Salesforce Admins Podcast

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, Founder and Principal Consultant for Throughline HR LLC, and William Walsh, Salesforce and AI Recruitment Lead at Harvey Nash.
Join us as we chat about what Salesforce employers are looking for in new hires and how to get your career started.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh.
How the Salesforce Admin job market has changed
Over the past few years, the role of the admin has changed a lot. It's no longer about how many certifications you have or how many users you can manage. While those skills are still important, being a great Salesforce Admin is much more about how you put that knowledge into action to support core business processes and generate value for your organization.
So how do you stand out from the crowd? That's what I wanted to talk about with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli and William Walsh. As recruiters, they see the Salesforce Admin job market from both sides: what it's like when you're looking for a role and what employers are asking for when they hire.
Increasingly, it's not just about what you can do in Salesforce, but how you can connect it to the business and make an impact.
Talk about business impact
The number one thing that Maria looks for in a Salesforce Admin is requirements literacy. "It's not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine-tune that," she says. "Push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision, knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI."
Showing you have that skill is tricky, but it starts with how you talk about your experience. Are you describing features, or are you talking about the benefits? Don't just list outcomes; talk about impact. You need to show that you can think bigger than what you're building and understand how it fits with larger organizational goals.
The power of showing up
William urges job seekers to spend real, face-to-face time in the Salesforce community. At this point, everybody has shiny, AI-polished LinkedIn profiles and resumes. But meeting someone and making a connection with them can be so much more powerful than sitting in front of your computer mass-applying to every job opening you come across.
"This ecosystem is super welcoming, and everybody wants to see everybody succeed," William says. "So go to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of the people they know."
Maria and William have a ton of great tips for interviews and navigating the Salesforce Admin job market, so make sure to listen to the full episode. And while you're at it, subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
The Salesforce admin job market looks a lot different than it did a few years ago. So, what are employers actually looking for right now? And how do you make sure your resume, experience, and interview skills line up with that? Well, today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli, founder of Throughline HR, and William Walsh, who leads Salesforce and AI recruitment at Harvey Nash. We get into why certifications alone aren't enough, how industry experience can help you stand out, and why curiosity and communication matter so much once you get into the interview. So, whether you're looking for your first admin job or your next admin, we're also going to tell you about where it's worth spending your time. With that, let's get Maria and William on the podcast. So, Maria and William, welcome to the podcast.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Thank you so much for having.
William Walsh:
Thank you. Thank you for having us.
Mike:
This is going to be exciting. I have not had two people on in the job space ever, so I go from zero to two, which is smart. But Maria, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about what you do in the job recruiting, job placement space.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely. Well, thanks so much for having us. My name is Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli. I am the founder and CEO and principal consultant for Throughline HR LLC. And very much in the vein of what we're talking about, this is my new solopreneurship venture launched in the last two months in response to everything that's happening in the job market. I've done every side of the recruiting, staffing, hired and being hired from doing Salesforce recruiting at Robert Half, supporting them, Protiviti, staff augmentation to going in-house with Vicasso, formerly Internet Creations, helping build both professional services and their ISV side. I worked at Salesforce directly in workforce development in Salesforce Talent Alliance under alliances and channels and helped get employer commitments to continuing to grow the ecosystem, investing in that top of the funnel Salesforce talent, building programs to help bring people in, admins, BAs, developers.
And now I am working all different roles, but still very much in touch with the Salesforce ecosystem, still working with so many of the amazing partners that I've built relationships with over the years, supporting outsource hiring, staffing, job coaching, and career guidance.
Mike:
Wow. So, a few things.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Just a couple things.
Mike:
William, how about yourself? 
William Walsh:
Yeah, I don't know if I'm as impressive as Maria, but I'll try to keep up as we go along here. But I lead our Salesforce and AI recruitment practice at Harvey Nash. So, here, what I basically do is work with companies across not only the Salesforce ecosystem, but multiple CRMs as we continue to grow. And that ranges to help them build out their teams of admins, business analysts, all the way up to architects, AI specialists, data focused people and leadership roles as well. The neat thing about what I do is I work really closely with both sides of the market. So, I'm talking to not only hiring managers for what they need for their teams, but also speaking with Salesforce professionals every day on what they're seeing in the market and where they want to take their careers next. So, I think I get a pretty unique view of the market from both the employer and candidate side. 
And a big part of my job is understanding obviously where those two things line up. So, hope we can give everybody some good information today as to what employers are really looking for and how to stand out in this ever-changing job market.
Mike:
Yeah, I think that's why I was so excited. Shout out to Umer who was on the podcast a long time before he even joined Salesforce that connected all of us. But I love that both of you had the same but different lenses into the job market. And William, you set me up perfectly. So, I mean that's the first question on my list, which is when you look at the Salesforce job market right now, specifically for the admin role, what are you seeing?
William Walsh:
Yeah, I think it's definitely a more competitive market than it was a few years ago. I think there's a lot of really good admins out there. So, just being that Salesforce admin and having a few certifications on your resume isn't really necessarily enough anymore. What I'm seeing clients respond to is admins who really understand businesses behind the platform, whether it's sales, service, operations, data, which I'm sure we'll talk about a little bit more, but really admins who can show they've solved business problems in Salesforce are the ones that are standing out currently. People that can, again, not just be that general admin, but can differentiate themselves with whether it's an AI tool or a specific industry, that's kind of been the biggest thing that I've seen change. It's become a much broader role. Again, a company would just look for someone who was able to manage users, build reports, handle workflows, keep the org up and running.
Now they really want someone who can be a real business partner for them, understand the data and automation integrations. So, I don't think the admin role has necessarily become much of a different role, but it's definitely, you want to add some more skill sets to just your generalist admin at this point.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely agree. I think we're seeing a really important evolution and one that really follows a lot of what we've seen before in ERP and MCSC before where you're getting a role that used to be about just configuration, build this, set this up. You had a lot of single seat admins that assist admin, a lot of people didn't even call themselves Salesforce admins when I first started recruiting in this space, which is what made it so difficult. And now there's this concentrated branding and it's evolving into this governance and you really need to be able to stand out in ways that say, to William's point, this is an outcome I can provide, not here's the number of seats I can manage, but this is what I'm able to do in terms of business impact. I understand how this is going to affect what the top line is for the company, how this evolves into the mission. People need to understand the actual companies, not just the platform itself.
Mike:
Those are really good points, I think. And that's one thing to jump off of too is so broader, I heard partnering with the organization, not just managing. Over the last few years then, what kind of roles or skills have changed or grew in terms of what employers are looking for in Salesforce admins? Maria, I'll start with you. 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Absolutely. One of the things I've seen the most is really that requirements literacy, not just being able to take a set of orders and execute it, but really be able to fine tune that, push back, make recommendations, be in front of what's happening and have that longer future vision knowing that so many of these runways are going to be short with AI. Things are going to continue to change at such an insane pace that's not going to slow down. It's not, well, after this week, after this cycle, after this next set of release notes, things are going to calm down. They're just not. And that resiliency means that when an admin has a set of requirements, they need to be able to show judgment and wisdom, not just knowledge holding.
Mike:
William, you mentioned in yours that there was a certain set of things you kind of look for, things that are changing. Could you expand on that?
William Walsh:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we all know AI has been the big point as of late over the last few years, and I think data is kind of the big one, right? You can have any AI tool in the world. If your data isn't clean, it's not going to work correctly for your business, right? And so, I think data's a big one, automation's a big one. And as we see AI show up more and more, you're seeing a lot more demand for admin to have the experience with your specific industry clouds as well, your specific Salesforce products. And I think that people would honestly rather hire admin to understand, again, how to use Salesforce to improve business process rather than just someone who has that long list of certifications. I think when people first get into Salesforce early on, at least back in the day, it was, "Hey, get as many search as possible." And search are great.
They get you in the door, but the real world experience is kind of what gets you over the finish line. And I think that's super important for people to understand.
Mike:
So, we've danced a little bit on industry and William, you brought it up. I think Maria, your answers have alluded to it. If I'm a Salesforce admin or looking to become a Salesforce admin, and I have a lot of a certain industry perspective, let's say Finserv or banking or automotive, I'm picking the big categories, should I really lean into that or should I just look for an admin role in any industry because I know Salesforce administration?
William Walsh:
Yeah, I would say either or, right? I think it totally depends on if you surely have a true love for that specific industry and working in that industry, you can definitely stick with it, but you just have to, again, not just be a generalist admin. I think within that industry, then you have to start diving a bit deeper into, again, if it's Finserv, say specifically Revenue Cloud and more that you can do within Revenue Cloud and CPQ. And again, learning more AI integration tools that'll help your specific business within that industry. Again, it's like I said, not just being that generalist admin I think is the main part, but I also find that sometimes you can get yourself into a spot where I feel too niche, right? And when I'm looking for a role, I can only go for roles in this specific industry because that's where my experience is. 
And so, I can see where people have those pain points. I think, again, if that's what you would really enjoy to do and that's your passion, stick with it and just broaden yourself within that industry. Otherwise, it's definitely, I always find being at a consultancy or being at a partner is always good because you get to have your hands on a few different platforms at once or get to be in a few different engagements to where you can really work on a Sales Cloud environment here, but then be in a Service Cloud org over here. And so, you get your hands on multiple different things and continue to grow your skill sets, not only in one specific industry, but all throughout all the Salesforce clouds.
Mike:
Maria, I'd love your thoughts. Should I lean into my industry first or should I lean into my admin skills and apply across the board?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
It's a very tricky question because ideally it's one of those, well, it depends, the lawyer answer. On the surface level, I would say yes, lead into the industry because of how that supports the differentiator of understanding the business outcomes. If you are coming from banking, if you are coming from healthcare, if you are coming from education and re-skilling into Salesforce, you're going to be able to speak more intelligently, especially at some of these, I'm going to use this phrase lightly now, entry level roles because you don't have entry level understanding of what the company is trying to do, what kind of outcomes they're looking to drive. And that's going to really support what I said about that requirements, scrutiny, the wisdom, the choices that you're making, and that's going to be an important differentiator.
However, in today's job market, I would not tell somebody to limit themselves to only applying to jobs inside of their industry because there is a transferability, there is a lot of change happening inside of all of these industries, and people at the end of the day need to pay their bills. And sometimes, there just may not be enough opportunities in a given industry that makes sense for them when they're looking at jobs that are either available for remote, that are in their geographical area, if they're looking at companies that are pushing RTO, et cetera. So, if somebody really had a passion to what William and I believe you alluded to earlier about an industry that maybe they don't have deep experience in or maybe they don't have a lot of career experience at all, finding ways to stand out and deepen that industry knowledge so that you can stand out, I think is just as important as having that deep industry experience and figuring it out.
Mike:
Again, you set me up perfect for what I was thinking because I was kind of hovering around this question, but let's jump into this part of it. For each of you, when a candidate lands on your desk, what is it that makes them stand out versus others?
William Walsh:
Yeah, so I can start. I mean, like I said, I think for me, certifications matter. It shows commitment, it shows employers that they've got some confidence in your technical foundation, that kind of stuff. But what's really important to me is when I sit down, not only look at a resume, but when I speak to someone, can they walk me through three really impactful, at least three really impactful kind of projects that they've delivered? And nine times out of 10, a client is going to want to talk to someone who can walk them through really impactful projects they've been able to deliver rather than someone who's just got a list of certifications on their resume. So, I think that's super important. Another thing is having a bit of technical ability as well. Again, having that crossover, differentiating yourself from just your generalist admin, someone that can. 
Again, when I say technical sales, I do not mean coding Apex, but more so building and configuring and being able to do a lot of work with workflows nowadays. And again, having some AI focused tools that you've worked with in your current role. Most clients now are using AI one way or another, and when they're hiring an admin, again, they want that person. A lot of times they are taking on the headache of trying to integrate that tool correctly, and it's probably not their role. And so, they want to have someone that they can bring in right away and understand what exactly is going to work for their business and how they can best get their platform to where they need it to get to. So, like I said, I do look for certifications, they're great, but at the same time, it's really about real life impactful projects you've been able to deliver on and what your role was in those projects.
If you're able to get a bit more technical and tell me you did some of the configuring yourself, that goes a long way when you put it in front of a client rather than, again, I was just kind of creating dashboards and all the other generalist admin stuff that we would usually look at five, six years ago.
Mike:
Yeah. Maria, I'd love your perspective on what makes a candidate stand out to you.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah, I think there's a handful of things. One, just being completely candid, that they look like a real candidate. The fake candidate's a real thing now, that they have verifiable information that they are active in whether it's LinkedIn, the Trailblazer community. I'm seeing posts that look like they're written by a real person. I've seen a resume that looks like it's written by a real person, just really to start at the surface level. And that can be really tricky because I have seen profiles, LinkedIn profiles, resumes, emails, communication, LinkedIn posts that because of trying to demonstrate this very, I think, professional demeanor and best practices, sometimes it can come across so boilerplate. My spidey sense tingles for a second and I catch myself going, "Is this person real?" And that is a real risk that people run now in polishing their information off. So, I'm just going to start at that surface level. 
Once we're actually interacting with a candidate and we verify this is a real person, not a bot, what really looks is that what's driving a person's? Where is the learning resiliency? Where is the resiliency within the stories that they are telling, not just the polished, "I was able to increase this by this percent and that percent." That's wonderful. Having those numbers is great. That is now the bare minimum. When somebody can say, "But," adding to the star method, that an extra R, that reflection, "But now with this new technology, I would do it differently. But now knowing how our customer base changed six months later, I would do this. But now knowing that more and more companies are going to be absorbing other companies, I would approach this slightly differently." Right?
That reflection piece of saying, not just giving me the story outcome, but how they would take that into a similar project going forward, or even if they're at that level, right at that cusp of people leadership, how they would train somebody else based on their experience of going through those steps, that to me is a significant differentiator because that tells me that person has the ability to stay the long run, that they are not just looking at just having that list of facts and figures for the resume, the output, the promotions, but that they're actually looking to build both within themselves and around them.
