Given the numerous roadblocks, Salesforce Developers often spend a lot of time worrying about how to prove they know their craft. Some focus on certs, others build side projects, and many spend hours preparing for technical interview questions in the hope of demonstrating their expertise.
But according to Salesforce MVP, author, and hiring manager Paul Battisson, many developers may be preparing for the wrong test entirely. While many candidates might assume interviews are designed to assess how much they know, Paul mentioned that experienced hiring managers are usually looking for something else – how a developer approaches a problem when they immediately don’t know the answer. We spoke with Paul to take a closer look at how developers can navigate this.
The Best Candidates Can Explain Their Trade-Offs
According to Paul, experienced interviewers are rarely looking for candidates to recite platform facts from memory, but are trying to better understand how a developer approaches a problem, evaluates their options, and justifies their decisions.
“A good sign someone knows what they’re doing is if they walk through a design question with whys and explanations,” he explained. “For example, we have used this pattern or this piece of technology for these reasons. Here are the benefits and trade-offs for this, but I think it is the most appropriate for this use case because…”
As most Salesforce development decisions are rarely black and white, the emphasis on those trade-offs becomes really important. There are often multiple ways to solve issues, each with different implications for scalability, security, or user experience.
Paul recalled one interview question he frequently used around roll-up summaries and Salesforce’s platform architecture, where the actual goal was never to see whether a candidate immediately knew the answer. One candidate, for example, initially got the question wrong, but continued exploring different possibilities, responding to prompts, and explaining their reasoning throughout the discussion. Eventually, they arrived at the correct conclusion.
He also mentioned that another candidate simply answered, “Because Salesforce says so.” And while the answer itself wasn’t the issue, the inability to explain the reasoning behind it was.
“I would probe them and say, ‘well what about this?’” Paul explained. “The first candidate was willing to talk through their thinking. The second wasn’t.”
For hiring managers, this is an important approach that demonstrates how they are likely to approach unfamiliar challenges once they’re actually on the job, beyond just knowing a particular feature or platform behavior.
Why Technical Reasoning Is Becoming More Valuable
What makes Paul’s valuable advice interesting is that it extends beyond just an interview – the ability to explain technical decisions clearly is increasingly becoming a core part of the Salesforce Developer role itself. While these qualities are often grouped under the banner of “soft skills”, they’re also deeply technical skills in their own right.
Paul said: “When a customer asks you something, you’ve got to be able to think, well, what should I do? But why should I do that? Is there another way of doing it?”
This thought process becomes more important when developers are reviewing existing solutions or making architectural decisions – as it’s easy to look at a piece of functionality and assume it wasn’t built correctly, but understanding and explaining the context behind why is a more complicated story.
“We like to go into other people’s environments and say, ‘Well, this is ridiculous, why have they built that?’ But what’s actually important is to think, well, why have they done that at the time they’ve done it?”
As we’re all aware, AI is changing the developer landscape massively. Take vibe coding, for example – now very capable of generating code and accelerating delivery (as long as it’s used and governed correctly). With these advancements, it could be the case that developers are being valued less for their ability to produce technical output and more for their ability to apply their judgment.
As Paul put it, “People don’t make bad choices on purpose.” So understanding choices, communicating them clearly, and making informed decisions about the next steps are in themselves valuable skills. And if recent conversations around the evolving Salesforce Developer role are anything to go by, those qualities may only become more important in the years ahead.
Final Thoughts
For Salesforce Developers, the biggest interview mistake may not be lacking certifications, experience, or even the perfect answer to a technical question – it may be assuming that hiring managers are primarily testing what you know rather than how you think.
As Paul’s experiences suggest, the strongest candidates are often the ones willing to explore a problem, explain their reasoning, and justify their decisions. Those qualities are not only really helpful in interviews but increasingly reflect what the role itself demands.
