Salesforce Fresher Interview Questions
Salesforce makes cloud software that companies use to manage their customers: who they are, what was sold to them, and what help they asked for. As a fresher, prepare to explain basics through that kind of data: a customer entered twice, contacts that belong to an account, many companies sharing one application. Bring college projects where you built something for a person who was not technical. What to show here: care for customer data and the people who use it. Each question below has what the interviewer is checking, an answer frame and a sample spoken answer to adapt.
1. Tell me about a project where the person you built for was not technical, such as a shop owner or a college office, and you had to work out what they really needed.
- Describe the person and their daily work.
- Explain how you learned what they needed.
- Show where your first idea was wrong.
- Share what you built and how they used it.
“In my third year I built a small system for my uncle's repair shop to keep track of customers. I first planned a large database with many screens. Then I sat in the shop for a day and saw that he only wrote down a name, a phone number and what was repaired, usually while the customer was standing there. So I built one screen with three fields and a search by phone number. Later I added a reminder list for customers who had not come back. He still uses it, and your result. I learned to watch before designing.”
Weak answers describe the technology at length and never mention what the user did with it.
2. Describe a time you had to learn a platform or language you had never used, quickly, in order to deliver something during an internship or a course.
- Describe what you had to learn and the deadline.
- Explain your plan for learning.
- Show where you got stuck and how you got help.
- Share what you delivered.
“During my internship I was asked to add a feature to an application built on a platform I had never seen, and I had two weeks. I gave the first two days to the official tutorials, building the small examples myself instead of only reading. Then I read existing code in the project that did something similar. When I was stuck on how the platform saved records, I asked a senior engineer one clear question after trying for an hour by myself. I delivered the feature with tests, and your result. I kept my notes as a guide for the next intern.”
Weak answers claim they picked it up with no difficulty, or waited to be taught step by step.
3. The same customer has been entered twice, once as Anil Kumar and once as A. Kumar with the same phone number. How would you find likely duplicates in a large list of customer records?
- Clean the fields first: lower case, trimmed spaces, phone in one format.
- Group records by a strong key such as phone or email.
- Compare names inside each group with a similarity measure.
- Suggest merges to a person instead of merging by yourself.
“Comparing every record with every other would be too slow for a large list. First I would clean the data, so phone numbers have one format and names are in lower case. Then I would group records that share a strong key, like the same phone number or email, using a hash map. Inside each small group I would compare names with a similarity measure such as edit distance, and also check whether the initials match. I would not merge records by myself, because two real people can share a phone. I would show likely pairs to a person and let them decide.”
Weak answers look only for exact matches, or merge records automatically without a person checking.
4. A business account has many contacts, and each contact has many logged calls. How would you design the tables, and what happens to the calls when a contact is deleted?
- Create one table each for accounts, contacts and calls.
- Link them with foreign keys from child to parent.
- Discuss the delete options: block, cascade or keep with an empty link.
- Choose based on what the business needs to remember.
“I would make three tables. Each contact row holds the id of its account, and each call row holds the id of its contact. These are foreign keys, so the database refuses a call that points to a contact that does not exist. For deletion there are choices. Cascade would delete the calls along with the contact, but a business usually wants to keep the history of who was called. So I would prefer a soft delete, where the contact is marked as deleted and hidden, and the calls stay. I would add an index on the foreign key columns.”
Weak answers put everything in one wide table, or have no view on what should happen when a record is deleted.
5. Many companies use the same application and the same database, and each must see only its own customers. At a basic level, how would you keep their data apart?
- Explain a company id on every row.
- Take that id from the logged-in session, never from the request.
- Put the filter in one shared layer so no query can forget it.
- Test by trying to read another company's record.
“Every row would carry the id of the company that owns it. When a user logs in, the server knows their company from the session, and every query adds a filter on that id. The important part is that this id must never come from the browser, because a user could change it. I would also not trust each developer to remember the filter. I would put it in one data access layer that every query passes through. Then I would write a test where a user of one company asks for a record of another company by its id and must get nothing.”
Weak answers filter in the browser or trust an id sent by the client.
6. A sales manager wants to see the ten largest open deals out of a very long list. Why might you not sort the whole list, and what would you use instead?
- State the cost of sorting everything.
- Describe keeping a small heap of the ten largest seen so far.
- Compare the two costs.
- Mention that a database index on the amount can answer this directly.
“Sorting the whole list works, but it does more than we need, because we only want ten items. I would go through the list once and keep a min heap of size ten. For each deal, if it is larger than the smallest in the heap, I replace that one. At the end the heap holds the ten largest. The cost depends mostly on the length of the list, with only a small extra factor for the heap. In a real system the deals are in a database, so an index on the amount lets the database return the top ten without reading every row.”
Weak answers say sort and take the first ten, with no thought about the size of the list.
7. While testing your change, you notice that your new log lines print customers' phone numbers and email addresses into a log file. What do you do?
- Stop the change from going further.
- Tell your lead at once, including where the logs went.
- Remove or mask the data in the code and help clean the logs.
- Add a check so it does not happen again.
“I would treat it as serious even in a test environment, because logs get copied and kept for a long time. First I would make sure the change is not merged or deployed further. Then I would tell my lead right away and be clear that it was my code, and which log files may hold the data. I would change the code to log only the record id, or a masked form of the value. I would help whoever owns the logs to remove the lines. Afterwards I would suggest a check in code review or an automated scan for personal fields in log statements.”
Weak answers fix the code quietly and tell nobody, or say that it does not matter in a test environment.
8. Salesforce builds software that helps companies look after their customers. Why do you want to begin your career working on business software like this?
- Say in plain words what the software does.
- Share an experience that showed you why customer records matter.
- Connect to the engineering problems you want to learn.
- Say how you want to grow.
“When I built a small customer list for my uncle's shop, I saw how much a business depends on remembering its customers. A missed call back is a lost sale. This software does that for companies of every size, for sales, service and marketing teams. I find that useful in a way I can explain to my family. The engineering also interests me: many companies share one system, each one changes it to fit its own business, and their data must stay apart. I want to learn how to build software that is that flexible and still reliable.”
Weak answers cannot say what the product does, or speak only about the size of the company.
No figures on this page: pay depends on the level, the city and the offer in front of you. When the offer comes, the free salary negotiation script helps with that part.
The questions above are the prep. On the real call, ClapAssist helps with the ones you did not practice.
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