Mike:
So, along those lines, thinking of where candidates spend their time, because I mean, I'm old enough to remember that I used to have to go to a bookstore to look up resume templates and go buy special resume paper. Now everything's electronic. I won't date myself, but I did in high school have to check out the internet for 15 minutes at a time. It's amazing we had anything done with dial-up back then, but we did. But you mentioned polish, and I think it's crazy that there's bots out there, but we're talking about real humans. Where are the real humans putting too much energy into either their resume or their experience or something that's not actually helping them in the hiring process? 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Well, one of the top ways I think is just in their general job search. So, LinkedIn did a pretty big overhaul of their algorithm in 2025 to an algorithm called 360 Brew, and it really rewards humanity and consistency within the process, their post, their about section, their experience, the resume that's uploaded, their interactions with recruiters on the backend, et cetera. And putting everything into a ChatGPT, a Claude, a AI of choice and spitting it out is actually. I'm finding a lot of very talented people are telling me, "Oh my gosh, three years ago I couldn't open my LinkedIn because every recruiter from here to Singapore was in my DMs and now it's just crickets." And most of that is because everything is so polished and saturated and M-dashed and if not this, then that that it's getting downgraded on the algorithms. And the same things happen, and that means that they're not showing up high in the recruiter back end of LinkedIn as much as high in the results.
So, really being able to have a unique voice and tone and sounds like the person that shows up in the interview, it does matter. And it's a hard line to draw because people want to present the best version of themselves, but that kind of certified human best version of themselves is mattering more and more. 
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, it's very tempting to feed your resume or your LinkedIn URL to AI, pick which one and have it spit stuff out. I mean, it can write how remarkable you are in some pretty punchy language that you're like, "Oh, I don't think I would've written that before." But the other half of that is everyone else is doing it, so now yours sounds less human just like everyone's. William, let's take a different angle for you. Opposite of that, what are candidates sometimes underestimating they should spend time with that hiring managers are really looking for out of candidates? 
William Walsh:
Yeah, I mean, I think it's tough on the resume side of things. What I would tell people is communication is the number one thing. Like you both just hit on, your resume can be great. It can look like you are the number one person that should get this job, but at the end of the day, I think, again, an admin is kind of sitting between that business and the technology team, and they need to understand how to talk to VP of sales one minute. They need to understand how to talk to a developer the next minute, and communication is key. And so, it's hard to say on paper, "Hey, what am I maybe overlooking here?" But it's really the communication aspect, and that comes from working on projects, volunteering. If it's tough to get a role, volunteer somewhere on a real project, get hands-on experience where you'll be able to explain what you really did. 
Again, I think it's tough to say what people are overlooking on their resume. Again, everybody's resume can look great. It's really, once you get in front of someone, the communication aspect, because that's the differentiator at this point. Like we just said, everybody's got their resumes being made by an AI tool somewhere. They're all going to look great. What are you like when we get on the phone? And if you are really able to, again, explain what you can do for a business, the value you can bring for a business, and not just your typical reading off your resume, which a lot of folks do, a lot of folks will just rely strictly on their resume and just go into an interview studying up their resume and the bullet points that they have in there so they can just hit those soon as a question comes up.
You need to be able to be a real person. People want to work with people they enjoy working with. I think that's a big thing that a lot of times people forget. You can be the best candidate for a role, but if you aren't clear with your communication, you don't seem like an enjoyable person to work with on a daily basis, there's a good chance they'll go with someone that may have a lesser skillset just because, hey, we can train this person up to be where you are and we really enjoy working with them. Again, they're clear with their communication. They can translate business needs and requirements to our technology team well. So, that stuff is what really I see matters the most once you get into that intro stage and meeting a client.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
And just to add to that, William, I think the asking questions, not just having answers. I think your point about having the answers, the mission statements, the details memorized is so spot on because I think the risk of that is there isn't that conversation where people are figuring it out together sometimes and showing up and saying, "I'm not sure, but here's how I think I would approach the problem." Or even just asking back, "Well, what's your internal method? Where would you start?" And then taking that from there. Sometimes even within the not knowing, how people approach that situation of not knowing, I think is really underestimated of how to show up or coming back.
I had a candidate years ago who bombed a question, just stumbled and fumbled and got flustered and frustrated and 24, 48 hours later, sent me an email and said, "I looked it up. I actually didn't know about this. Here's what I learned. Here's how I would approach it right now. I actually though this was really interesting. I found a community group. They have a call here. If anybody else struggles with this question, you can send them this link and they can learn more about it." And actually gave me their references, the work that they did, and that's what comes into that learning resiliency that was... I think people underestimate the ability to come back or not know and demonstrate how that not knowing makes them someone that would be enjoyable to work with, that the team could see themselves being with. In real life, you don't have the answers sometimes when you're figuring the problems out.
William Walsh:
I was just going to jump in there and say, what does a good admin do? They ask questions, right?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah.
William Walsh:
You don't get told to do something and then just put your head down and do it. Usually you want to know, "Hey, why do we want to do this? What is the value for the business that we're able to do this?" Right?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
100%. 
William Walsh:
And so, you want to know what that outcome is going to lead to, or where in that business is this going to help support if we're able to create this workflow this way or whatever the case may be. And so, a good admin asks questions and you have to have that same approach when you're going into an interview. You have to, again, not just be there with. You have no idea how many times I get feedback from a client where they say, "Hey, they seem like they're great, but they seem very robotic, right? They were just kind of reading off a sheet. Here's question, answer, question, answer." And a lot of times, clients want candidates to put them on their toes and ask questions that they might not even know the answers to. But for them, that's in their head they're going, "Oh wow, you know what? That's great. I didn't even think about that."   
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
And that can be a small failure of the hiring process as well because the roboticness happens on both sides. You have hiring managers that have their rubrics and going through, and it's very important that we have non-biased criterion that we're hiring towards the competencies and the skill sets. And also, there needs to be room in that interview process to have that conversation and measure someone not just on their. Did they guess the answer correctly? Did they memorize the right answer? Were they able to regurgitate that? But were they thoughtful? Did they have really good questions, inviting and making enough time and room for that instead of filling every single space with call and response? 
Mike:
Yeah, I can't agree more with both of what you've said. I think in the times that I've been interviewing for different positions, both myself and interviewing to fill positions for other teams, nine times out of 10, I enjoy it if the candidate doesn't know the answer, but tells me their thought process to getting to an answer. I say an answer because they may not know if it's correct or not until they continue to research it, but it's understanding their thought process in that interview that I always wanted to know. At least for me, that's what I've always found valuable.
William Walsh:
Absolutely. And you see a lot of times, there's many different ways to do things within Salesforce, within many orgs. And a lot of times when people are interviewing, the main basis of it is, "I want to see how your mind works. I want to see how you get from point A to point B." Not to say it's wrong or right, but I'm curious. I think, again, like you just said, a lot of it is how does your mind work? And that's a huge part of what we see on a lot of interviews as well. Not necessarily it was the wrong or right answer, because usually there's a lot of right answers, but just how did you get there in your mind? How do you get from point A to B? It's always interesting for people to see.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Curiosity is such an important word there because there's such a performance to the interview process and whereas the actual job requires so much curiosity. And if you can demonstrate that, I think that's going to be a significant differentiator toward and hit all the points I think we hit, making somebody be able to understand, "I understand what it's going to be like to work with this person. Maybe they didn't come to the right answer, but I feel like we could have the type of conversation that would yield the best answer, the learning resiliency, the ability to continue to develop knowledge."
Mike:
Yeah. It's interesting, Maria, you bring that up because on the admin relations team, we've done surveys and had some research done. More than a few times. And every single time, curiosity or curiousness is usually one or two on the list of traits. I want to jump ahead to that first job, but I want to think about it a little bit differently because for a long time in the ecosystem it was, do I become an admin? Do I become a consultant? I think it's probably changed now where a lot of companies are hiring admins. A lot of, William, you brought it up. Some people are choosing to be consultants, but I also think there's contracting work. And the bulk of the people I know do contracting work. And I kind of almost think of that as you can work for an organization, you can do consulting where you're under somebody else's shingle, or you can do contract work.
And I'd be curious, what is a trait or how would an admin, a person looking to get into that job role say, "Oh, I need to work for an organization and I'll be a good fit or I'm really a good fit to be a contract admin or I really want to do consulting." How would they find that or what is something they should look at themselves to determine what path of those three to go down?
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
I think to start, I can start on that one as I moved into the consultant contractor seat myself. I think looking at what part of the work excites you the most is important. If it's that initial gathering the requirements, figuring it out, solving the problem, meeting new people, working with new teams, if that initial part of it is not what you overcome to get to the solution that then you maintain, then you continue to build upon, I think the contracting consulting often can tend to be a path that people will continue to stay very motivated in because there is a Groundhog's Day to that type of work, right? You have to meet a lot of new people over and over again. You kind of very Sisyphean, you roll that boulder up the hill, you get to the top and boom, it's right back down at the bottom with a new project.
Whereas somebody who enjoys finishing a project, scratching something off the to-do list, looking upon the Simba, everything the light touches is what you have configured landscape and then continuing to improve upon that probably is looking for more of that in-house seat, looking for more of that stability and is not going to enjoy that contract work where they're just constantly inheriting a new mess, a new series of problems and nothing ever feels finished. 
William Walsh:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm a big believer in contract work. I've done a lot of work with a lot of partners with contractors. I think if you're trying to break into the ecosystem, I think it's great. You get exposure to a lot of different environments like I kind of touched on before, different businesses, different problems. And a lot of it comes at a quicker speed. Again, if you were just at that solo in-house role, you're dealing with your org and at the pace that your organization wants to go with that. And from an employer's perspective, I think you're able to actually point to projects, real projects that you've studied that you've worked on rather than just saying, "Hey, I've studied Salesforce. I've gotten my certifications." And so, I think, again, people can help... What I think is always interesting is people sometimes feel like they have to completely start over if they're trying to get their start in Salesforce.
And what I always try to tell people is use your previous career when you come into Salesforce, connect those dots. If you come from a sales background, you understand sales processes, right? If you come from a finance background, you understand financial processes. If you come from customer service, you understand that whole customer journey, right? And so, go into a role within Salesforce to where you can utilize your previous career and again, the business knowledge that can actually make you a better Salesforce admin is ultimately being able to... Again, the business knowledge can actually make you a better Salesforce admin because Salesforce is ultimately a business platform, right? So, if you have that experience, you can utilize that in multiple different ways in Salesforce.
And whether that's with a partner, whether that's in-house, I think, again, contracting is a great way to get your foot in the door. And there's not much commitment on the client side either, so it's a lot easier where a client, it's almost, they can call it a try before they buy type of period. And it's the same on both sides, right? I think it's the same for a candidate as well, right? It's for them to try out the role without much of a large commitment as well.  
Mike:
I like that. I'm realizing we spent a lot of time from the admin perspective, which makes sense. It's an admin podcast, but I do want to focus at least one question on employers, and I'm going to try and go right for the heart of the main thing. In both of your experiences, what is the number one thing employers are getting wrong when they're writing admin job descriptions? 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
William, do you want to start on that one? I'm happy to jump in.
William Walsh:
Yeah, yeah, I can start on that one. I think, again, the funny part is, and Maria would probably say the same thing, I don't know if anybody writes job descriptions anymore, unfortunately. And so, I think that's a big problem is they go into, again, your ChatGPT or your clone and say, "Hey, create me a Salesforce admin job description." And you look at a lot of them, it's your basic, again, like we talked about your generalist admin kind of bullet points in there and people will apply and then they go to talk to people and then they start to realize these are all great generalist admins, but not what we need. And so, I think a lot of it comes on the employer side where they need to really have a human type up that job description, have someone who's working with Salesforce every day in the business say exactly what our pain points are and what someone can come in and help us bring value right away. 
And I think that's the big issue. Like I said, most of the, I would say nine out of 10 job descriptions I see are written by some type of AI tool. And you can tell right away, you could copy and paste most of them and put them into the same job description for different companies, for different industries. They're all basically the same. So, I think that's on the employer to really be better at doing their due diligence on what we're actually looking for. And when I work with a client, we'll see it time and time again where, "Hey, we're missing the mark here, we're missing the mark here." And that's on us to do our due diligence to say, okay, what is really needed? Not just your Salesforce. I know you need a Salesforce admin, but what does your Salesforce admin look like compared to what this organization's Salesforce admin might look like?
They can be totally different job titles and requirements, right? And so, employers need to do a much better job of actually describing what that role is going to look like and not just your basic, "Hey, we want someone who can, again, create flows and document requirements and all your basic kind of stuff." Right? So, I think that's what I would say is most of the stuff I see is AI written and they don't really take their time and then they find two, three months down the road, why have we still not found this person? Maybe it's because we're not targeting the right audience.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
100% agree. I'll put a bold prediction that if in three to six months you go and start looking at admin jobs, how many of them are going to have completely retired certs still listed as the relevant or we had talked about it before, must have five years of experience in something that has existed in five months. There is a basic lack of understanding of what they're looking for in the job description. And a lot of time it's a speed thing, right? People want to go for, "Okay, we want to hit same as the candidates. They want to hit the keywords, they want to hit a high search, they want to show up on the right people's feed." So, a lot of times it's kind of a regurgitation, it's thrown into AI. It's dusting off an old job description from the last time they hired, whether that was three years or three months ago and reposting it. 
And what employers really need to be doing, it's something that I work with a lot of employers on is looking forward in the requisition. I need somebody who is going to join us for this thing that we're doing, not just a list of what we've needed up until now, right? Showing where that investment is going to be and having that path in mind, not just, I need someone who checks this boxes and great drinking game in recruiting and hiring is hit the ground running, right? You'll be blasted. I need someone who can hit the ground running and said, "Okay, when we get to the finish line, what do they do then?" Because you have to think forward. Understanding what that rubric is and what the weighting is around things. I can't tell you what, especially in, I would say 2012 through '17, you saw the job descriptions, excellent verbal communication skills and jobs that are not client facing, right?
Being clear about what the job actually requires and making sure that those requirements fit, that they're just not the grab bag of keywords that people are just used to seeing, but say looking at, "Hey, what does the data judgment look like? How good are they at requirements gathering? How are we going to actually measure that in the interview process? Why is that important? Who is it important for? What should that look like? What does success look like in the past?" But also what could success look like in the future and not narrowing it down so tightly. And then the last piece, and I'll say the kind of small kind of controversial thing is I think more companies need to pay for the work product from the interviews. A lot of times they give them real business problems and there is a very exploitative aspect of interviewing where sometimes you get a lot of knowledge from very excellent candidates and these candidates are going on a lot of job interviews.
