow and which actions can it perform? What is the difference between immediate and time-dependant Workflows?
A: A Workflow is an automation tool in Salesforce, used for sending auto emails, notifications, creating tasks, and sending outbound messages to external systems. Immediate Workflows fire the action straight away if the conditions are met. Time-dependant ones will trigger according to the assigned schedule, date or time if the conditions are met. Importantly, are not the same.
24. Q: How would you choose when to use Workflows or the Process Builder?
A: Generally, the Process Builder is a more advanced and user-friendly version of Workflows designed to replace them. Workflows have one criteria set which triggers one action per single object. Therefore, it makes sense to use the Process Builder over whenever more than one action is required per object since automation can be done with more than one criteria set. Moreover, the Process Builder has many more actions to select from, including making updates on child items of the Object, unlike Workflows which have only 4 actions. Nevertheless, if you need to send an Outbound Message, then it’s best to choose Workflows.
25. Q: When are Approval Processes applied?
A: are used for getting permission to do something from a manager or person with the designated authority. After getting submitted, the user request can be approved or rejected. For instance, approvals are handy for getting the green light from the manager to give a client a discount or for confirming an employee’s time off.
To Conclude
Finding an experienced and is no simple task. We hope that you’ve found these tips and answers to frequently asked questions when handy!
