Salesforce has undergone significant restructuring and redeployment over the last year, much like many of its Big Tech competitors. Part of this restructuring effort has come in the form of layoffs, but another part has come in the form of the creation of new, AI-focused jobs.
According to the company, 20,000 Salesforce employees are now in roles that “didn’t exist a year ago”, with specific insights into which roles are actively being hired for, largely centered around the “builder archetype”.
New Roles for 20,000 Employees
Salesforce announced that the company had been navigating role changes over the past year, making use of what Salesforce calls the ‘Four R Framework’ to do so. This framework comprises the redesigning, reskilling, redeploying, and rebalancing of jobs.
Nathalie Scardino, Salesforce’s President and Chief People Officer, said that this created a whole host of new employment opportunities internally.
“Almost 20,000 employees over the last 12 months are in roles that didn’t exist 12 months ago,” she said. “Every single job has been redesigned.”
Which Jobs Are Hot?
Both Nathalie and Andy Valenzuela, Salesforce’s EVP of Global Rewards, emphasized that although Salesforce’s approach to hiring has largely remained the same – focusing heavily on learning velocity rather than background – they have had to adapt to a new era of agentic careers.
“When I look across the entire suite of roles that we have, we look at builder archetypes,” Nathalie said. “So it doesn’t matter what role you’re being hired into, there is a builder component of it.”
“We’ve invested in a workforce innovation team which is doing a ton of skills distinction across all of our jobs,” Andy said. “They will tell us, ‘wow, do you know across these four distinct jobs there’s one skill difference’. If we can reskill that entire population of those skill gaps, they’ve now gone from being capable of doing one job to doing almost four jobs – or all four of those jobs have become one job.”
Specifically, there are four “hot” AI-centric jobs Salesforce has been actively hiring for: Agentic Managers, Ethical AI designers, Prompt Engineers, and Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs).
Salesforce is aware that the line between product and engineering has gradually been blurring, but MaryAnn Patel, Salesforce’s SVP and GM of IT and HR Service Cloud, explained her thoughts about how this is a good thing.
“Look at the engineering organization,” she said. “If you’re in product, you can engineer. If you’re an engineer, you can create a new product.”
Boomerang Talent
Salesforce’s ‘Four R’ hiring strategy doesn’t just apply to existing or prospective employees. It has also apparently played a part in the boomerang hiring phenomenon – rehiring ex-employees – that the company is currently observing.
“My job is to attract and hire the best people in the world, and that means that you’re gonna come from lots of different places, whether it’s an organization, a company, an experience,” Nathalie said. “Over the last 12 months we’ve welcomed back almost 1,000 boomerangs.”
She claimed that employees may have been drawn back to Salesforce through the company culture, and the opportunity to be directly involved with cutting-edge technology. That being said, there are of course many reasons why someone might choose one company over another – pay, benefits, flexibility, opportunity for advancement – and culture is just one piece of that pie. ‘Builders’ will likely be working with cutting-edge technology of one kind or another, wherever they work.
Final Thoughts
Salesforce hasn’t always got it right when it comes to its hiring decisions, and it will make mistakes in the future. However, it is also clearly aware of how jobs need to change as AI continues to develop, making it at least a little easier for employees to adapt at the speed the company needs to.
Salesforce is also currently hiring for more than 1,400 roles, so if you’ve ever wanted a way into the Mothership, maybe now is the time to try.