It's exhaustive. You go on LinkedIn and see, I interviewed a hundred times to get this job. I applied to 200 jobs to get this. If somebody gets to the end of the process and you are going to ask them to do a take home assignment, the best way you can get the most out of them, give them a reasonable contractor rate, give them work that you can use and get the information from them and really narrow it down because you will be really intense about who you get to that final process if you know you have to pay for that work product. And candidates would really respect, I think, being able to give work that matters, especially if they're looking for work. 
Mike:
Wow, I like that. That's very different than anything I've ever heard. And it would make me rethink a lot of the stuff that I've delivered because I know in the interviews I've been asked to deliver some sort of project or here's an org and here's a scenario that we gave 20 other candidates. We want to see what you do. I like that twist to be really something tangible. When I push my presenters in admin track for Dreamforce or TDX, I always say, when you get done with your presentation, think about what the person's going to do when they stand up. What do they do next? And I'm going to do the same and hold myself accountable for when we end the podcast, the listener doesn't just take out their earbuds or probably switch over to Apple Music or something and finish the rest of their dog walk.
But if you were, because in my world, it would be really cool to get the three of us on stage at TDX, which is about six months from now. But if somebody was listening today and looking for an admin job, maybe they're employed, maybe it's their first job, maybe it's their third job, depending on no matter where they're at, where would you tell them to focus their energy? 
William Walsh:
I guess I could jump in on this one, Maria. And I would just say, I think we've hit on it a few times, but be very clear about what you actually want to be hired for, right? I think a lot of people's resumes can be a bit ambiguous in that. Make your resume and LinkedIn reflect that as well, right? Don't make a hiring manager dig through four or five pages to figure out what you can do. I'd spend a lot of time networking. I'd go to Salesforce as an awesome ecosystem. We talked about Mid-Atlantic Dreaming, which myself and Maria were at. We've talked about obviously Dreamforce coming up and TDX. And so, there's a bunch of networking events out there and obviously myself and Maria are also part of user groups. There's a ton of user groups out there that are obviously free to join, right? Be involved, network.   
Again, talk to Salesforce professionals, talk to as many recruiters as you can. I know sometimes, people can think recruiters can be annoying, but I promise you, they're just getting you in front of people that you would've otherwise not been in front of. Our goal is to just introduce you to other people. And so, get as many recruiters as possible, consulting partners. The job market is super competitive, right? You can't rely exclusively on applying to jobs on LinkedIn all day long. You have to know people in the ecosystem. You have to get your name out there, get your face out there, make it known that you're a part of this ecosystem and this ecosystem is super welcoming and everybody wants to see everybody succeed. So, you get to network a bit, get a chance to get to some user groups, some local events, and you'll see how quickly people around you start to root for you and start to put your resume in front of people that they know in the ecosystem as well. 
And so, that's the one thing that I think some people miss out on. They kind of really rely on just, "Hey, I applied to 20 jobs today on LinkedIn." Again, get out there, network with people in the ecosystem. This ecosystem is awesome and super welcoming. I don't know if I've ever met somebody in this ecosystem that wasn't rooting for everybody else around them. Everybody can win. So, I would say network as much as possible. There's a ton of different things out there for people that are trying to make their way into the ecosystem to get into. And again, you get in front of the right people, you get yourself, make some friends in the ecosystem and you'll see how quickly things start to move in the right direction for you. 
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Yeah, I 100% agree. I think the networking aspect has not changed. With everything that has changed in the last 15, 20 years in Salesforce, what has not changed is the power of community, the power of showing up, asking questions and getting connected. And that does not mean you have to be the most active on social media. You can be active in real life, but really showing up and participating in community events, the events that are available, listening to the podcast, et cetera, is so important to engage. The other thing I would say is to really look at your LinkedIn profile, your resume, your email communications, and also your networking prep and kind of filter everything through.
Why are you asking? Why this person? Why this company? Why this outcome? So, what? Why does it matter inside of all of it? And then the how. So, when you're answering interview questions, when you're networking, when you're sharing your elevator pitch, really honing in on those three aspects I think are going to yield more human conversations versus just a bullet list brag show. People are trying to get so much information out. We forget that within that efficiency, it still needs to be a conversation. So, really practicing that human aspect and giving people context and understanding and not trying to be perfect, but just showing up consistently I think is going to be the most important thing that people can do. And try to un-AI your LinkedIn information. I cannot stress that enough. Your headline, your about, and your experience section should match. 
It should be consistent and it should have some sort of human aspect to it because I don't think people realize how many profiles and information get passed over because of either algorithmically, it's too polished or the lead is buried. 
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a perfect way to end this podcast. I couldn't think of it any better. I mean, I know the more than handful of people I've interviewed, every single one of them has come back to a user group or some sort of Salesforce event that, hey, I went to and I didn't have a job and I walked around the room and sure enough, a couple weeks later, people were calling me or an employer called me because they saw me and got to talk with me, which essentially elevated you above that stack of resumes that they were already looking at. So, I appreciate it. Maria, William, thank you for spending this time going over what is an ever-changing job market, what is constantly being invaded by AI and uninvaded by AI, I think, and helping admins try to find that niche and try to find those jobs that are really rewarding for them because I know the ones that do end up presenting everywhere and you can always just tell it in them.
So, thanks for spending the time with us and thanks for helping out the admin community.
Maria Alvarez-Zarrilli:
Well, thank you so much.
William Walsh:
Awesome. Thank you so much for having us.
Mike:
Well, I really want to thank Maria and William for being on the podcast. It was great that I could be connected with you to talk about everything that admins are looking for in this job market and really help us make sense of what employers are actually looking for in Salesforce admins right now. For me, I think the big takeaway is that job search can't be just about adding another certification or sending out more applications. You've got to be clear about the problems you've solved, show how you think, ask good questions, and most importantly, get involved in the Salesforce community so people know who you are and what you can do. Now I want to thank you for listening and if you know a Salesforce admin who's looking for their next opportunity, share this episode with them. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Sabrina Simeroth, Product Manager on the Salesforce Security Product Team.
Join us as we chat about the new Security Center Essentials feature and how to work security reviews into the rhythm of your organization.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Sabrina Simeroth.
What is Security Center Essentials?
The last time we had Sabrina on the pod, we were talking about Health Check scores. However, as she explains, that number is meant to be an assessment of your organization's security Configurables at a single point in time. But what about continuous monitoring?
That's where Security Center Essentials comes in. "With Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility," Sabrina explains, with a focused set of security metrics you can monitor over time. It makes it easy to see things like what managed packages are supported, which third-party platforms have access to your data, and who in your organization made changes.
In other words, Security Center Essentials gives you a map for how your org is structured, making it easier to spot potential problems and make sure your security and governance are aligned with your business goals.
Two questions to ask for security reviews
So how do you get started with Security Center Essentials? For Sabrina, it's all about context. Once you've run Health Check and dialed in your security settings and policies, you want to use the metrics on Security Center Essentials to get context for how things work in your organization.
From there, Sabrina recommends asking yourself two key questions:
What should be in my environment? Who owns this managed package? Who installed it? Who is using it?
What has changed most recently? Were you expecting it? Who did it? How does it affect your business processes?
Sabrina recommends establishing a monitoring cadence around regular business process milestones. If something is updated every Tuesday, check before and after to make sure everything happened as expected. As an admin, you have the best operational context to flag potential problems and bring them to your security and governance team.
Why you shouldn't chase a perfect Health Check score
While your Health Check score is helpful for giving you a general understanding of how your security standards compare to industry best practices, Sabrina urges you not to chase a perfect score.
"Your Health Check score should begin a security review, rather than ending a review," she explains. It's there to flag areas of your org that need a closer look, so you can make decisions about how much intentional risk your business needs to carry. The most dangerous security threats are the ones you don't know about. It's OK not to have a perfect Health Check score, as long as you know why you're doing it.
Make sure to listen to my full conversation with Sabrina about how to use Security Center Essentials and Health Check. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
Security is one of those things where it's really easy to look at a score and think, "Great. I'm done." But your Salesforce org doesn't sit still and neither does your security posture. Today I'm talking with Sabrina Simeroth from the Salesforce Security product team about Security Center Essentials and how admins can use it to understand what's connected to their org, what's changed, and what deserves a closer look. We talk about why getting a perfect Health Check score isn't necessarily the goal and how to work security reviews into the rhythms of your organization. So if you've ever opened up a security dashboard and wondered, "Okay, what am I actually supposed to pay attention to?" This episode is for you. Let's get Sabrina on the podcast. So Sabrina, welcome to the podcast.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me back.
Mike:
Well, it's worth talking about because security is always top of mind for Salesforce admins. And the last time I had you and Laura on, we were talking about Security Center Essentials. And I think if memory serves me right, people now have that available to them and admins can start getting in touch with it, right?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. Absolutely. So that has been launched and it is fully rolled out. They should be able to see that in production orgs and some sandbox orgs as well.
Mike:
Sweet. So you're integral part of security at Salesforce and you do a lot. Refresh my memory, what's your domain and what do you handle at Salesforce?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah, absolutely. So I sit on the product management team. I support our security center product and that also incorporates the Essentials product that we just launched and some of our other free tools like Health Check in setup. And then I actually work really closely with a few other PMs that support other features of the premium products like our agentic features and work really closely with the Shield team as well.
Mike:
Shield.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yes.
Mike:
Yes.
Sabrina Simeroth:
All security, all the time.
Mike:
Our secret MCU product. So let's talk about Security Center Essentials and actually Health Check. I'd love to know, and probably admins too, we love when we get these features, but what exactly were you trying to solve with Health Check?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. So Health Check is a really valuable ... I would call it a point in time assessment of some of the critical settings that we find in setup. These are your security configurations. Oftentimes if you've been to any events, you hear them called configurables. So these are settings like your password policies, your session settings, some of those toggles that you can turn on and off. But with the Essentials, we're trying to give a broader and more ongoing visibility. So it's not just a point in time, this is something that extends that capability. Health Check is still really valuable and it is a collection of these configurations that are set against a baseline or a set of standards so that you can see where your posture is at at any given time. But we really wanted to extend that and allow admins the ability to see how changes in their system, how changes in their configuration occur over time, as well as broaden the view of what they're actually looking at. So not just those toggles.
Mike:
I always liked Health Check was like right now, here's where you're at with links to open things. So that makes sense. It's making the dashboard a little bit bigger. I think for a Salesforce admin who just opens Security Center Essentials for the first time and they have a whole bunch of different metrics looking back at them, where should they focus? I think of a car dashboard. Well, if I start my car and the fuel light comes on, probably the most important thing to pay attention to. But as an admin, depending on the level of security awareness that I have, I may not know what number is the most important number. So help me walk through those different metrics that they're seeing.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. You are so spot on. So I think there's a tendency to want to stack rank, which is the most important thing to look at. If I could put it very simply, so we started with a very narrow scope of, let's call it metrics. So we wanted to extend the capabilities of Health Check. We wanted to give a broader view and give admins access to what does the actual state of your org look like? What are the things that are connected to your org? What are the managed packages that are being supported? Where are your access points? Those types of things. These are all really critical things for admins to be aware of because it's basically how is your org structured? So I think that that's the key. It's not that you should focus on or stack rank immediately any one metric in Essentials. It's more around let's figure out what our baseline is and what is the actual standard for our environment. So I would resist saying one over the other. Obviously, I think the tendency is to lean towards let me look at the thing that has a score. Let me look at Health Check. I would actually say, ask yourself two questions as an admin. What looks unfamiliar to me? So look at the seven metrics. And I apologize in advance because come Dreamforce, we're extending that seven metrics to 14 metrics, but we're still keeping the scope very narrow.
Mike:
It's no like Salesforce to just double anything, right?
Sabrina Simeroth:
No. Not at all. But we're trying to bring the most critical things for you to pay attention to the forefront and just keep it narrow so that you have a really, really solid idea of what should be in my environment and then what has changed most recently. Those are the two things to be really looking at so that you can start asking yourself questions. Does this actually make sense? Should it be here? Is there an assigned owner? These are the types of questions. It's really about laying out a map for the admin to start getting the right context about how the org is configured and then start evaluating is this good or bad and does it align with the business needs? So that would be my advice using essentials.
Mike:
Yeah. No. It makes sense. And I think you pointed out that what's really nice is you're not just seeing today's configuration, you're seeing how things changed and that if you're a Salesforce admin, whether you're just getting started in a new org, you can watch that progression. Or if you're coming to a fresh org, if you just got hired, that was always, and I still think is top of mind for a lot of admins. "Hey, when I parachute into a new company, what do I do to look at an org that I'm inheriting?" And so I think let's apply security center essentials to that and say, "If I inherited an org tomorrow, how could I use that to see how things are changed or understand a little bit more about the org that I'm working in?"
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. That's a great question. So if we look at the metrics that are included in Essentials, it's things like what types of packages do I have installed? What type of connected apps? So how is data interacting with third party packages? How is data interacting? And the great thing about these metrics is we're giving you visibility into who actually installed these packages? So is that normal? It's that type of context. First take inventory, see what's connected into your apps, see what IP ranges you have associated with your different profiles. What are your trusted IP ranges? Take a look at your security configurations through the Health Checkout. Are you using any baselines that were already set up? So if this is a new org did somebody already have a baseline, have they already done a security review? Check those things first and then start establishing your context.
So the metrics do a really great job of showing you who may have been the owner of those, who may have installed or made specific changes at any given time. So use that as your starting point and start to do your own investigation, building context around which teams are using this? Who is the true owner at this point? Does this make sense? Is it still actively being used? That context is going to be really helpful when you start to get into the monitoring piece, which is when changes are made, then an admin can more easily flag like, that doesn't align with what I'm expecting. Does that make sense?
Mike:
Oh, absolutely. That whole connected apps and packages part is ... If you're working with people in a larger team or ... Boy, I got to tell you, I've done this accidentally where you set up a user and you forgot to deny them access to install packages.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Oh yeah. Just delete access.
Mike:
And I remember I had this power user. I found this whole app exchange and we can download apps. And my face just went white. Because I was like, "But you couldn't do that, right?" And they're like, "Oh no, I did totally." "Oh, well, you're not going to be able to after I finish my salad."
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. And that's so true. It's very hard when things are scattered all over the place to maintain that. It is a very complex platform for a reason. It provides so much flexibility to the users to really align with business. The challenge then becomes like, okay, how do you make sense of that to make sure that you're doing the right things as it relates to security? And so that's the whole goal. It's let's bring some of those key elements so that you can quickly identify where those changes, those missteps, they always happen. They're not going to be able to be avoided. But how quickly can you evaluate and then shift and make changes to address any gaps or concerns or what we consider gaps in your posture?
