Hey everyone, 👋 If you are looking forward to knowing about the interview process for securing an internship at Salesforce, then you are at the right place. Here, I am going to cover all my personal experiences from the preliminary test to the HR round.

So basically, I have applied for the position of "Associate System Specialist Intern" at Salesforce via the on-campus hiring process. Initially, I was wondering by looking at the Job Description(JD) about me being ignorant of the Salesforce platform and any related knowledge. But, in the pre-placement talk, I got a clear-cut idea of what my role is going to be if in case I join as an intern.

👉Tip-1: Always do attend pre-placement talks attentively to understand the hiring process, and to get a basic understanding of the company you are aspiring for, and the role you are applying for. (This may also help you a lot in further rounds)

When it comes to Salesforce, the hiring process continued for 2 days successively with results of each round being announced very quickly (within 1-3 hours after every round). There were 5 rounds (In every round, you are expected to have a functioning webcam and microphone, with good internet connectivity):

💥Round-1: HackerRank test consisting of 50 MCQs to be answered in 70 minutes.

It has 5 sections:

• Section 1: 10 questions ( Verbal ability )
• Section 2: 10 questions ( aptitude)
• Section 3: 15 questions ( Java and OOP concepts, few technical questions related to DSA(basic level), time complexity)
• Section 4: 10 questions ( DBMS concepts )
• Section 5: 5 questions ( Regarding Salesforce, which were discussed in the pre-placement talk)

If you have basic knowledge of coding, and Databases, this round can be cracked very easily.

• Because the verbal section consisted of questions like -reading comprehension followed by questions, synonyms, antonyms, rearranging sentences.
• And aptitude section consisted of questions like:
  • if every vowel in the word "DOORSTEP" has to be replaced by the next letter, and every consonant by its previous letter, then how many vowels would be there in the resulting word?
  • if x secured a rank of 13th from the top and 29th from the bottom, then how many students were there in that class?
  • Number series like 2, 6, 12, 20, 30, 42, 56, ___, 90 and etc.
  • And rest were technical MCQs in the next 2 sections.

The shortlisted students from round-1 had a GD the next day.

💥Round-2: Group Discussion of 15-20 minutes

The group discussion was conducted Online in a Google Meet, where people who got shortlisted from various colleges joined to discuss a given topic.

After announcing the topic, 2 minutes were given to jot down few important points and prepare.

The topics were different for different groups.

• For me, the topic was: "Innovation vs Invention, which is more important and why?"

Other groups had topics like:

• Is technology making us less human?
• For a certain role in a company, hiring a fresher vs an experienced person, which is better? etc.

👉Tip-2: Mostly the topics for GDs would be perspective-oriented, that is it depends on how we are approaching the topic. It is advisable to speak neutrally about such topics. And it is also important that you do both speaking and listening, never try to dominate someone, not allowing them to talk. Listen to everyone's perspective, which helps you in giving a better conclusion at the end.

You can always feel free to speak either for the topic or against it. For example, for the topic "Innovation vs Invention, which is important?", all my co-gd-participants were speaking from a perspective of innovation after invention (i.e, about adding features to the existing products), but I was initially talking from a perspective of innovation before invention (i.e, regarding getting new ideas), which lead to confusion during discussion (where people felt I was against the topic). Later, when I recognized at some point of discussion that we had different approaches towards the topic, I took a moment to explain to my co-participants, that it all depends on what situation and time we are dealing with and it cleared the confusion that was held among the group, which gave us a better conclusion.

The shortlisted candidates were sent a mail for technical interview-1.

💥Round-3: Technical Interview-1 for 45-55 minutes

This round was also conducted in Google meet, it was completely a technical based round i.e, all technical questions were covered. The topics included but were not limited to OOPs, DSA, OS, DBMS and problem-solving.

The very first question for me was to introduce myself. The next was about a coding language I am familiar with, and about my technical skills. Then these questions followed (not in order though):

Java and OOPs questions:

• What is Java according to you, and how do you think it is useful?
• Can you explain about Constructor and its use?
• What is the difference between overloading and overriding?
• Can you write an example program reflecting the difference between method overloading and overriding? and explain.
• What is String in Java? What are its characteristics?

