Want to Work at Salesforce? Here Are the Degrees You’ll Need.

Imagine your first day at a new job. After a warm welcome from HR and your manager, you might expect a tour around the office, introductions to your teammates, an employee orientation, and onboarding meetings.

But if your new job is at Salesforce—one of the world’s leading cloud-based software companies—you’ll spend your first afternoon doing volunteer work. This service mindset is a core part of the company’s culture, with employees given up to seven days of paid time off to volunteer for causes of their choice.

The opportunity to help others is one of the many perks—or rewards as the company calls them—of working at Salesforce. The organization may not have a cafeteria like tech giants Google and Facebook do, but it offers benefits such as a commitment to pay equality, stock purchase program, education reimbursement, and adoption and surrogacy assistance. It’s no wonder then that Salesforce ranked second on both LinkedIn’s 2019 list of top 50 companies in the U.S. and Fortune’s 2019 list of the 100 best companies to work for.

Are you thinking of pursuing a career at Salesforce? Read on to learn more about the degrees you’ll need to help you land a job at the company, as well as tips on how to become part of the force.

A brief review of Salesforce’s account

Salesforce is the brainchild of Marc Benioff, who started the company “in a rented apartment in 1999 with the goal of making enterprise software as easy to use as a website like Amazon.” It began as a customer relationship management software meant to bring companies and customers together, heralding the days of the software as a service model. The organization then expanded into cloud services and has since acquired many companies, including data visualization platform Tableau and integration software company MuleSoft.

The company has 35,000 employees across the globe, including in its Salesforce Tower headquarters in San Francisco, California, and offices in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Israel, Japan, and Morocco, among other locations. Salesforce reported earnings of $4 billion in August 2019.

An inside look at the Salesforce family

Salesforce employees make up teams in sales, marketing, IT, tech and product, finance and legal, and customer success. Based on data from Glassdoor, the organization pays its employees well, especially those in senior positions and tech roles, though not as generous as companies like Apple or Netflix.

Among the highest-paid roles at Salesforce include the following, listed by average base salary:

• Lead software engineer: $177,050
• Senior product manager: $167,037
• Senior systems engineer: $146,806
• Strategic account manager: $140,921
• Product marketing manager: $135,913
• Finance manager: $135,747
• Product manager: $132,570
• Customer success manager: $131,570
• Software engineer: $126,773
• QA engineer: $121,360

Salesforce’s culture emphasizes blazing a trail through integrity, transparency, alignment, and accountability. The company values customer success, relationships built on trust, thinking differently and innovating, and fostering a sense of equality.

Want to blaze your trail at Salesforce? Here are the degrees you’ll need.

Exploring the Salesforce jobs site reveals various job listings in different areas—from marketing and finance to products and technology.

Finance.

In the field of finance, Salesforce has roles available for accountants, finance analysts, finance business leads, and finance and strategy managers. These positions entail managing budgeting and forecasting processes, analyzing financial results, creating financial models, and providing strategic insight into financial operations.

A degree in accounting, economics, or finance will equip you with the necessary skills for the job.

Marketing.

In the marketing arena, Salesforce has positions for marketing analysts, customer marketing specialists, and marketing managers. You’ll be responsible for administering marketing technologies and platforms, building and maintaining customer relationships, and developing marketing operations policies and procedures.

To do the job, you’ll need a degree in marketing or marketing analytics. If you want to up your chances, you can even get an MBA with a marketing analytics specialization.

Products and technology.

When it comes to products and technology, Salesforce is looking for full-stack software engineers, big data software engineers, security architects, security engineers, data center engineers, site reliability engineers, and data scientists. Here, you’ll have the opportunity to develop innovative features and maintain a massive systems engineering platform; ensure the platform’s speed, security, and reliability; and preserve customizations and integrations for every release.

Earning a degree in computer science, information technology, or information systems is essential for success in the role.

Other ways to blaze a trail: Join the Futureforce

For students, Salesforce has summer internships available. Interns work on real projects that go into production, are assigned a manager and paired with a mentor, learn new skills through guided learning paths, and receive seven days of paid volunteer time off.

Meanwhile, a way in for recent graduates is through new grad positions. Programs are available to develop entry-level talent into associate product managers, solution engineers, and customer success experts.

Trailblazing tips to help you get a job at Salesforce

To help job seekers get hired at Salesforce, the company outlines its hiring process, complete with valuable tips for each stage. It even has a dedicated site for candidate resources to support applicants in preparing for interviews.

Ana Recio, executive vice president of global recruiting at Salesforce, shared some advice to score a job at the company, including being able to articulate your successes and failures, and how a role at the organization fits into your career journey. Be prepared with specific examples of projects you worked on, the scale of those projects, the collaboration involved, and the outcomes.

“Candidates should demonstrate that they’re a part of a larger community—a family—so we look for those themes in their responses and if they have a desire to make an impact both internally as well as in their community,” Recio said. “It is always great when candidates are able to speak to our values, understand what resonates with them the most, and provide personal examples of that type of contribution.”

(Last Updated on February 26, 2024)

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