Mike:
Right. Right. One thing that I loved about Health Check was it gave me a score and admins love score, got to get perfect score on everything. The idea of making it to a hundred on Health Check being perfect as a goal, is that really a goal or how should admins think about that number?
Sabrina Simeroth:
That is such a good question, and this is so common. So I was a part of the Own acquisition. I've been working with Salesforce security products for the past 10 years. And in that previous role, I actually helped customers implement their security programs and implement their security tooling. And we would get this all the time, customers just really wanting to reach 100. There is this-
Mike:
I want to be perfect. Come on Sabrina.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Strive for perfection. It's so common. And when it comes to risk scoring, the desire is always to reach perfection. Here's how I would look at it. A higher score is a very useful signal. A low score is a very useful signal, but 100, I would say, should not become like a trophy or the end goal without very valuable context. So context really matters. So Health Check compares settings with a standard baseline, but every organization can have very legitimate reasons for different settings or the need to actually carry some risk in their system in order to be able to operate the business. So not every setting makes sense for every customer. So the score should really begin a review rather than ending a review. It really needs to be treated more of ... We were talking about the car. It's more of a gauge. It's not like a report card that tells you you're good or bad. It is telling you where to look so that you can actually evaluate and get the right context to say, does it make sense for our business to actually secure this or remove this or lock this down, restrict this? Because there will be some legitimate reasons why you don't want to align with that.
There will be impacts to the system or things that are restricted from users that need access to sensitive data in order to do their job. That is acceptable risk if it's well documented, if it's intentional, if it makes sense for the organization. So a hundred I would say is not the goal. You can always reset a baseline in-house check so that it makes sense so that you can reach that 100 state. But I would definitely use it more as a signal to review what's going on and to provide awareness of your configurations rather than the end goal. And don't ever think like I've reached a hundred, I'm perfect, I'm going home and I'm never looking at this again. A system is always changing, it's always evolving. And so a regular review is really critical. So that would be my advice there as it relates to a score.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, I got to ask, often admins will have governance. They'll hold monthly governance meetings or quarterly. You can refresh Security Center Essentials a lot. What is the pattern that you would suggest admins do a data refresh on that? And then part two of that, because I'll just make the question harder, how would they work that into a governance meeting?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Oh gosh. So now see, you're putting me in a corner because I always give a soft answer on this one, but let me try to be really practical because I want our customers to really have a clear idea of how to manage this. The cadence that we've set for in the background running these metrics is once a week. So use that as the baseline. Once a week gives you plenty of time to see actual changes in the environment, but that's not to say that you shouldn't do these manual refreshes so you can manually update these and do more targeted. What I would say is avoid just every hour, update, update, update. That's excessive. And if it doesn't align with your actual business cadences. So it's going to be different for every customer, but try to align it with known milestones or known practices. So these are things like your development life cycle. When are your planned releases? When do you traditionally install new packages? Are there large onboarding events? Do you have regularly scheduled security reviews? And this is why it's a fuzzy answer where it's like it's going to be different for every customer.
But as an admin, if you know that you also have an internal regular cadence ... Maybe you're doing a security review at the first of the week every week, maybe then you do deployments on Thursday every week. I would actually align the update cadence to those known activities because then you have context. It's a starting point where you say, "This was an expected activity and here's the changes that I saw." I also saw changes outside of that activity. And so that's a really good point when you talk about bringing it into a governance meeting.
When you are speaking with security folks, when you're speaking with compliance folks, it's incredible context to be able to say, "Hey, I was expecting this activity. I was not expecting anything on this date. Is there anything in your world that would indicate that this is actually an appropriate action that was taken? Should we investigate this further?" And that's a really clear starting point given the context of I'm an admin, I have a lot of the operational context of how we're operating our business and here's that context. And this from my perspective sits outside. It's a little bit anomalous to what we would expect in terms of our own personal cadences. So I can't tell you it should be every day, it should be every five hours. That's really challenging. But it should try to align with some known milestones, some known events that you have going on in the business.
Mike:
That makes sense. You don't want to refresh it every day if once a month you make your changes and you're getting the same number day after day like, okay, well obviously it's expected.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Right. And then you become numb to it a little bit. You're just like, yeah, okay.
Mike:
You do. And then a number of changes, you're like, wait a minute, should that have been up or down? And you forget. So I get that. Let's talk about Security Center as a whole, because Essentials is the starting point. And I think for a lot of the admin work that I've done, it sounds like it more than fills the bill. But Security Center, you've got multi-org, you've got advanced capabilities. At what point would an admin look at Security Center Essentials and say, "Not enough. We need more."
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. I think everybody leans towards it's when it's multi-org. I think that's the default. Everybody says, "Okay, well the premium products, that's for multi-org, that's for these massive organizations." I would avoid thinking that way. For me, it's more around, let's call it organizational or operational complexity, and this can mean many things. So if you are starting to have more frequent changes like adding users, your company is growing drastically and you have a lot more users that are needing access to things, the hierarchy is changing. You're having a little bit more complex structure where there's management teams and then there's people under there. Regionally, you're expanding. If you are adding a lot of applications, you are doing a lot of customization within the environments. You are incorporating more custom code or more custom applications that are third party. Anytime that the system becomes slightly more complex, that is when I would think that it is very critical to evaluate the full product where you're going to get that more advanced management, advanced monitoring, broader security controls that are in the purview.
So I would base it more on when you start to feel like your org is maturing enough to a point where there is enough complexity, the full product is where you're going to see a lot of value. And it's not just about how many orgs you're managing because sandboxes are important to manage security in as well because that's the feeding point into your production orgs, but it's about the data that you're looking at, how complex are your regulations becoming in your industry, what are the standards, what are the types of controls that you actually need to manage now as an admin? And I think basing it off of that gut feeling of this is becoming more complex, that's when it's a good time to start evaluating the tool.
Mike:
It's almost like when you need more information behind the warning light.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Exactly. Exactly.
Mike:
We're running out of gas, but how much do we really have?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yes.
Mike:
Can't go another 10 miles.
Sabrina Simeroth:
When you start to feel like security is your only focus, that is a really good time to start looking at the automation for the premium features.
Mike:
Absolutely. So I think thinking about that, I always love giving admins something very practical to do. And I think connecting with ... Depending on the size org that they have, it could be a security officer, it could be a person in IT. If they were to sit down with somebody at their organization and show them Security Center Essentials, in your mind, who should that person be and what should they point out to them?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. So every organization's going to be different. Some people do have a dedicated security team. Some of them just have a center of excellence that ensures all things related to administration and security for an environment. I would say one, if you have someone who owns internal InfoSec policies. So whether that is your compliance policies, your data governance policies, any InfoSec team, I would build a relationship with one of those connections because they're going to have context that you need in terms of what are the right policies that we need to be aligning with, but that will be a really critical relationship. If there is just a platform owner for your team, that's what I would say. The admin needs to work with a platform owner and just really establish themselves like, "Here is where we're at with the system. Does this align with your expectations? Is this where we want to head? And is there anything that you want me to focus on?" So I would say those.
If there isn't a dedicated security setup in your organization, then definitely whoever is the platform owner you want to connect with. Otherwise, a security personnel building a relationship with one person in security who really understands from a business perspective what the security concerns are, that would be the right relationship to say, "And here for this system, this is what we have in terms of our security controls and configurations."
Mike:
Yeah. I remember how humbling it is sometimes to sit down and show them dashboards, be like, "Look at all we have." And they're like, "But what about ..." And you're like, "Let me get back to you on that." That's a really good question. And inevitably, you always learn and there's always one more thing to pay attention to.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Absolutely. So that's a great point. What I would love for our admins to know as well is we're learning right along with you. So we are making decisions about what we feel admins should be paying attention to, but if there's feedback, feedback is such a gift. That's what we always say at Salesforce, feedback is a gift. So if there are really large gaps or there are really problems that you are trying to solve where the tool doesn't quite hit the mark, please let us know. Send it in to your account reps, send it in to your connections at Salesforce and feed it back to the product team because we would love to start seeing how our admins are using our security tools and really becoming security professionals for their companies. And we do take that feedback to heart and we are trying to incorporate what our customers truly need.
Mike:
When this episode airs, it'll be 11 days, hard to believe, until Dreamforce. But you said that there's new stuff coming.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yes.
Mike:
Without spilling all of the news, can you give us a preview of what admins can expect?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Mike:
We'll say later in September. How's that?
Sabrina Simeroth:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it should actually be able to be demoed at Dreamforce, and we will even actually have some additional materials. So we're working on a quick look in Trailhead for Essential specifically. But we mentioned this, I think, on our last episode as well, but we are going to be introducing a few of those critical user permissions that are going to now be a part of the required MFA enforcement and the increased restrictions on who actually requires tighter controls as a user. So those permission metrics will actually give really good insight on who are your highly privileged users in this environment? Who do you need to really focus on in terms of making sure that they have the right level of access to the right data and that there's the right controls in place, that their user credentials are protected?
Mike:
Wow. This is neat. This is so cool. This is all the stuff that I wish I had a hundred years ago when I was an admin just clicking around like, "I wish I could run this report now." Now, not only do you get the report, but you probably have set up with Agentforce that can help you re-permission somebody. It's an exciting time. Sabrina, thanks for coming back on the podcast and helping us out.
Sabrina Simeroth:
Of course. It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Mike:
Thanks again to Sabrina for joining us. My big takeaway is that security isn't about choosing a perfect score, it's about knowing what normal looks like in your org so you can spot it when something just doesn't fit. Take a look at the Security Center Essentials, establish that baseline, and then bring what you find into the conversations you're already having about releases, governance, and access. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Alexis Kingma, Senior Certification Developer at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about the newly updated Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam and the best way to prepare for certifications.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Alexis Kingma.
The Salesforce Platform App Builder Certification gets a refresh
The Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam has been updated, and the process is more complicated than you might think. This week, I'm talking to Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce Certification team to find out what's changed, why it matters, and how to best prepare for an exam.
Whenever Alexis and her team are doing a refresh for an exam, they start by interviewing a range of subject matter experts working in the real world. For the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam, they're trying to answer a simple question: "What is the industry saying is most important if somebody's looking to hire an app builder?"
Alexis encourages you to think of a certification exam as a validation of your knowledge. In other words, it's proof that you have the expertise to build cutting-edge apps and implement them in your organization.
Shifting the focus to Flow and Agentforce
So what's changed? The focus is on automations with Flow and Agentforce.
As Alexis explains, if you're looking to hire an app builder, you're looking for someone with a deep understanding of Flow. Do you know which flows are best for which situations? Can you troubleshoot them? Can you maintain and monitor them? They want to make sure that anyone who passes the certification exam has the Flow expertise they need to hit the ground running.
The other change is including Agentforce as an automation tool for app building. While you don't need to be a power user (there's another certification for that), Alexis and her team want to make sure that you have it as an option in your toolkit.
How to prepare for Salesforce certification exams
According to Alexis, every Salesforce certification serves as a gauge for your practical, on-the-job skills. This means if you are currently building applications for your company, you are already ahead of the curve. To support the recent updates, her team has curated a specialized Trailhead trail that features interactive badges, allowing you to practice directly within a sandbox environment.
Alexis also highly recommends taking a close look at the exam guide for any certification you're going for. They're written very intentionally, she explains, to give you a very specific idea of what level of understanding they're asking for on each topic. Words like "create" or "configure" are asking for much more in-depth knowledge than "describe" or "understand."
Finally, if you're attending Dreamforce, Alexis wants to remind you to schedule your free certification exam. Make sure to listen to the full episode for more about the Salesforce Platform App Builder certification exam. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Alexis Kingma from the Salesforce certification team about the newly-refreshed Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam. We're going to get into exactly what changed, why Flow now has a bigger role on the exam, and where Agentforce fits into the app builder skillset. So whether the Platform App Builder is your next certification or you just want a better sense of where admin skills are headed, this episode is worth a listen. Now, before we get into it, be sure to subscribe and share it with any other admin who's thinking about their next certification. So with that, let's get Alexis on the podcast.
So, Alexis, welcome to the podcast.
Alexis Kingma:
Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Mike:
Well, I am a huge fan of our exams and certifications. And you can take one, you don't have to have the other, and I like to have both. But I love that we have a lot of exams and we redo them, we update them, we refresh them, at least we try to. I feel the product now is changing super quick. But before we get into all of that, Alexis, tell us a little bit about your history and how you came to Salesforce and what you do at Salesforce.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. So I am on the Salesforce certification team. We are a team of Salesforce employees who are solely dedicated to creating and updating the whole suite of Salesforce exams. So, historically, I come from a certification industry background. I've done software certification my entire career. And I came to Salesforce about two, two and a half years ago and just hit the ground running. I joined the team updating and creating new Salesforce certifications. So I actually started with the Tableau certifications and have since moved over into my latest, which is refreshing the Salesforce Certified Platform App Builder exam.
Mike:
Ooh, yes, app builder, that's something all of us admins are near and dear to our hearts on. And that's cool. I mean, I guess there's enough tech out there in the world that there's enough people that need to write certification exams for all of it. Wow. This is one of those ideas of, I bet 20 years ago, that job maybe didn't exist, but it exists now.
Alexis Kingma:
It's funny, certification is such a rich industry, it's one of those jobs that I feel like nobody knows it exists until you have that job. Nobody grows up saying, "I want to write tests," but now it's all of our favorite things to do.
Mike:
No, I mean, you're exactly right, nobody sits down and, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And it's, "I want to sit down and write really hard software questions for people about a cloud-based platform that they can configure declaratively."
Alexis Kingma:
Right.
Mike:
I think if you would've answered that, your teacher would've been, "And you're an astronaut today."
Alexis Kingma:
But it is interesting, the same principles that we use to write Salesforce software certifications are the same principles that are used for the medical boards, for firefighting certifications, for airline certifications. And so when we come together at certification industry events, it's a whole gamut of industries coming together to talk about the same certification principles. So you get to meet a lot of interesting folks.
Mike:
I mean, you don't ever think of that, but that is really... Wow, I bet that's really interesting to sit across the table from people that write certifications to be a rocket scientist.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. Yes. A lot of these certifications, like for a professional roofer, that's a high-stakes certification, or an architect. So it's interesting to hear how all these different industries approach the same problems.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, we're still high stakes too.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
So you mentioned Platform App Builder exam. It got a refresh, which it's probably needed, I mean, every few months, right? But I think before we get into that, what does it mean to refresh an exam?
