Every growing organization hits a wall where Salesforce stops being a plug-and-play CRM and becomes a custom enterprise application.
When your org reaches the point where standard Flow, point-and-click UI, and basic validation rules can no longer handle your business logic, you need a developer. But scaling a Salesforce team often goes wrong during the technical screen. Certificates like PD1 and PD2 are great baselines, but they don't prove someone can architect a scalable solution for a multi-tenant environment.
If you are a CTO, Tech Lead, or technical founder tasked with hiring Salesforce talent, here is how you should actually be screening candidates in 2026.
1. Test for Bulkification & Governor Limits (The Apex Trap)
Salesforce operates in a multi-tenant environment with strict resource limits (Governor Limits). A developer accustomed to traditional server-side languages might write code that works perfectly for a single record but catastrophically fails during a bulk data load.
During an interview, present a basic Apex Trigger scenario. If they write a SOQL query or DML statement inside a for loop, that's your signal to dig deeper.
// Red Flag: Never do this
trigger AccountTrigger on Account (before insert) {
for (Account acc : Trigger.new) {
// Query inside a loop will hit the 100 SOQL limit fast
List<Contact> contacts = [SELECT Id FROM Contact WHERE AccountId = :acc.Id];
}
}
Top-tier candidates will instantly talk about collecting IDs in a Set, querying outside the loop, and using Maps to tie records back together. It should look something like this:
// Bulk-safe: query once, outside the loop
trigger AccountTrigger on Account (before insert) {
Set<Id> accountIds = new Set<Id>();
for (Account acc : Trigger.new) {
accountIds.add(acc.Id);
}
Map<Id, List<Contact>> contactsByAccount = new Map<Id, List<Contact>>();
for (Contact c : [SELECT Id, AccountId FROM Contact WHERE AccountId IN :accountIds]) {
if (!contactsByAccount.containsKey(c.AccountId)) {
contactsByAccount.put(c.AccountId, new List<Contact>());
}
contactsByAccount.get(c.AccountId).add(c);
}
// Now work with the map — one query, no matter how many records are in the batch
}
That's the difference between code that works in the sandbox and code that survives a real data load.
What's the worst governor-limit bug you've caught in a code review? Curious what patterns show up most in practice.
2. Prioritize LWC Over Legacy Tech
If your candidate's primary front-end experience is in Visualforce or Aura components, you are hiring for legacy tech debt.
Modern Salesforce UI development runs on Lightning Web Components (LWC). You want developers who are deeply comfortable with standard web standards:
- Native JavaScript (ES6+)
- Decorators (@api, @track, @wire)
- Understanding the DOM and shadow boundaries
Ask them how they handle asynchronous data in LWC — imperative Apex calls versus relying on standard wire adapters. A candidate who reaches for @wire by default, and only drops to imperative Apex when they need to control when the call fires, understands the model:
// Wire adapter: reactive, fires automatically when accountId changes
@wire(getContacts, { accountId: '$accountId' })
contacts;
// Imperative: fires only when you call it — e.g. after a button click
handleRefresh() {
getContacts({ accountId: this.accountId })
.then(result => { this.contacts = result; })
.catch(error => { this.error = error; });
}
If a candidate can't articulate why you'd pick one over the other, that's worth probing further — not necessarily a dealbreaker, but a gap.
3. Screen for SFDX and CI/CD Fluency
The days of deploying changes using standard Change Sets in the Salesforce UI are over.
If a candidate is only comfortable working out of the Developer Console or the Setup UI, they will struggle to integrate into a modern engineering team. Your screen should verify their fluency in DevOps tooling:
- Salesforce CLI (sf/sfdx): Can they authenticate orgs, retrieve/deploy metadata, and spin up scratch orgs?
- Version Control: Do they understand Git-based workflows and package-based development?
- Pipelines: Have they been exposed to automated deployment tools like GitHub Actions, Copado, or Gearset?
A quick way to test this without a full pipeline setup: ask them to walk through the commands they'd run to spin up a scratch org and push source to it.
Create a scratch org
sf org create scratch --definition-file config/project-scratch-def.json --alias my-scratch-orgPush source to it
sf project deploy start --target-org my-scratch-orgRun Apex tests
sf apex run test --target-org my-scratch-org --result-format human
If they can't get through this without hesitating, they've likely been working in a click-and-deploy world — which won't scale with your team.
The Rest of the Equation: Market Rates and Team Structure
Evaluating technical depth is only half the battle. Knowing how to structure a team (balancing senior architects with junior builders) and knowing what to pay them is the other half.
If you are actively budgeting for a new hire or trying to decide between a freelancer, an agency, or an in-house developer, we've compiled the complete data for this year — 2026 salary benchmarks (from $95/hr freelancers to enterprise agency project costs), where to source pre-vetted talent, and our exact 30/60/90-day onboarding playbook for new Salesforce engineers.
Link to the full breakdown: Link
