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Include Trailhead in Your Hiring Evaluationby Rita LeverettTwitter: @RitaLeverett |
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If you're the person who hires or evaluates candidates for Salesforce positions at your company and you read the title of this article and said to yourself, "What's Trailhead?" then this is for you. Also, if you've heard the name but you're not really familiar with it, this is for you.
Let's say you want to hire a Salesforce Administrator. Your job description and requirements look something like this: An established and rapidly growing Salesforce End-User is seeking a Salesforce Administrator to join their team. You will be joining a team of talented IT professionals and you will: coordinate, manage the scope, development team and implementation of 3rd party apps and system add-ons with Force.com. The ideal candidate is technically inclined and has experience working with end users through support and training, configuring SFDC in line with requirements and leading less experienced Administrators on the team by example, with minimal manager hovering. We are seeking…
Ok, let's think about this. Suppose a candidate who is a Salesforce Certified Advanced Administrator has a Computer Science degree and for the past four years has worked with non-profits using Salesforce NPSP (Non-Profit Success Pack), mostly as a volunteer. There were no business units, although being tiny organizations, nearly all users were Executives. No Marketing Cloud, no Service Cloud. However, the candidate has 237 Trailhead badges. You're thinking, "So what? I need someone with experience". Well, consider this. Trailhead is Salesforce's free online training. A badge is awarded upon completion of a module. Each Trailhead badge requires 20 minutes to 2 hours to complete and each is devoted to one specific concept of Salesforce. Some badges are quizzes only but the vast majority are hands-on, requiring skills such as data import, installing apps from the AppExchange and GitHub, as well as configuration, app building, creating reports and dashboards, security, and clouds such as Marketing Cloud, Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, etc. Doing the math, 237 badges times approximately 1.5 hours per badge is about 356 hours of work. That's a lot of time and effort to be dismissed out of hand. If the candidate supplied a link to their Trailhead profile, use it. Do some analysis and be aware of different types of badges and the level of skill required to earn them. |
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For example: Click All Badges and do a search on Marketing Cloud or other specialty relative to the position. One of the four Marketing Cloud badges earned is highlighted below. Without benefit of job experience, at least this person has pursued official Salesforce training in Marketing Cloud. |
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Click Superbadges to see where the candidate has demonstrated expertise. Yes, I said expertise. Each Superbadge requires several prerequisite badges to even attempt working on them. Superbadges don't play. |
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Each Project represents a real, hands-on resolution of a business use case. Hmm, 42 seems like a lot of projects to me, don't you agree? I wonder if this person has done any reports and dashboards per the above job requirements? |
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Apparently so. Search displays one of the two Reports project badges earned. |
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Finally, to see the overall skill set, take a look at the Skills chart. Hover over the chart to see each skill relative to the whole. |
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So that's it. Of course, Trailhead doesn't replace work experience, but anyone taking the initiative to go through this training on their own time, learning Salesforce Best Practices as they go, has demonstrated valuable skills in finding out how to get things done right. Now you know how to include this information in your candidate evaluation. See if this changes your mind about someone who might be a better fit than you originally thought.
If you're interested, try Trailhead for yourself. If you need help, check out Introduction to Salesforce Trailhead. |