Alexis Kingma:
So the Platform App Builder exam has been around for over 10 years. It predates me at Salesforce by far. We're actually in our 11th year this year, which is awesome. And so it's been around for so long and the role changes and evolves so much in that time. And so it's important for us to look at the role, look at the requirements in the industry, what are admins doing, what are app builders doing, what are architects doing, what is the most important knowledge that those roles need, and how does our exam align to that? And making sure that the things that we're testing out on the exam are actually things that are the most important for these roles in the real world.
Mike:
Yeah. I mean, that was always one of the hard parts, I remember, when I first got one of my certifications. At the time, we didn't use a lot of Service Cloud, Agentforce for Service, I think now, but I had to go out and learn it because it was part of the certification. And I thought, "Oh, why should I have to learn that?" And I thought, "Well, just because you don't use it or your company doesn't use it, doesn't mean it shouldn't be part of that certification as well or that exam."
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. And so when we approach doing a refresh like we did with app builder, we try to include subject matter experts from a whole range, internal Salesforce employees, external Salesforce users, a wide breadth of roles, admins, people who are solely app builders, architects, to try to say, "Okay, Salesforce might say these topics are most important, but what is the industry saying is most important?" If somebody's looking to hire an app builder, what does that person expect the app builder brings to the table and what knowledge should they already have when they start the job? And so we rely on our subject matter experts to say, "What are those most important concepts, and how do we make sure that they're reflected on the exam?"
Mike:
Makes sense. I mean, that's the part of getting dialed in, to me, that I think is the most important is, one thing for Salesforce to think this is important, but where does that fall in terms of your responsibilities and what you're seeing day to day? Well, let's talk about this new exam, because Platform App Builder, I believe if you said it was been around for 10 years, then I've been at Salesforce when it was launched. What did it originally... Not originally, back in the day have, but what were you refreshing from and really refreshing to?
Alexis Kingma:
I'll say the biggest change between the previous version of the exam, which had been refreshed maybe one or two years ago, to this new version of the exam is really increasing the emphasis on Flow on the new version of the exam. In talking to our group of subject matter experts, hearing from the community, we just continue to hear Flow is such an important piece of being an app builder and being able to do that role, that it needs to be tested. And we actually added it to the exam with quite some depth, not only testing can you create flows, can you choose which flow for which situation, but also can you troubleshoot flows? Can you maintain and monitor them? Really asking the app builder to get deep into flows and making the assertion that flows are a key piece of being an app builder at Salesforce.
Mike:
I mean, that makes a lot of sense. It's funny, I'll ask you later, but I'll be curious to see your answer on it. I mean, when I think of app building, it's a collection of stuff and then there's that automation piece. But also, really diving into Flow like you did really helps set the admin up for being an agent builder as well, right?
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely. And that's another change we made to the exam is adding Agentforce, specifically how you can use Agentforce as an automation tool on the exam. So I don't want to say you must be an Agentforce superuser to be able to take that exam. That's absolutely not the intention. We have an Agentforce specialist exam for that. But really just more about knowing that Agentforce is a tool in your tool belt that's available, and when might it make sense to reach for that tool.
Mike:
So I'll come to that question now that I get asked, and you can decide if you want to answer it or not. But I was asked last week, do admins still build apps?
Alexis Kingma:
Yes. I'll say, from what I've heard, yes. We, as part of this refresh, go through the roles that this exam most aligns to, and Salesforce admin was the number one. So when we got our group of subject matter experts together and asked, "Who is taking this exam? Who should be taking this exam?" Salesforce admins was the number one thing that people said.
Mike:
Yeah. No, I agree. I think it's interesting to live in the time we do now where, I mean, I had somebody send me a link the other day of a dashboard that an agent had coded for them. And it was kind of temporary. It wasn't meant to be any kind of source of truth. But when you think about it, sometimes the permanency of the app, I think that's where that question was going. And I still very much believe that it's the agent that jumps in and adds the additional layer that perhaps goes across apps.
Alexis Kingma:
Agree. I hear from our community over and over that knowing how to get in there and actually build the flows and customize and all the checkboxes, and what they do and what they mean and what they cause is so important and continues to be important even with the new agentic world that we live in.
Mike:
Right. And you mentioned part of the refresh process is also gathering a lot of feedback from not just admins, but customers and employers that hire admins. What were some of the things that they pointed out as admins still need to understand these things? You refreshed it for Flow and Agentforce, but that's not the whole exam, right?
Alexis Kingma:
Correct. And you'll see, it's funny, we still kept Salesforce fundamentals and we still kept user interface. And the funny part is that I was actually looking at much older versions of this exam through this refresh process, and those are the same topic areas that have been around, I don't want to say since the first version, but that have been around since the beginning. And it's because they continue to still be important. Every refresh, we pressure test and say, "Okay, do you still need to know object record and field access? Do you still need to know reports and dashboards?" And the answer continues to be yes. And so those will continue to live and be tested on this exam because they continue to be important.
Mike:
Yeah. Now, from your advice, if a Salesforce admin's listening, maybe they don't have a certification yet or they haven't taken any of the exams, what would you advise in terms of preparation to get ready for this exam? Can they come out of the gate and take it or is there kind of understood prerequisites to this?
Alexis Kingma:
All Salesforce exams are designed to test your hands-on experience. And so they're designed so that, yes, you can read documentation, but they're testing that you have some hands-on experience going into the exam. But, that said, that's where Trailhead becomes a huge asset if you may not have had access to actually get into a sandbox and play around with all these different topics. So exciting for this refresh, we created a brand new exam prep trail. We had existing prep trail badges before, but those have been retired in favor of this new exam prep trail. And what's most exciting is it does prioritize the hands-on badges available on Trailhead. So there's opportunity within each section to get in there, spin up an org, and actually play around with the types of topics that are being tested on the exam. So if you don't have the opportunity to get hands-on experience with every single thing tested, this trail is an excellent opportunity to still be able to prepare for the exam and take the exam regardless.
Mike:
That makes sense. I mean, I think that's always the biggest question I get asked when I'm at user groups or at an event is, "What should I do to prepare for this?" And it's one part just learning. You don't want to study for the test, as they say. You want to study to learn it and understand it. I think that's why the practical hands-on part of it, really what can they build is important.
Alexis Kingma:
And I'll say too, a tip that all of us on the Salesforce exam development team share when we can, is every exam, this one included, has the exam guide, and there's really a lot of information and clues within that exam guide. We list all of the exam objectives, what we call them, all the different content areas tested on the exam. And they're really written very intentionally and with a lot of detail in mind. So thinking about if an objective says, "Create and configure flows," we're not just asking you to describe them or have a high-level understanding of what they are or when to use them. We're really asking, can you get in there, get your hands dirty, create and configure them? And so that's kind of a clue, "Hey, I should be getting in there. I should be clicking around. I should know what each of these buttons, each of these checkboxes does," because that's the kind of question that's going to be asked on the exam.
Whereas something like describe or understand, maybe that is more of a high-level just, "Hey, can you explain or describe, but maybe not necessarily get in there and do?" So I think paying attention to that can help direct how you study for each of these objectives.
Mike:
One thing I thought of, and this was back when I was getting my admin certifications, was describing the value of it to my manager and to my users. And I won't tell you my answer because I want to hear your answer first, but if you were to put yourself in the seat of a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast that's like, "I really want to go and take that exam. I really want to get that certification." How do I justify that or how do I make that case to my employer and to my users that this is worthwhile and worth my time?
Alexis Kingma:
It's such an important question, right? Because that's the big question is how can I get buy-in to study for this, to get support to take this? I think the biggest one is that a certification at its core is a validation of knowledge. A certification is a statement that you possess the knowledge and have the skills and abilities that are tested on this exam. And so for Platform App Builder, these are the knowledge, skills and abilities that not only Salesforce, but the industry in the group of subject matter experts that helped develop this, this is what the industry is saying is most important for an app builder to know and be able to do in the market right now.
And so by earning the certification and saying, "Hey, I have the knowledge, skills, and abilities that are most important for an app builder," you're bringing a lot of value to your team. You're bringing a lot of the learning that you gained through studying. You're bringing a lot of expertise to your team to be able to bring back and show what's the latest and greatest that Salesforce is doing now, and actually be able to implement it.
Mike:
No, spot on. I would also just add one word, confidence.
Alexis Kingma:
Yes.
Mike:
I walked on water the day after I passed my admin certification, because I finally felt like everything that I thought I knew, was verified. I don't know what the right word is. Verified comes to mind, but it's probably not the right word. And I was like, "Yes, that feels right to me." We talked about the prep trail, which I think is important because, boy, for a while there, preparing for a certification was reading some sample questions and hoping you kind of had your bases covered. I think that prep trail is really, really good to help get you hands on. Now, I'll say this because I think I know the answer, but I want to make sure. Even if I complete that prep trail, that doesn't mean I'm going to pass the certification exam, right?
Alexis Kingma:
I'm so glad you asked.
Mike:
Yeah.
Alexis Kingma:
The prep trail is one piece, but I think there's no guarantee, to be honest. There's no way to say with 100% certainty, "I will pass this exam." I think the prep trail is one piece. Like I mentioned, the hands-on component or experience is really important. And so, in addition to the prep trail, I think the best way to assess your level of readiness really is to go through that exam guide and those objectives on it, and just kind of do it a little self test, "Hey, let me read this objective. Is this something I'm familiar with? Do I feel like I can explain what this means and explain how I do this in my day to day? Or is this something I need to take a second and read some help documentation and get a little bit deeper on?"
So I think those two things combined, the prep trail and the exam guide are your best bet to make sure that you're ready, but it is definitely not a one for one. And no Salesforce certifications are finish the prep trail, pass the exam. We want to add a little extra rigor.
Mike:
Yeah. Well, and that makes sense because I feel when you complete the Trailhead module that the exam should test on, okay, so you knew the answers. Did you know why those are the right answers? And I always felt like the exams pushed that limit for me because it was one thing to know what to do, I think it's another thing to know why to do it.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
We'll talk about one thing in general, and then we have Dreamforce coming up. In general, I'm a Salesforce admin, I listen to this podcast and like, "You know what? I got the green light, I'm going to go get my app builder exam." What should I bring? What do I bring to the... Do I go to a testing center? Can I take it at home? How should I do that outside of just the regular preparation part?
Alexis Kingma:
We offer a lot of flexibility in this process, so it's totally up to you if you prefer to go to a testing center or if you prefer to test at home. I know for me, right now, looking at my desk, there's six drinks and about a million Post-it notes. And looking around my office, I'm embarrassed at the state. So for me, I typically go to a testing center, because when you take the exam at home, you are asked to make sure that your workspace is clean, your cat's not walking in, like mine just did. All the things.
So you have the choice to take it at home or in a testing center. If you do take it at home, I just encourage everybody to run through the system checks that are part of the Pearson exam process. That will just make sure that your computer is able to take the exam. Some work computers or VPNs can need to be shut down first. So run those system checks, read the information that Salesforce has on taking an exam. Or if you go to a testing center, you'll show up to the testing center, bring your ID. Salesforce has documentation on both that will make sure that you're ready and have exactly what you need either way. But we offer our exams almost any time, any day. So you can, when you go to register, obviously, testing centers have hours, but there's a whole breadth of days and times available for you to choose to take your exam. So you can sneak it in before Dreamforce.
Mike:
There you go. I mean, I really admire the people that take it at home. And I know some people just have to logistics wise. For me, I can get into the mindset of I'm here to take this exam if I have to go somewhere. I think it's the whole process of getting up, getting outside, having to go to a location, it feels very purposeful. And then, I guess because of that, it keeps me focused, right? I don't feel like, "Okay, well, it's 2:15. I guess I'll take the exam now." It's like, nope, my appointment's at this time. I got to leave early, I got to put my shoes on.
Alexis Kingma:
I agree with you, but I'll say the other side of that coin is that the stress of, okay, now I have to fight through traffic or I have to wait on transit, and then I have to show up and hope that the check... So I think offering both is a huge benefit because it totally depends on each individual person.
Mike:
Yeah, no, absolutely. So I asked that because I also wanted to kind of sneakily, if that's a word, sneakily, work in the fact that you can get your certification at Dreamforce if you attend, correct?
Alexis Kingma:
Correct. We are very excited, Salesforce certification will be onsite at Dreamforce. And really exciting, not everybody, I think, realizes who attends Dreamforce, but everybody who attends Dreamforce gets one complimentary certification exam while they're at Dreamforce. So a huge opportunity there in having a free exam that you can take onsite and actually earn a certification while you're at Dreamforce.
Mike:
Wow. And that's not just limited to app builder, it's any of our certifications.
Alexis Kingma:
It is any of our certifications, including the architect certifications, which is exciting.
Mike:
Wow.
Alexis Kingma:
And I will say, just a shameless plug for everybody listening too, if you're interested in taking an exam at Dreamforce, I highly recommend adding that exam session to your agenda. That way, that secures your space to take an exam at Dreamforce. Otherwise, if you don't have it added to your agenda, you'll have to show up in the standby line, which we ask that you join an hour before the exam.
Mike:
[inaudible 00:25:49].
Alexis Kingma:
Yes. We get very crowded, so it saves a lot of time to add the exam session that you'd like to attend to your agenda, we have them Monday through Thursday, to make sure that you're prepared and you have a spot to take your exam.
Mike:
I mean, why you would leave Dreamforce without one more certification is beyond me.
Alexis Kingma:
Especially when it's free.
Mike:
I mean, it's part of your ticket. I also get, you know what, you could fail. I will say this, there has been exams that I've studied for and went in and failed, and that's okay. I mean, it just helped me really understand what I had digested and understood, and the parts that I think I had glossed over or maybe felt I had understood, and that the exam brought that out and told me that. No harm, no foul if you go to take an exam and you don't pass. The expectation isn't that you'll pass or fail, it's that it tests your knowledge. And I think for me, leaving and having that understanding of, "Okay, I passed, great, but did I feel good about how I passed or should I really keep going to build on that knowledge?" Or maybe I didn't pass, and you know what? Now I have an inventory of where I can pay attention to and gaps in my learning.
Alexis Kingma:
One of the certification developers on our team, Melanie, always says, "We don't use the word fail, we use the word learn. You didn't fail, you learned." And I think that's absolutely how we approach it. Failing is not a failure. It doesn't mean you don't know Salesforce, you don't know your job. It's a learning opportunity. And we tell you the areas to work on in the exam results, and it's just one more opportunity to learn and dig in and try again.