Operating Systems (OS related) questions:

• What is a thread according to you? when and why do we use threads?
• What are various sub-sections or parts of a thread? (Like what all does a thread consist of?)
• What is a server and what is a client?
• What is meant by paging?
• (based on my answer for paging) Is paging related to dividing a process or dividing the memory?
• What is meant by Caching? and how is it useful?
• What is the Producer-Consumer problem? and what are its real-world applications? ( Like did you experience that problem anywhere ?)
• Did you experience Fragmentation anytime practically? Or in which situations do you think you might experience it?
• ( based on my previous answer ) Do you know how to deal with such situations where you experience fragmentation practically?
• What is RAID?

Database Management Systems (DBMS and MySQL) questions:

• What is normalization? why do you think it is important?
• What is the difference between a primary key and a unique key?
• Write MySQL queries for creating employee and department tables with primary key and foreign key constraints?
• From the above tables which were created, write a query to display those rows which had employee_ids as even. (MOD(a,b) function helps here)
• Draw an ER diagram with entities Vehicles, their models and insurances and establish relationships between them.
• From the above ER diagram, write a query to display all those vehicle_ids with specified models whose insurance is valid till-date (as of now).
• What are the various join operations in SQL? What are the differences between them?
• What are correlated subqueries and non-correlated subqueries?
• What is indexing? Did you ever use it while creating tables?

problem-solving questions:

• Write a program to take a string as input and check if it is palindrome or not? And explain its time complexity.
• Explain any one of your favourite algorithms, and its working and flow. (I explained Merge Sort).

👉Tip-3: It is better to revise and have a glance at the basics of the topics like OOPs, OS, DBMS, DSA for technical interviews. And I personally advise you to tell something about the topic that you could relate to. Sometimes the exact answer may not strike your mind, but you can start telling something which you can relate to that question, and you may recollect the answer in the meanwhile.

To find questions that were asked to my co-participants, view this google doc.

At the end of the round, I was asked if I have any questions or feedback. I gave feedback thanking the interviewer for giving me a smooth interview experience.

The shortlisted candidates were sent a mail to attend the 2nd technical interview.

💥Round-4: Technical Interview-2 for 30-40 minutes

Here, after my introduction, the interviewer asked me to write a code or logic for a given programming question in a google doc, after solving the question I was also asked to show debugging the code for every iteration to check if the code is working for the given test cases.

The programming question was as follows:

Given a string S, swap the vowels in S as shown:

Example input1: s='hello'

output: s='holle' (Swap 1st vowel with the last, then 2nd vowel with 2nd vowel from last etc.)

Example input2: s='leetcode'

output: s='leotcede'

My logic was as follows:

Then few questions followed:

• What is polymorphism? What are its types?
• What are various types of join operations in SQL?
• Cpp vs python which one do you prefer and why?
• How to design a data structure similar to HashMap in Cpp?
• What are ACID properties?
• What is a relational database?
• Do you think normalization is important? If so, in what form do you think the table should be? (Like should it be in 1NF, 2NF, 2NF, BCNF, 4NF or 5NF)
• What all did you learn apart from your curriculum?

Later, I was asked if I have any questions. I asked questions to the interviewer like...

• What is your role at Salesforce?
• When did you join?
• And how is the work culture there?
• How are you enjoying your work?

And the discussion went on regarding the work at salesforce.

The shortlisted candidates were sent a mail to attend the HR round.

💥Round-5: HR interview round for 30-45 minutes

The HR introduced himself and asked for my introduction. And few questions followed based on my Resume as:

• What are the core values that you rely on?
• If your professors have to describe you in one word, what do you think they say?
• What is the biggest challenge that you have faced during online classes?
• Why did you choose engineering as your stream?
• What are your thoughts about Automation, is it going to reduce employment opportunities?
• Which is your favourite subject till now in engineering? and why?
• What did you learn from data structures? (Like what values can be derived out of them)
• If you have to improve online note sharing and assignment submissions, what is that one feature you could add to make the process very feasible?
• What are your interests and hobbies?
• What are few things that you feel like you have to work and improve on them? (Weaknesses)
• What are the topics on which you wrote blogs till now?
• How did you balance your time for academics and co-curricular activities?
• Finally, do you have any questions related to the role or company etc.? How was your interview experience?

👉Tip-4: Always have a learning attitude. Sometimes failures make you understand where you stand and how you have to improve, so take everything sportively. It helps you shine everywhere... 🔥

Hope you have got a basic understanding of the hiring process of Salesforce. Thank you for reading this blog! Please share it with your friends who need it, and comment "Helpful😍" if this blog helped you in some or the other way.