Interview Prep Guide: Common Salesforce Admin and Developer Interview Questions

Landing a job in the Salesforce ecosystem means joining a platform that powers the world’s leading companies. The Salesforce ecosystem offers incredible career paths, but preparing for the technical deep-dives can feel daunting. Whether you’re configuring flows as an Admin or writing triggers as a Developer, your interview performance hinges on mastering core concepts. We’ve compiled the most common and challenging questions for both roles, giving you a perfect guide to approach your interviews with confidence.

Essential Salesforce Admin Interview Questions

Admin roles are centred around configuring, maintaining and customising the platform without code. Interviewers will often focus on your knowledge of declarative automation, security and data management.

Core Platform & Configuration

When discussing user access, be ready to clearly explain the difference between a profile and a permission set. Acknowledge that profiles define a user’s base level of access (like object visibility), while permission sets extend a user’s permissions.

• Know the difference between Developer, Developer Pro, Partial Copy and Full, and when you’d use each (e.g. Full for performance testing).
• You’ll also need to demonstrate environment management expertise, so be prepared to explain what a Sandbox is and all the different types.

For example, an interviewer may ask: ‘When would you use a Validation Rule versus a Formula Field?’
They would be looking for answer similar to this ‘The key distinction is action. Validation Rules enforce data quality by preventing a record save, whereas Formula Fields are read-only fields that calculate a value upon viewing.’

Security & Access Deep Dive

Security is non-negotiable. Therefore you must be able to explain the Salesforce Security Model and how it works from top to bottom.

• Start with the broadest access controller, the Organisation-Wide Defaults (OWD).
• Then proceed through the role hierarchy, sharing rules, and finally manual sharing.
• Always remember that profiles and permission sets handle object and field-level security.

A common follow-up question related to OWD could be ‘What’s the difference between Public Read/Write and Controlled by Parent?’.

Make sure to focus your answer on ‘Controlled by Parent,’ which is crucial in a Master-Detail relationship, where the child record inherits sharing from its parent.

Mastering Automation

• The shift to Flow is paramount, be ready to compare and contrast Workflow Rules, Process Builder and Flow.
• Highlight that Flow is the current best-practice tool for all automation tasks (including screens, loops and external actions), and that the legacy tools (Workflow/Process Builder) should be avoided for new development.

A high-level Flow question could be, ‘Give an example of when you would use a ‘fast field update’ in a record-triggered flow’.

The answer is simple, use this option when you only need to update the triggering record itself, as it runs before the record is saved, making it faster and preventing unnecessary database operations.

Technical Salesforce Developer Interview Questions

Developer interviews heavily test your knowledge of Apex, Lightning Web Components (LWC), and system limits. You must demonstrate an understanding of best practices, asynchronous processing and efficient data handling.

Apex Programming & Best Practices

Firstly, you must understand the platform’s constraints.

• What are Governor Limits and why are they important?
• Define them as runtime limitations enforced by the multi-tenant architecture, to ensure resource fairness.
• Always cite critical examples like the 100 SOQL query limit per transaction.

When writing secure code, you’ll be asked to explain the difference between with sharing and without sharing keywords in an Apex class. Explain that with sharing respects the user’s record-level permissions (OWDs, Sharing Rules), while without sharing runs in system mode, ignoring those record-level restrictions.

A foundational technical question could be ‘Describe the order of execution for a Salesforce record save’. To answer this you should memorise the sequence, you must detail the steps from Before Triggers and Validation Rules to the final Commit to the database, including when Workflow Rules, Process Builders and Flows fire.

Asynchronous & Data Handling

You need to know how to handle large data sets and long-running operations. Be ready to detail When would you use Future Methods, Queueable Apex, and Batch Apex?

• Batch Apex is for processing large records (50,000+) in chunks.
• Queueable Apex is for asynchronous operations that require chaining or complex data types (prefer this over Future).
• Future Methods are for simple fire-and-forget callouts.

A core querying concept is ‘What is the primary difference between SOQL and SOSL?’ Answer by stating that SOQL queries data from a single object based on record fields, while SOSL performs text-based searches across multiple objects simultaneously.

Lightning Web Components (LWC)

LWC is the current standard, you must know its fundamentals.

What is the purpose of the @api decorator in LWC? The @api decorator makes a property or method public, allowing a parent component to set its value. Crucially, these properties are reactive.

To demonstrate advanced component communication, be ready to answer ‘How do you communicate between non-parent/child components in LWC?’ The standard answer is the Lightning Message Service (LMS) channel, which acts as a global publisher/subscriber hub.

Finally, explain the data layer: Explain the wire service in LWC. The wire service is a reactive function that fetches, streams and caches data from a Salesforce server, making it the preferred, efficient way to call Apex methods and standard UI API services.

Final Tips for Interview Success

No matter the role, remember these universal tips to stand out:

• Be Prepared to Explain Why: Don’t just list a tool; explain why you chose it (e.g., “I’d use an After-Insert Trigger because the validation rules have already executed, and I need the record ID for the subsequent logic”).
• Use Real-World Examples: Instead of just defining a concept, share a brief story about how you used it to solve a business problem in a previous project.
• Bulkify Your Code (Developers): Always answer Apex questions with an emphasis on bulkification and avoiding queries or DML inside loops—it shows a responsible understanding of the multi-tenant platform.

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