Mike:
Yeah. That's a very positive note. I want to ask your advice. I mean, as somebody that has been writing software exams and helping people understand, what is, in your opinion, one method or one tip that you give people in terms of how they should approach preparation for this and preparation for other exams?
Alexis Kingma:
The biggest one is what I was alluding to earlier about really paying attention to the level of knowledge or skill that the exam is asking for. Is it asking for you to be able to do that thing? Is it asking for you to be able to troubleshoot that thing? Or is it just asking you to know and have awareness and be able to explain it? Because when we're writing exam questions, that's what we're looking at to write our questions, is do these questions need to be to the depth of somebody who's actually configuring and troubleshooting or is this just more let's test on the awareness? So that's always my biggest tip.
And then I will share my own personal tip when I take an exam, is I sit down and I take three deep breaths before I get started, and that's always helped me. So that's my more practical logistical tip.
Mike:
Yep. Calm and center yourself.
Alexis Kingma:
Yes.
Mike:
Be present where you're at. I'll be honest, sometimes that's the best part about going somewhere is it's always nice and quiet and it's very easy to just stay focused because of it.
Alexis Kingma:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Alexis, I think we covered a lot. I'm excited for the refresh. I know our admins will be and our architects and developers. I mean, app builder is applicable to a lot of people in our ecosystem, not just Salesforce admins. But I love that it got refreshed and really reflects what the product can do and where the product is, and also what admins and app builders should think about. So thanks for coming on the podcast and sharing that with us.
Alexis Kingma:
I'm happy to be here. I am so excited. Like you said, this exam is applicable to so many people in so many roles. I heard so many times throughout working on this exam from folks saying, "This is my favorite exam because it's just so relevant and applicable across the board." So it was such a blast to be able to work on it, and I'm super excited to hear the feedback, hear from folks who take it and pass it. I hope to hear from everybody on LinkedIn after they pass. So super excited to have this out in the world.
Mike:
I want to thank Alexis again for joining us and giving us a look into what's changed with the Platform App Builder exam. I think this is a big takeaway for admins as certification is more than just knowing the features, it's about validating that you can apply those skills in the real world. So from Flow and configuration, to understanding when tools like Agentforce make sense. Take a look at the exam guide, get hands on, and use those objectives to figure out when you're ready and where you can learn more. And, of course, if this episode helped you, be sure to subscribe, share it with another Salesforce admin. And until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Khushwant Singh, SVP of Product Management for the AI Application Development Platform at Salesforce.
Join us as we chat about how rethinking the Salesforce stack for AI with Headless 360 will change the way admins set up complex systems.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Khushwant Singh.
Opening Salesforce to AI agents
AI is changing more than how we find information or generate content. It could also change how Salesforce Admins configure the platform itself. I sat down with Khushwant "Khush" Singh, to learn about Headless 360 and the work happening behind the scenes to make Salesforce accessible to both humans and AI agents.
"Headless 360 is about bringing Salesforce to wherever you need it," Khush says. In a headless platform, he explains, the frontend is separated from the backend. So you can use Salesforce data and visualizations on your website without changing the design, or change records in Slack without having to open an extra tab.
But Salesforce Headless 360 is about more than portability. Khush and his team are translating the entire platform into a set of model context protocols (MCPs), skills, and metadata that can interface directly with AI agents. And that opens a world of possibilities for what admins can do with conversational tools.
What if setting up Salesforce became a conversation?
"For the last 27 years, layers that make up the Salesforce platform have been put in place for a human," Khush says, "so we're trying to open this up for both a human and an agent, so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin."
Setup with Agentforce, which streamlines configuration for admins with the help of an AI assistant, is a great example of what Khush is talking about. You can use natural language prompts to create objects, Lightning pages, and flows; manage users and user access; and troubleshoot formulas.
Headless 360 lays the groundwork for a future where setting up Salesforce becomes a conversation about your business goals and processes. No coding required.
Admins still stay in control
None of this removes the admin from the process. Khush is quick to point out that the goal is for agents and admins to work together, with humans still initiating actions, validating results, and providing governance.
His advice for admins right now is simple: try Setup with Agentforce and start getting familiar with what this new way of working feels like. Because the biggest shift may not be AI helping you use Salesforce faster—it may be AI changing how you build Salesforce in the first place.
Listen to the full episode for more from Khush about Salesforce Headless 360 and how AI could change the way we set up our orgs. And don't forget to subscribe to the Salesforce Admins Podcast to catch us every Thursday.
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Full show transcript
 
Mike Gerholdt:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm joined by Khushwant Singh to talk about what happens when Salesforce stops just being a destination and starts becoming part of every system your business already relies on. That's right, from Headless 360 to Setup with Agentforce, Khush breaks down how admins are moving beyond configuring features and into orchestrating how data, AI agents, automation and people work together across the business.
Now, we're going to dig into what Headless actually means for admins, why governance and trust matter more than ever in an AI first world, and how Salesforce is building toward a future where setting up complex systems really becomes more of a conversation than a checklist. This episode is really about systems thinking, how admins can connect experiences without forcing teams to rebuild everything from scratch. So if you've been trying to figure out where AI fits into your role or how your role is evolving alongside it, I promise you this episode gives you a practical look at what's already happening and what's coming next. So be sure to hit that subscribe button. Share this episode with your favorite architect or admin friend, and let's get Khush on the podcast.
So Khush, welcome back to the podcast.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Thank you for having me back, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I say that because I had to look and it was 2022 back in the day you were talking Experience Cloud when we last had you on. You've since moved on, moved up, had your hands in a lot of things, did an admin keynote with me. So let's start there and let's kind of catch everybody up on some of the products you've been working on, and then we're going to talk about the newest one that we launched at TDX this year.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, happy to. And again, great to be back. I think back in the day, started obviously with Experience Cloud. Experience Cloud really was building a product that is external-facing and again, it's built on the same platform. And again, as we looked at the product portfolio, it just made sense to start to bring things together. So we've actually sort of rolled and morphed into the application development platform, obviously within the platform organization, everything pro-code, low-code, desktop, mobile. And so there've been quite a few products leading up to here, anything from our delivery on mobile, mobile offline, the Salesforce mobile app, all the way to Agentforce Vibes, the Agentforce Experience layer, obviously a fair amount of work on the Headless side of things. So yeah, it's been quite a journey to this particular point, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, it's actually hard to point out things that aren't admin-friendly that you've had your hands on because you've always kind of championed everybody being able to build on our platform.
So let's talk about TDX this year because we launched Headless 360.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Oh yeah, we did.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
By the way, in case you forgot.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, it was a massive announcement. I think, look, as you think about what's happening in the market right now, you've got customers engaging through many different surface areas. We've got customers on ChatGPT, on Claude, on Gemini, Teams. At the same time, you've got developers also using a variety of different tools, different IDEs, different coding agents. And so I think Headless 360 really is a testament to acknowledging this change in the market in the industry and trying to meet the customer where they are. The customer being an end user or the customer being a developer and admin, just meeting them where they are in whichever tool, whichever interface they might be.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, do you recall ever a time in technology when it was, I hate to use the euphemism, but like the Wild West where I feel like there's so many choices for what you can do just in regards to AI?
 
Khushwant Singh:
There is. And there is obviously a good side to it. There's also a downside to it. The good side is really your [inaudible 00:04:31] for choice. There is innovation that is helping you drive productivity day in, day out.
The downside of this is you just have to be really careful about quality, about trust, about governance. And you have to ensure that while you're going fast, you're not sort of compromising on that trust aspect of things. And that's what we're trying to do here at Salesforce and just trying to be a little bit more thoughtful in our approach over here.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. So my developer friend, Josh Burke, who comes on the podcast, usually has to explain things to me every now and then. I think developers are very familiar with the term headless.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yes.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm not sure outside of Headless flows, which I know what those mean, I'm not sure admins could understand or could confidently buzz in on a game show and answer what is Headless 360. So can you help them kind of understand what is Headless 360 if they had to tell their manager?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah, sure. So one way to think about it is, let's say you're a customer and you've got your own website, it's built out of React, it's not built on the Salesforce platform, but there is so much of your goodness and investment that you have within the Salesforce platform that you want to be able to easily reuse in the context of this other website that you have, portal that you have, mobile application that you have. All of that may not be built on the Salesforce platform. You want to be able to reuse your investment seamlessly.
And so Headless 360 really is about how do we empower you, the customer, to be able to easily use those assets, those investments within the Salesforce platform in that surface area that you've got that may not be on the Salesforce platform. So it's really about giving them that flexibility so that they can easily reuse their investments in all of these various surface areas and just meet their customers wherever they are versus bring their customers into Salesforce.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I think it makes sense. I mean, I was a customer way back in '06 when I remember it was like transfer and move to Salesforce, and everything was "have it on the platform, have it on the platform." And then shortly thereafter it was kind of like almost the realization that we had was, "Well, it's a lot of friction to constantly move platforms. What if companies just integrate and we become that connector to everything?" And I feel the same way with this.
 
Khushwant Singh:
100%. And you know what? Look, I think the one example is if you go into the Williams Sonoma website, right? Williams Sonoma website, it's not built in Salesforce, but if you use their sous chef AI, I think... I'm not sure what they call it, but-
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I'm sure it's something really, really snappy and small.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Olive. Olive. There you go.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Olive. Yeah. See?
 
Khushwant Singh:
A snappy name right there. That agent is an Agentforce agent, right? So that's on example where Salesforce is being used in whichever head that you'd like us to be in. And so in this particular case, the Salesforce agent is in the Williams Sonoma website. So that's just one example where we are trying to make it easier for this integration to happen through the Headless 360 platform.
Now that's one view. And that's the view, I would say, an easy way to try to understand what it means for Headless 360.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, because then as an admin, as a developer, you're not having to sit down and say, "Okay, well, if we move to the Salesforce platform, we have to deprecate everything that we just spent the last two years building on our site." Marketing's like, "No, no, we just got the site pixel perfect the way we want it. Now we can integrate best of everything that we want."
For admins who aren't thinking of maybe websites, how does Headless 360 play into other integrations that they may talk to IT or internal stakeholders about?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Yeah. So for example, when admins are chatting with their other internal team, they may have a custom application that they already have in place and they want to be able to have Salesforce data, Salesforce visualizations surface in whichever application they may have already, right? That's one example. So again, it is about bringing Salesforce to wherever they may already have.
So for example, an admin may have a business application that already runs within ChatGPT. So ChatGPT, for example, it allows companies to create bespoke applications. And if you want to be able to integrate Salesforce into that application, that's doable as well. It doesn't have to be in ChatGPT. It could be in any other existing non-agentic application as well. But it's about that, look, you don't have to rebuild everything. Wherever you are, you've got an existing application, we'll find a way through Headless 360 to be able to bring Salesforce to it.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. No, it totally makes sense. I mean, in that way we can really think about how are we making sure that the departments have the software and the tech that they want, but also access to all of the information that they need to do their jobs the best.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Mm-hmm.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
So Headless 360 is a big thing we talked about. I also know I saw you in some True to the Core and True to the Core Deep Dive stuff. Was there some features you were talking about in that that possibly play into what admins are going to be working on for the rest of this year?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Well, yeah. I mean, a few aspects as we think about Headless 360 that would be of interest to admins. So first and foremost, you've all seen the stack diagram of the Salesforce platform. You've got those four layers. You've got your layers of engagement, you have layers of context, you've got the sort of our data foundation, et cetera. So you've got those layers that make up the Salesforce platform. For the last 27 years, those layers have been put in place for a human, right? And now what the product teams and the engineering teams are doing are going back and saying, "How do we now open this up both for a human and an agent so the agent can do that work on behalf of the admin when the admin sort of wants a task to be done for that particular reason?" And so what that means is that we're translating our entire platform into a set of MCPs, a set of skills, a set of metadata that is grounded so that these agents can do the work on behalf of the admins.
So one good example is the setup with Agentforce, which is so far so good. We've gotten great feedback on it. Now behind the scenes is a set of skills, a set of MCPs that are firing off to be able to get their tasks done. And so that's one thing that I think our admins can look to benefit from.
The other piece is I know we have some admins who are familiar with some of these IDEs that we have out there. They use Cloud Code quite a bit. They use Vibes quite a bit. It may not be the entire admin audience, but for those audiences, again, the ability to be able to use all of these MCP skills in these development environments is another thing that our admins can really look forward towards.
Now the other thing that we've also worked on is, over the last few months, the foundation for these skills, these MCPs, this Headless 360 foundation has been very sort of focused on how do we unblock these pro-code use cases, whether that's in Cloud Code, whether that's in Vibes, et cetera. But this is the same foundation upon which as we speak in safe harbor, I share that we are building what we call our no code offering as well.
So how do you go about in an unintimidating sort of type of interface, have this conversation with an agent, which behind the scenes is interacting with that same Headless 360 layer to help you build out your agents, your applications, to help you augment your existing agents and applications, help you set up provision, configure Salesforce from a zero to one point of view, because we all know how setting it all up is quite a taxing task for our admins? So that's the potential I see for Headless 360 for our admin personas.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah. I mean, to go back on some of the stuff that you were mentioning, I remember the first time I thought, "Hey, I could have ChatGPT rewrite ChatGPT's instructions." And I remember thinking like, "I'm so far ahead of the curve, man. I'm making AI rebuild AI." And then it was only a few weeks later that Cheryl was demoing Setup with Agentforce and I thought, "Oh, that makes so much more sense because all of the things that you were having that setup agent do are things that not necessarily admins don't like doing. It's like paper cuts." It's the little things that take 20, 30 minutes out of your day when you really wanted that solid hour to build that application kind of start to finish.
 
Khushwant Singh:
Indeed. Indeed. So we really viewed Headless 360 as the foundation upon which agents can work on behalf of the admins. And again, look, this is agents and admins working together because again, we've got to have the human presence to be able to validate, to be able to interrupt, to be able to initiate any actions that are performed by the agents. And if these agents can help drive greater productivity, then it's a win-win while at the same time having governance by humans over it.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Right. Absolutely. Do you envision us being at a point where all of setting up Salesforce could just be a conversation with an agent based on the business and what they're trying to accomplish?
