If you're a Java expert, Salesforce wants you.
The software programming language has been around for decades, but it remains one of the most sought-after skills for tech employees. It's used to create applications that manage financial transactions as well as algorithms that trade on the stock markets. It can also run on multiple platforms, including Windows and Mac, making it a universal language.
The skill is extra valuable at the $136 billion cloud-computing giant Salesforce, given that the company tries to release three new products a year. "There is never going to come a point at Salesforce that we're going to say, 'Oh no, we've got our fill; we're all good.' We can never have enough Java developers," the company's executive vice president of global recruiting, Ana Recio, told Business Insider.
Alongside Java developers, the company is also rushing to hire artificial-intelligence developers and data scientists. "All of our products are embedded with that type of technology, and we are always going to value and hire aggressively for that skill set," Recio added.
Companies across industries are vying for the best technical candidates — the ones who can help their organization thrive in an era of digital transformation. But Salesforce has developed a multipronged hiring strategy meant to maintain its competitive edge.
To find top talent in a competitive field, Salesforce looks beyond technical prowess
Salesforce is looking for people to fill tech roles amid a major battle in corporate America for the talent.
Companies like Amazon and Microsoft are collectively spending billions to retrain their workforces for those positions. And in May, Salesforce signed the White House Pledge to America's Workers, vowing to help 500,000 Americans develop the skills necessary to get a job at Salesforce through its free online learning platform, Trailhead.
Despite the talent war, Salesforce's wide variety of hiring strategies is able to fulfill all its tech-hiring needs, Recio said.
The university outreach program Futureforce pairs interns with mentors at the company and allows them to work on projects that actually make it to production.
Interns are students and recent graduates from schools including the University of California at Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford University. One CMU student spent her summer internship at Salesforce developing products to help clients find customers based on email data.
For middle-market positions, like software engineers, the company maintains an active pipeline of new recruits. And there are ample applications to draw from: Salesforce receives over 1 million résumés a year. Roughly 52% of tech hires also come from referrals from existing employees, according to Recio.
The best candidates are not only skilled coders but also have a "natural curiosity" and are strong problem-solvers, Recio said. Salesforce also seeks people who can "look at data trends regardless of the source and really come away with a conclusion and understand what's actionable about the data," she said. Most important is an applicant's ability to communicate those insights to team members and craft a strategy around it.
Throughout the interview process, Recio and other hiring managers present test cases similar to what applicants would face on the job "so they get a flavor of the sophistication of the code," she said. The ideal candidate is able to suss out hurdles to solving the problem and also to keep the customer — and the experience of using Salesforce's products — top of mind.
The best candidates "will ask a series of questions, and they'll do so in a way that is very collaborative," Recio said. "It's really clear in their communication that they're trying to build a road map" to solving the challenge.
