June 11, 2020 | Chad Stewart | Vice President, Global SaaS Support Services
When I first entered the Salesforce workforce, I was thrilled by the opportunity to join a large and fast-growing market community. With every new certification I earned, came ten more unsolicited recruiter contacts. As my career progressed from individual contributor to a leader of teams and practices, the barrage of online solicitations by recruiters has never let up. I’m sure many of you can relate.
Having seen this play out from both sides – being recruited and doing the recruiting myself – I can attest that skilled Salesforce talent is especially hard to find and retain. We are all trying to attract, upskill, promote, and retain the best people, and the demand continues to outpace the supply of qualified candidates.
I recently embarked on a project to assess the Salesforce talent market from the vantage point of a Salesforce Managed Services Provider (MSP). I was not only surprised by what I learned, I grew more convinced than ever that managed services can provide a more enduring and less costly option for enterprises that need to maintain or ramp up their Salesforce instances.
Here are the challenges I see enterprises facing today:
Challenge #1: Hiring Is Slow
Surely everyone can relate to this: you’ve crafted the perfect job description to entice someone with the exact skills and culture fit for your organization. But then your brilliant posting sits idle and only a few applicants trickle in. In this market, you need to actively, rather than passively, recruit!
According to one study, organizations take 42 days on average to hire a technical delivery professional. Finding, vetting, and then negotiating with the right resource for a Salesforce role requires patience and dedication. But even after the ink on the hiring contract has dried, there may be problems ahead.
Challenge #2: Even a Successful Hire May Leave
Within the same study cited above, researchers found on average that 22% of new hires leave within the first 45 days! After you find your ideal candidate and put her or him through 45 days of onboarding and systems training, there remains a 1 in 5 chance that the individual leave. PWC estimates that losing an employee costs between 50–150% of their annual salary.
The alarming reality is that skilled Salesforce developers and architects are always open to the role that provides them with the greatest life balance, learning and certification opportunities, and upward career progression. As I related at the start, as you plod along with your own search, candidates are inundated with options. According to the Harvard Business Review, within their first six months, 33% of new hires look for a job.
Challenge #3: The Market Just Keeps Growing
Ranked as one of Forbes’s most innovative companies, Salesforce continues to grow its customer base and solution offerings. According to Salesforce, 150,000 companies currently use its products. As that number grows annually, even in our current economic downturn, both experienced and entry-level Salesforce professionals will have bountiful opportunities within companies of all sizes.
How much growth is expected? A recent IDC White Paper found that Salesforce and its ecosystem are expected to enable the creation of 4.2 million jobs worldwide by 2024. Earlier this year, Salesforce predicted the creation of 300,000 new jobs this year alone. Even slowed, this incredible expansion presents an interesting demand problem.
In recent years, Salesforce has focused on increasing training opportunities, but the resource scarcity does not appear to be diminishing anytime soon. How can the supply of smart and talented technologists keep up with this demand?
Challenge #4: Salaries Are High and Climbing
As any Econ 101 professor will tell you, when demand exceeds supply, prices increase. According to one recent salary survey, enterprises are paying an average of $101K to an Administrator, $122k to a Consultant, $126K to a Developer, and $143K to an Architect. But this only tells part of the story.
With so many organizations competing and trying to tempt resources away from their current employers, recruiters are using hiring bonuses and higher than average salary bumps as big hiring carrot. According to the Mason Frank Salary Survey, between 2016 and 2019, there has been a 3% increase in the salary expectations for entry-level Salesforce developers and a 6% increase for experienced resources.
Those looking for the “easy button” to hiring often find themselves speaking with one of many talent placement firms. These third-party recruiting companies have grown with Salesforce and offer interview-ready candidates across a variety of skill sets. However, the cost is often 20-30% of the placed employee’s first-year compensation. With this added cost, you still run the risks that the employee will leave after a short tenure.
Conclusion: Consider Managed Services Instead
Salesforce expertise is one of the most in-demand skills in the marketplace today. The hiring deck is stacked in favor of the candidate, and there is little that hiring organizations can do about that in the foreseeable future. Your mission to find quality Salesforce resources will likely be expensive, time-consuming, and often frustrating.
But it doesn’t have to be. If you are an enterprise looking to implement new Salesforce features, scale your Salesforce delivery capacity to meet business needs, or simply maintain your implementation, you should consider the benefits of a Managed Services Provider (MSP) over internal staffing.
As a Salesforce Partner and MSP, Spinnaker Support provides clients with access to flexible service arrangements that provide the right resources, in the right capacities, at the right times. We offer a range of managed service packages and consulting capabilities to ensure long term platform adoption and success – all at a price point designed to drive long-term partnerships.
Spinnaker Support removes the above challenges because:
- Our seasoned Salesforce experts have experience built on servicing dozens of Salesforce implementations
- Our teams can fulfill the widest variety of Salesforce functions, from administration through development
- We can immediately start to solve your issues and will work on your timeframe
- We offer flexible service packages at a reasonable price
Whether you need part-time Admin Assistance, help with managing and developing complex solutions, or full agile team delivery, we enable organizations to focus on making an impact, and not searching for scarce resources. Check out our service pages or contact us directly to discuss how we can fill your Salesforce skills gap.
Don’t miss my follow-up post on this topic, which will discuss how Spinnaker Support is attracting and keeping world-class Salesforce resources in this challenging market.