 
Khushwant Singh:
We are trying to do that. We are trying to do that. Now, I'll give you a view into our approach over here. We're taking a steel thread approach here where just trying to, for example, set up a customer service agent. That cuts across Service Cloud, cuts across platform, cuts across Agentforce, cuts across Data Cloud. So we've got to take a system view, an end-to-end view versus a feature view because that's what our admins go through. That's what a practitioner goes through. They look at it from a steel thread point of view, and that's what we as product teams have to do.
And so as we think about using agents to go ahead and help provision, set up, get Salesforce up and running really quickly, that's the new strategy that we are taking over here, a steel thread view so that we can look across the board and say, "Look, which MCPs are missing? Which skills are missing? Which APIs are missing? Which metadata needs to be grounded? How do we ensure that across entire steel thread, quality is being ensured, governance is being woven into?"
So we are starting that way and we want to scale that way as well. So my hope is that come Dreamforce this year, we'll be able to at least have a sizable number of steel threads that we feel really, really confident about on Agentforce really helping and agents helping in this particular side of things. So yeah, that's the approach we're taking, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Wow, that's going to be amazing. Every time you think, "Oh, we've probably invented everything," technology just comes along and pulls the rug out from underneath of you and says, "Haha! There's new stuff. You got to figure this out now."
I'd be curious, you're so ingrained in a lot of things that admins do on the platform, a lot of things developers do on the platform and then also having to keep up with AI. What is a piece of advice you could give people for how you personally keep up with the newest news and innovation on what's going on with AI?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Wow, that's a good question. I think first and foremost, I spend a lot of time just looking at reading publications like what's on TechCrunch, what's on Techmeme, trying to just understand how are technology providers adapting, how are companies using AI. That's one.
The second one is actually you learn a lot via speaking with others in the community, right?
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Mm-hmm.
 
Khushwant Singh:
You talk to customers, you talk to other admins, you talk to other developers and you get to understand there are use cases that they're working through and some of the very many innovative workarounds or users of AI that they're applying. And then you're thinking about this that, "Wow. There's a trend here, there's something that we should be backing up and maybe providing out of the box within the product."
And so I think that community piece speaking with other customers, with your peers, your colleagues from different companies, that sort of brings a very practitioners and practical view to things. So I think if you combine it with some of these ... So if you take a combination of both, what's being published out in the internet, what sort of bleeding edge and all of these various publications and then you sort of marry that and juxtapose that with the practical aspects on how it's implemented in all of these various by your peers in different companies, that's kind of how I ... That's at least the approach that I've taken. And I've seen it help even with some of my teammates who use a similar approach as well, Mike.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
Yeah, I would agree. I mean, coming fresh off of being at a conference, just even talking with people, you find more resources than you think you could find and it exposes you to different levels of thought.
As we kind of close things out, I'd love to know I'm always big, especially when I'm coaching people for events, for TDX, for keynotes, because I've been in keynote with you. I feel like when people are done listening to something, I always want to give them something very actionable that they should do when they get done listening to a session or they get done listening to a podcast like this. So if you are a Salesforce admin listening to this podcast, what is one thing you think you should do right after you listen to this podcast?
 
Khushwant Singh:
Good one. It's a tricky question. I would say that, look, I would encourage everyone to go ahead and use and try and give Setup with Agentforce a run, right? Take it out for a spin. It's available in an open beta. And I would encourage all of you all to give it a try, please. We've gotten so much great feedback. We are a stone's throw away before we make it generally available. And this is our first approach to using Agentforce, using AI to help improve the productivity and quality of life of our admins. It's not our last, but it is definitely our best foot forward right now. And we'd love to get your feedback. Like I said, we are in the final mile and your feedback is much appreciated, so try it out.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
I love it. Khush, you've always been a fan of admins. And I am so grateful to have you back on the podcast and even more thankful that you are constantly helping Salesforce innovate for everybody in the tech industry to be successful. So I appreciate you spending a little time with us today.
 
Khushwant Singh:
No, of course it's my pleasure. Admins are the lifeblood of Salesforce. You're out there, you're representing our products, you're using our products, you're championing our products, you're giving us tough love. And we can't be more appreciative. And so this is an honor to be here on this podcast to speak with you, Mike, and to speak with all of our admins.
 
Mike Gerholdt:
And a big thanks to Khushwant Singh for joining me and sharing how Headless 360 and Agentforce are reshaping the way admins build and manage systems across the business.
My big takeaway? Well, the future admin isn't just configuring Salesforce. They're designing trusted systems where automation, data, agents, and people all work together for better outcomes. And as Khush said, trust and governance will still sit right at the center of all that work. So if you haven't already, take Setup with Agentforce for a spin and start exploring what human plus agent collaboration can look like in your org.
And of course, be sure to subscribe, leave a review. And as always, I would love it if you share this episode with your friends. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.

Today on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, we talk to Skye Tyler, Principal Solution Consultant at Beyond the Horizon Technology.
Join us as we chat about why clean metadata is crucial for getting the most out of AI.
You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few takeaways from our conversation with Skye Tyler.
Why metadata is your training manual for AI
You've done it, I've done it. Sales wants a name changed on a report, so you just change the field label rather than create something new and mess with the integrations. Or maybe you have four different dates, but your marketing team knows which one they're actually looking for. What's the big deal?
The problem is that while humans can get by on institutional knowledge, AI agents need a bit more help from your metadata. As my guest this week, Skye Tyler, explains, you should think of AI like an overenthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems. It really wants to answer your question, so if it sees four different dates, it's going to take a guess.
Think of metadata like an onboarding manual for AI. With clear field descriptions and help texts, you can point your agents in the right direction and prevent hallucinations.
How to get started with metadata cleanup
Obviously, cleaning up your org's metadata is easier said than done. However, Skye has some great tips for how to get started.
If your business has busy periods and slow periods, you might be able to schedule time specifically to work on your metadata. But for the rest of us, Skye recommends a clean-as-you-go approach. Any time you update an object, set aside some time to review all of the related metadata and update the description.
Similarly, any time your organization is building a new business process that includes AI, you need to clean up any metadata an agent could interact with. As Skye points out, while you don't necessarily have time to deep clean your house every week, a little spot cleaning can go a long way.
Skye's Salesforce journey and the value of sharing what you know
We also took some time to talk about Skye's career path from nonprofit arts and what advice she has for folks who are new to the Salesforce ecosystem. AI is changing things fast, and that means there are more opportunities. "With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning, having been in the space for a decade," she says.
The Salesforce community is incredibly supportive, and Skye recommends putting yourself out there. You never know who you'll meet at an event, and where those connections could take you. "No matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't," she says, "put yourself out there, and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it."
Listen to my full conversation with Skye for more on how to clean up your metadata and stop AI hallucinations. And make sure you're subscribed to the Salesforce Admins Podcast so you never miss an episode.
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Full show transcript
Mike:
This week on the Salesforce Admins Podcast, I'm talking with Skye Tyler about the part of AI readiness that, well, it's easy to overlook. That's your metadata. We all know that clean data matters, but agents also need clear field descriptions, documentation, permissions, and context to understand what your business actually means. Skye explains why metadata acts like onboarding for an enthusiastic new employee and why a confident answer isn't always a correct one.
We'll also talk about practical ways admins can improve metadata without trying to clean the entire org overnight. So give this episode a listen, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, and of course share it with an admin who maybe has prepared their platform for Agentforce. And with that, let's get Skye on the podcast.
So Skye, welcome to the podcast.
Skye Tyler:
Hi, thanks for having me back.
Mike:
I'm excited. Going through everything that we're doing to prepare for Dreamforce and admins are preparing for the agentic future, which is coming faster than eve, I stumbled across your session. And I thought, hey, before we get into Dreamforce, maybe we can dive into all of the stuff that you might not be able to cover in your 40-minute breakout session. So we'll talk about that because it's data related and data related is agent related. But before we get started, can you just refresh everybody on how you got started with Salesforce and what you do in the ecosystem?
Skye Tyler:
Oh, I'd love to. So I've been fortunate enough to be working in the Salesforce space with the nonprofit industry for a little over a decade now, and started off doing implementation work with nonprofit arts organizations, doing ticketing and donation. And then I've moved in and through the consulting space. Again, focusing primarily on nonprofits with a little bit of dipping into education along the way. And over the course of that decade, I've been fortunate enough to meet some amazing folks, yourself included, that has given me an opportunity to have the chance to share not just my journey, but my experiences, my struggles, successes, failures. And some of those avenues have included things like coaching and mentoring with super moms and the Salesforce military program, and then also just being really honored to be able to speak at community dream and events and events like Dreamforce and Trailblazer DX.
Mike:
I mean, that's a great answer. You know what's funny is so many people ask me, "How do I get started in the community," or, "What should I do?" And I feel like now I'm just going to point back to your answer because what you said was just perfect. Well, don't be afraid to share what you've learned, or what you're learning, or how you've learned it, or things you're working on because that's what people love to see. They love to see how you're doing it so that they can get an idea for how to do it. So thanks for answering a question I didn't have.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, absolutely. I also just want to throw in, and I say this at many of my live sessions, that no matter where you are in your journey, you know something that other people don't. And everybody learns more when folks show up, and are vulnerable, and are willing to share those things. So definitely just give it a try. Put yourself out there and I guarantee you someone's going to appreciate it.
Mike:
Yeah, absolutely. Plus the thing I add to that is there's probably somebody out there like you that really needs to see somebody like you on stage.
Skye Tyler:
Yes, absolutely.
Mike:
So we talk a lot about data with agents and cleaning data, making sure your data's up-to-date, making sure your data's fresh, which every time I use the word fresh, I always think of how that plastic comes off an iPhone. I don't know why, but that's where my brain goes, because agents and AI and LLMs do a really good job of consuming a vast amount of information and giving it back to you in what you asked for. I think one of the things that we talk less about and that I want to talk to you about is your metadata, because I'll be honest, I pay attention to my metadata for five seconds when I'm creating the field.
Skye Tyler:
I'd say that's four seconds more than most people.
Mike:
Right, because all you got to do is click outside the box and it fills in the developer name, so I'm good. And description, ah, fill it in later.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. And for the longest time, that's been really standard. And again, working across several consultancies and with lots of different works, people assume, well, we know what this field means. You give it a field name, the team knows what this means. I don't need to fill in description. I don't need to fill in help text. It's fine.
And again, for the longest time, that institutional knowledge was enough of a stopgap that it was fine. Nothing was going to break or go horribly wrong if you left the description field empty. But all of that changes when you start introducing agents. And an example I may reference a couple times on this podcast is, I don't know if you've ever heard this, but the idea of thinking about your agent as a really enthusiastic intern with short-term memory problems.
Mike:
Like memory of a goldfish.
Skye Tyler:
Yes, exactly. So if you've got a new intern and they don't have deep industry experience, or they don't have longer term institutional memory within your organization, and they come on site, they're excited to be there, they're energized, they're probably young and enthusiastic, and they're going to sound really confident. You're going to ask them a question. They're like, "Yeah, absolutely. I can absolutely do that."
But there's a difference between sounding confident and actually knowing the answer. And where AI gets really tricky is not only does it sound confident, it usually has a certain level of fluency to it with the amazing jumps in natural language processing over the past few years, it sounds both confident and right because it's just a well-structured sentence. And there's a huge gap between the structure of the sentence and the actual understanding of the data behind it.
Mike:
Right. It reads to us as so confident in its own answer that we would be silly to think it's wrong.
Skye Tyler:
Oh, absolutely. It would be a waste of time to go back and check it because look at how confident it is.
Mike:
Yeah. And look at all the part that I always think of is look at all the information it gave me. I asked it two sentences and it gave me four paragraphs of an answer. It must be right.
Skye Tyler:
Yes. And of course, don't forget that at the beginning, it also flattered you and said, "Oh, Mike, that's a great question. Let's dig into that."
Mike:
Yeah. You sound just like my AI.
Skye Tyler:
Exactly.
Mike:
"Of course it's a great idea, Mike. You should totally do that. Everything's a great idea." So when we think about that though, why is it making those mistakes? Because if we're paying attention, and I mean, I was even working on some content today that's like, got to keep your stuff fresh. If you're going to do call notes or have a summary agent, then make sure your salespeople are doing call notes and keeping it up to date or keeping the data up to date. Then why is it so confidently giving us, I don't want to say the wrong answer, but confidently providing us with information that it thinks is correct, but isn't?
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. So a big part of this comes down to the difference between how humans think and form answers and how the large language models do it. And one of the real risks around this false fluency framework is that you pose a question, you ask a question, and first there's the basic understanding that the agent, whichever model or system you're using, their goal is to accomplish the thing that you asked.
So the first thing is getting really careful about how you ask your questions so that you're not sort of setting it up to just affirm the thing that you have asked. But then beyond that, the way that these LLMs, these large language models work, is it's basically a really complex pattern completing process. And so you mentioned peeling that plastic off of your new iPhone. How many times are you typing a text message on your iPhone and it has that auto recommend that comes up right above your keyboard?
Mike:
Yeah.
Skye Tyler:
So that's a good example of a simple version of this. So depending on how often you type in "Oh my," and then it's going to recommend a couple of different things that often come after "Oh my" in the training data. When we're thinking about this in the context of asking an agent something in Salesforce, the way that it identifies what to propose for an answer is not looking at just the data in the field, it first has to go look and see what information is available and that's when it dips into the metadata. So if you've got four different fields that have very similar field names, but have no metadata to tell the agent field one means this, field two means that, field three means this, and field four means this completely other thing, it's just going to guess.
Mike:
So if you had four dates on a record that were, I don't know, draft dates because it ties to a contract or something, and it's draft one, draft two, draft three, draft four, and you know as the user, those are the dates that you completed those drafts, but your metadata just shows four draft dates and there's no explanation for the agent. So the agent's like, "Here's when all the drafts were completed."
Skye Tyler:
Right, it's going to guess. And because it's non-deterministic, it might guess right the first time you ask it a question. It might guess right the second, third, fourth, fifth, 20th time, and then the 21st time, it guesses wrong.
Mike:
But confidently.
Skye Tyler:
But confidently wrong.
Mike:
Confidently. Right.
Skye Tyler:
Right. And so when we're thinking about how to support our agents, if we go back to that analogy of the over-enthusiastic summer intern, the metadata is effectively the onboarding process for that new intern or a new employee. It's the manual about what your data means, and it's the context that the agent can use to give you more consistently reliable, correct answers.
