How to List Salesforce Skills on Your Resume

Few maxims about business remain true across industries and sectors, but from the tiniest mom-and-pop bodega to heavy hitters like Boeing or Tesla, collecting and organizing information about your customers is always helpful.

That’s probably the reason more than 150,000 businesses use Salesforce, a cloud-based customer relationship management system that’s infinitely customizable to fit any business. Whether you’re running a retail operation or a non-profit, a B2B service or an auto parts factory, you can potentially build your digital operations with Salesforce. Salesforce hosts applications included with the platform or ones custom-built by trained Salesforce developers.

Why Do Businesses Use Salesforce?

Salesforce is a powerful CRM tool. Listing your experience with it on your resume correctly can make you a more valuable candidate.

Salesforce is attractive to businesses for a variety of reasons:

• Salesforce is SaaS: SaaS or “Software as a Service” means Salesforce as a company handles all the bug fixes and functionality updates automatically by updating their applications on the cloud.
• Salesforce is a PaaS: By utilizing a subscription model, Salesforce allows developers access to its platform to build custom applications that go beyond the functionality of the ones created by Salesforce. This allows developers to focus on the functionality of a given app within a framework that has the baseline programming for security and interoperability already established.
• Salesforce is IaaS: Salesforce offers its clients “infrastructure as a service,” meaning your fee includes space on servers to host the applications and the data your business generates using them. You’ll never be responsible for maintaining onsite servers or the hassle caused by mechanical or OS failures in the system.

What Is Salesforce Trailhead?

Salesforce Trailhead is a robust certification and education platform available to anyone.

Salesforce, because their product is so versatile and expansive, offers tons of trainings online where Salesforce users can earn certifications and badges indicating various levels of proficiency with the program.

Unlike giving a list of resume tips for presenting your skills in a program like Excel, for instance, every Salesforce-focused resume will be a little different depending on what job you’re applying for in which industry.

That’s why you should take advantage of the software vendor’s robust online training and certification system called Trailhead. If you’re looking for a job using Salesforce, you should be exploring this platform and earning badges and certifications in the areas pertaining to the industry you’re seeking a job in.

If you are applying to be a Salesforce administrator or developer, obviously you’ll want more detailed information on your Salesforce expertise than if you’re applying to be a sales executive. For end users of Salesforce, i.e. the sales people and customer service representatives who use the platform constantly in the line of duty, you’ll simply have to indicate how familiar you are with using the system.

How Do You Present Salesforce Skills and Certifications on Your Resume?

According to one of the Web’s foremost Salesforce gurus, employers are looking for at least three certification badges on your resume. Here are some other tips from David Liu, technical Salesforce architect for Google and administrator of the Salesforce education site SFDC99.com:

• Add Salesforce Lightning as a Skill: This newest version of Salesforce is poised to replace Salesforce Classic, so if you can show you’re familiar with its features, you’ll be ahead of the game.
• Make sure you include the number of users on systems you’ve administered or built before: Employers want to gauge how big of an operation you’re comfortable with.
• Describe specific problems you solved with your skills: Details are important – especially if you can quantify the time, money or other resources you saved the company as a result of your Salesforce intervention.
• Include specific AppExchange app experience: All employers who use Salesforce will use at least some of these existing apps on the platform. Your potential employer may see you’re experienced with apps they already use, making you a more attractive candidate.

Also, you can learn more from this great Salesforce resource about how the platform can help sales managers and gain some insight on the kind of skills you should present when interviewing for a sales or management job (as opposed to jobs listed below focused on maintaining and customizing the platform).

What Are Salesforce Careers?

Here are several different Salesforce-centered job positions and a little bit about what they do, according to the Salesforce Trailhead site:

• Salesforce Administrator: These employees work with stakeholders to optimize and customize the salesforce platform, allowing your business to get the most out of its features.
  • Certifications recommended for this position from Salesforce Trailhead:
    • Certified Administrator
    • Advanced Administrator
    • CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) Specialist
    • Marketing Cloud Administrator
    • Platform App Builder
• Salesforce Architect: These are the folks who use creative problem solving to design and configure your Salesforce system to serve the business goals of the company. “They’re big-picture thinkers and in-depth problem solvers who take pride in designing systems that can stand up to anything,” Salesforce states via the Trailhead website.
  • Salesforce Certified Technical Architect and Solution Architect Trailhead Certifications (certification paths differ slightly between these two specializations of architects):
    • Application Architect
    • B2B Solution Architect
    • B2C Solution Architect
    • B2C Commerce Architect
    • Heroku Architecture Designer
    • System Architect
    • Technical Architect
• Salesforce Developer: These professionals use their “programmatic and declarative” skills to build and customize applications on the Salesforce Lightning platform. You should have familiarity with JavaScript and be fluent in Apex and Visualforce, Salesforce’s proprietary coding system.
  • Credentials on Trailhead recommended for Salesforce developers:
    • B2C Commerce Developer
    • Industries CPQ Developer
    • JavaScript Developer I
    • Marketing Cloud Developer
    • OmniStudio Developer (OmniStudio is Salesforce’s app building environment)
    • Platform App Builder
    • Platform Developer I
    • Platform Developer II
• Salesforce Marketer: As a Salesforce marketer, you use the platform to develop targeted marketing campaigns and help shepherd customers through their journey.
  • The Salesforce marketing credentials recommended for Salesforce marketer include:
    • Marketing Cloud Administrator
    • Marketing Cloud Consultant
    • Marketing Cloud Developer
    • Marketing Cloud Email Specialist
    • Pardot Consultant (Pardot is Salesforce’s automated marketing application)
    • Pardot Specialist
• Salesforce Consultant: These employees work with business clients and sales executives to figure out exactly what the business needs from the platform, and then helps optimize it to deliver that solution.
  • The following are some certifications recommended for Salesforce consultants:
    • Experience Cloud Consultant
    • Education Cloud Consultant
    • Tableau CRM and Einstein Discovery Consultant (parsing and analyzing sales data)
    • Field Service Consultant
    • Marketing Cloud Consultant
    • Nonprofit Cloud Consultant
    • OmniStudio Consultant
    • Pardot Consultant
    • Sales Cloud Consultant
    • Service Cloud Consultant
• Salesforce Designer: Optimize the user experience and make their workflows more intuitive, efficient and aesthetically pleasing.
  • The following is a certification recommended for Salesforce designers
    • User Experience (UX) Designer

REFERENCES

Salesforce.com

“Top 10 Salesforce Resume Rules”

David Liu

July 2018

SFDC99.com