Mike:
Love it. So I remember, I think it was TDX two years ago, we were talking kind of on this subject. And whenever we roll out a new feature, it's here's the things you need to do to prepare. And I remember getting up and talking with a lot of people of like, "Hey, it's more than just the data that's got to be cleaned because there's a lot of data cleaning services and hopefully you have a lot of validation rules and stuff in place, but also your metadata needs to be cleaned as well."
And I looked over in the audience, I felt this guy just shrug his shoulders and just kind of turn a lighter shade of pale, I'll say. And I walked up to him afterward and I asked him, I was like, "Are you okay?" And he's like, "Yeah, your words just hit me really hard. I was thinking of all the metadata I have to clean up." So obviously it would be awesome if every day people woke up and you cleaned your whole house. But let's be honest, you don't have to wake up every day just to live in your house to clean your whole house. What is the approach that an admin should think of in terms of getting their metadata to that next level and to prepare for an agent force implementation?
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, I love the analogy of cleaning your house every day because I'll tell you, I do not wipe my baseboards every day.
Mike:
oh, man. I would pay somebody to come once a week to do my baseboards. It would be awesome.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. So there's a couple of ways that you can look at this. The first one is figuring out within your workflows, your day-to-day and annual workflows, where you can build metadata maintenance into your process. And so what this might look like for admins is the next time someone on your team asks for an update on an object, whether it's a page layout, or some new fields or what have you, taking and building some extra time into however long you budget or allocate for that task to include reviewing related metadata. Every time you need to update a flow because the business process has changed and you say save as new version, as soon as you click save as new version, update the description of the flow.
That's the first thing that agents are looking at to be able to figure out what automations do I call, what automations are related to a process, et cetera. So building it into the workflow of what you already do is one avenue to consider. If you have an amazing organization that lets you do proactive maintenance, working that into your project plan and saying, "Hey, this is a usually kind of quiet time of the year for new admin requests. Let's go ahead and block two weeks or three weeks and do a more thorough or a deeper dive into updating the metadata." If you work at one of those organizations, let me know, because I've heard they exist. I haven't encountered one in the wild.
But then lastly, when you have any new agent related process, it should be considered mandatory as part of that project to do a metadata review of every aspect of metadata that that agentic process is going to interact with. Because one of the big challenges that organizations have been seeing is they're putting a lot of time and resources and money into creating agentic solutions, but the research and the data is just not showing the level of return on investment or the level of success that people are expecting. And one of several underlying factors is you're not setting your agents up for success.
You've got this new employee, this new agent employee, but you didn't onboard them. You didn't provide them with adequate institutional knowledge and training. You gave them some direction. But if you think about it, Mike, when you've got a new employee that comes on and they go to that podcast or that blog record for the first time and they see your four review dates and they don't know, they stop and ask someone. They ping you on Slack and be like, "Mike, can you explain these four review dates to me?" Your agent can't do that. So set them up for success with that onboarding through the metadata updates.
Mike:
And I think that also, I mean, I really like how you approach that. I think that's also a funnel or a pathway that you could flip. So you don't have to think of, I have to tackle everything and clean all my metadata first, as opposed to, well, if we're going to roll out an agent and it's going to touch these three objects and these 15 fields, then that's where you start.
Skye Tyler:
Absolutely.
Mike:
Because then that will help you set up a plan for here's how we're going to tackle this part of it. And then as the agent responsibilities or you build additional sub-agents expands, then you can tackle two or three more objects that maybe that sub-agent has to talk to as opposed to, okay, we're going to wake up at 3:00 AM, clean the whole house just to live in it, which is a good idea. I think sometimes readiness to the extreme can feel overwhelming.
Skye Tyler:
Right. And if it's overwhelming to the point where you don't make any progress on it, then it's not useful either. So definitely thinking about what's within scope. Where I would challenge that a little bit though is unless you have put very firm guardrails on your agent, there's always the possibility that it's going to get creative. So you might intend for that agent to only look at these four fields, or these 15 fields, or these two objects, but if you don't actually instantiate that guardrail or that limit into how you build the agent, it could start to be like, huh, I wonder if this related record might impact me being able to answer Mike's question better. Let me just go take a look at that.
And that's where we could get into some of the more deeper technical things, but the idea that authentication is not the same as permission. And so making sure that each of your agents has very clearly defined, and that ties in with the metadata too, because all of those settings in Agentforce and Agentforce builder are set up, the sub-agent descriptions, the scope, all of those things are metadata around your agents.
Mike:
And I think there's downstream effects to this that are also positive too. I'm thinking of all of the reports that you're dealing with that will suddenly get better because I know you're always building reports, sometimes not off of the report label. So help me through this. You've got an implementation and you have an integration with another system and you change metadata descriptions or field names. How do you need to approach that? Because obviously you need to identify that early in your discovery.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. This is a little bit of a catch-22. Let's just say that we've got five fields on, I'm going to just call it the case object, that are updated through some form of integration. Maybe it's a form submission, maybe it's an external data source, whatever. But there's five fields that are tracked and interact outside of Salesforce, and you're going to set up an agent that does something that impacts those five fields. When you set up the previous integration, if you didn't put in the description somewhere on those five fields that this field is part of X integration or this field is populated via X external data source, one, past you did future you no favors by not putting that in there.
Mike:
Man, when the DeLorean gets out of the shop, I'm going to go back and really tell myself.
Skye Tyler:
Exactly. So again, going back to that idea of you've got a new project, you've got a new request, you've got a new thing that you're building. Taking the time to do that slew thing and to really investigate what are all of the things that touch this piece of data or this particular metadata. The simplest sort of way to address that is whatever else you're changing, don't change the API name.
Mike:
Smart.
Skye Tyler:
Now where that kind of gets, I've seen more orgs than I can count where the field label is something completely different from the API name because it had some kind of external connection or integration, and if you try to change it would break it. So they just changed what referenced to the human. That's going to be a problem for your agent. If you are expecting interaction around review date one and the API name is something completely unrelated and there's no description to give the agent more context, they may not even look at that field. They might not even recognize it.
Mike:
Oh man, I am so guilty as charged.
Skye Tyler:
We've all done it. We've all done it.
Mike:
I mean, businesses change process and I was like, I can just change the field label. If it says this on the screen, are you happy with that? Mostly because I didn't want to ... It always happened where I didn't want to have to create a new field, move the data over just because they wanted a different name.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and if you are an admin that does not do Apex, which most admins don't, right?
Mike:
Not me. Nope.
Skye Tyler:
They're differentiated roles for a reason, and you have Apex that's running against those custom fields, you can't just go in and change the API name. You are going to break things. And so this is where that cascading effect can come into play and you say, okay, well maybe this one quick fix that the marketing team was asking for isn't actually a quick fix because we do want to get the org as ready as possible for future agentic improvements.
Mike:
I love how you set me up for my next question there because I was just going to ask you. So I could see somebody's listening to this and hopefully they got this far and they're like, "That was a fun podcast, but we're not really getting ready to deploy Agentforce, so why should I care about my metadata?"
Skye Tyler:
Yeah, this is one of those things, and I'll admit early in my consulting career, this wasn't as emphasized. It was all about the user's experience. Does the page layout make sense? Can the user click through and do the things they need to do? And the stuff that's behind the scenes, the admins can cope with that or the consultants can deal with that, and it just wasn't as important. But even things like as flow gets more complex and now, I mean, we're talking about moving to this whole headless experience, the system itself has just matured to a point where if your top or only priority is the UI, the user experience and the user interface, you are limiting the capacity of what your organization can do on Salesforce.
Mike:
Very true. Very true. I feel like as an admin that did focus very much on the UI, would bounce back and forth on trying to make Salesforce the one-stop shop for everybody. I remember way back in the day, do you remember when we used to be able to build web tabs?
Skye Tyler:
Oh, yes. Oh, those days.
Mike:
And so I remember we had a travel system, and I put it in a web tab because I need my users not only to sign in, but sign in and update their opportunities and update the accounts and stuff. And so I asked the salespeople back then, "What is the number one thing you check almost every day?" And they're like, "Our travel thing," because they're traveling and they need to book things and stuff like that. And I said, "Cool. I can do that." And so I put it in as a tab, but it was like a simple I-frame. It's just there.
And I had one user, when I showed it to them, they were like, "Oh, this is amazing, but I booked my travel and it didn't sync with my calendar." And I was like, right, because it's literally a pane of glass that I'm giving you into another system. But your whole conversation about this made me think back to when I would try to bring all of my users together in Salesforce, and then when I would try to make it so that they didn't have to pay attention to the UI in Salesforce. And I feel like I tried to make both, because you brought up headless. And headless in theory is you use a tool and then you just at Salesforce or something, you can bring all of that knowledge in.
Skye Tyler:
Well, I mean, you and I have both been in the space long enough that we remember the days when the mantra was, if it's not in Salesforce, it doesn't exist.
Mike:
Oh, yeah. I mean, I still say that.
Skye Tyler:
Right. But the reality of the world now is there's a lot of data and there are a lot of processes that don't exist in Salesforce. They can be surfaced there or they can be represented there, but they live somewhere else. And that's where, going back to my previous comment that the platform, the system itself has just matured beyond that. You have to log into Salesforce, you have to create a record or update a field in Salesforce for it to count. And that's not the case anymore. And even things like using experience cloud sites to be able to allow external partners or site guest users to be able to get information into Salesforce, all of those connections, all of those disparate data points are potentially accessible by agents, and then if you move into a headless environment from a headless perspective.
And so taking whatever time and resources you have at this moment and making whatever improvements or whatever cleanups you can make is just going to help future you, future admins who manage the system, be more successful in doing that. And I know right now in the nonprofit space, there's lots of conversations for folks who are considering moving from the nonprofit success pack to Agentforce Nonprofit. And when I talk to folks who are considering the move, one of the things, even before Agentforce Nonprofit, moving from a different data system into Salesforce, really doing an audit.
And we were talking about cleaning houses. I have this great story from one of the times we moved when I was a kid and my mom was real stressed out, she ended up packing the trash can full of trash. And by the time we got around to unpacking that box, you can imagine how pleasant that was. So when you're packing up your house, when you're packing up your data house or your data system and you're planning to move, don't pack your trash. Go through and do a data audit. Go through and update your metadata. Make sure that you're moving into your clean new house with just the things that you want, and they're going to be easier to access and more effective. And then your over-enthusiastic summer intern of an agent is going to be much more likely to give you a coherent, fluent, and accurate response, not just a confidently wrong one.
Mike:
I like that. Packed your trash. It is odd when you move because there's stuff that lives in the world that when you move, you have to figure out what to do with it.
Skye Tyler:
See, I can't relate. Having been associated with the military for a decade, I can now fit my entire house in a U-Haul. Every time I move, it's a purging process.
Mike:
Sure. Yeah, I can understand that. I'd love to end on that, but I have one other thought, which is, this doesn't just apply for Salesforce. When we're working with our IT colleagues or people in the organization that own other platforms, a lot of the power comes not only from Agentforce being able to bring in Salesforce information, but to be able to consume other information. And I have to believe that we have to sit down and do the same kind of audit when we're looking to integrate with another platform.
Skye Tyler:
Oh, absolutely. And this is where, I mean, the kind of highest level way to think about this is it's the context. You have to have some mechanism in Salesforce, it's primarily metadata, but you have to have some mechanism for the agent to understand and to have the context of what you're actually asking them to do. So these large language models have been trained on the entirety of human knowledge that has been encoded into the internet. Well, that's not helpful for your specific question or your specific query.
So having systems in place, whether it's knowledge articles, whether it's Jira tickets, whether it's Confluence folder structures, having mechanisms that give the agents the proper level of context for them to be able to support you in solving the problem, designing the solution, answering the question, whatever your purpose is, this is transferable across any touchpoint of agentic work.
Mike:
Yeah, totally makes sense. I always push the speakers that I work with for Dreamforce, or TDX, or any event to think about what happens when the person stands up after your presentation is over. And so I'll ask you the same thing. So what happens when somebody presses stop on the podcast and goes about their day? What's the one thing they should do after they listen to this?
Skye Tyler:
Well, obviously keep listening to the other podcast episodes.
Mike:
Right. Just continue on to the next episode.
Skye Tyler:
I think the takeaway that's sort of bigger than just data or metadata or even agentic work, is keep learning. All of these systems and all of these tools are evolving so quickly. And while that can be a challenge and can be maybe intimidating, it's also potentially very democratizing. And when we think about your comment earlier about people trying to get into the ecosystem, for a while it got very hard. There was the age of the accidental admin when Salesforce was young enough that just if you were good at fixing the printer, you became a Salesforce admin.
And then we moved into a period of time where it had matured enough that organizations wanted people with deep experience. With all of these newer technologies and tools, anybody who's looking to come into the space today is learning the same things that I'm learning having been in the space for a decade. So my call to action for anyone listening to this podcast would be find other avenues of learning. And then if it's in your wheelhouse or your interest, offer what you've learned to other people and share that experience.
Mike:
I think that's great. I mean, that ties right in with the podcast I did with Gene Velonis, which was open up a Trailhead org and just start playing around and-
Skye Tyler:
Just try it out.
Mike:
... don't be afraid to break things. I think there was a point in time when I would work with a lot of community members and they were always afraid, "But what if it doesn't work?" And I'm like, "Cool." And then we know we have to go back and get to tinker with something.
Skye Tyler:
Yeah.
Mike:
That to me is half the fun.
Skye Tyler:
If it works the first time, then it means you weren't trying something hard enough.
Mike:
I know. Yeah. Yeah. That or I'm worried when it's going to stop working, because if it worked the first time, then I didn't get to troubleshoot stuff.
Skye Tyler:
This is true. This is true.
Mike:
Skye, it's always a pleasure to have you on the podcast. And in the ever-changing world of AI, and metadata, and data, and everything else, it's good to have you kind of keeping us honest and keeping us on our toes.
Skye Tyler:
Well, I don't know if I want to bear that responsibility, but I'm happy to try.
Mike:
You're one of many people.
Skye Tyler:
Great. Thank you so much, Mike.
Mike:
Big thanks to Skye for joining us and making metadata feel practical, useful, and well, a lot less overwhelming. My key takeaway was for admins, it's really simple. Agents can only act reliably when Salesforce clearly reflects what the business means. So build metadata review into the work you're already doing. Maybe pick one active process and document the fields and the automation it depends on, and give the future you and the future agents the context they need.
Now, of course, you should subscribe to the Salesforce Admins podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to keep learning and trying something new in your org. Until next time, we'll see you in the cloud.