Salesforce CV Example

Founded in 1999, Salesforce UK is a leading provider of customer relationship management and cloud computing solutions, revolutionising how British organisations engage with their customers. It operates in the technology and software industries.

After reading this article, you'll be equipped with all the necessary information to impress Salesforce recruitment teams, and stand out from the crowd with your applications. Actioning these tips should boost the chances of your CV passing the ATS filters, giving you a greater likelihood of gaining an interview at Salesforce. Next, we’ll go through the key sections of a CV and explain how to write them strategically.

Key sections of a Salesforce CV

Your strategy for writing a Salesforce CV will depend heavily on your experience, your level of seniority and the requirements listed in the job description.

However, no matter where you are in your career, a Salesforce CV must present a clear, compelling narrative of your professional journey. To help you build that story, we’ll now break down the document piece-by-piece—from the initial contact header to your most significant career milestones.

CV Header

At the top of your Salesforce CV, add a header that establishes the design language of the document. Include the necessary contact information: your full name, email address, phone number and location. It's not typically necessary to include your full address. Additionally, listing your LinkedIn profile in your CV header can be valuable. It serves to provide more detailed information about your career journey, your qualifications and your industry standing, in an easily accessible way.

For UK jobs, it's generally not a good idea to add a photo or any other personal details beyond your basic contact information. This means leaving off details such as your age, gender, ethnicity and nationality, as these can introduce bias to the selection process and complications related to the Equality Act 2010.

CV Summary or Objective

Underneath your contact information, write a brief CV summary or CV objective to introduce yourself and highlight a few key skills and qualities. This can help the employer to quickly form a first impression on your suitability for the Salesforce developer role. While the CV summary focuses on your key skills and achievements, a CV objective highlights your career ambitions, making it more suitable for junior candidates.

Both a CV summary and objective should be concise, with an ideal length of two or three sentences. List your key skills, personal strengths and career achievements or ambitions, taking care to ensure the content reflects the requirements listed in the job description.

An effective summary will include brief reference to one or two of your strongest skills, ensuring they reflect the skills listed in the job description. It's important to make your skills and qualities feel unique to you, and show how you've used them to positive effect in your career to date. Below you'll find a good example of how to write an effective Salesforce CV summary. The example shows quantifiable achievements and well-structured sentences.

Above is an example of CV summary that doesn't follow best practice, with some subtle shortcomings and failings. There are several factors that could make your summary less engaging. These include using long, poorly-structured sentences, failing to add evidence of your impact, being too generic with the skills you mention and not adapting your CV summary to specifically respond to the job description.

Work Experience

In your work experience section, you'll want to prove you're capable of performing to a high level in the cloud computing industry by adding previous jobs that highlight relevant experience. Add bullet points listing skills and achievements that match the job description, and that will show Salesforce hiring managers how you can make a positive impact. List your previous relevant cloud computing industry jobs in reverse-chronological order, starting with your present position or most recent relevant job. Include your job title, the name of the employer, its location and your dates of employment. For each entry, list a few bullet points describing your key skills and achievements in the role.

The best work experience sections will place a strong emphasis on jobs related to the industry, and provide compelling evidence to show how you've put your skills to good use to create a positive impact for cloud computing sector employers.

Your work experience section may fail to make a positive impact on the reader if it includes jobs that aren't relevant to the cloud computing industry, or lacks evidence of key skills and qualities required for working in the sector.

Education

Your education section should showcase your most recent and highest qualifications, paying particular attention to anything that's specifically required for the role.

To be eligible for Salesforce developer positions, you typically need to have a relevant university degree, and include it in your CV. If you have a Bachelor of Science in Business Information Systems or another related degree that qualifies you for the role, you should definitely mention it in your CV, along with any other degrees or qualifications that highlight your most relevant skills, such as apex trigger development expertise or visualforce page creation proficiency.

When creating your education section, think about which qualifications are most relevant to the role, and list them in reverse-chronological order, starting with the most recent and working back from there. Add the name and level of the award, the institution, its location and your dates of study or graduation. If you have space or if you particularly want to emphasise your qualifications, you could add one or two bullet points under each entry, highlighting specialist areas of study, projects you worked on, awards you won or societies you were a member of.

It may also be useful for you to add any specialist industry qualifications, certifications or licences that you might require for the role. If you choose to add these, remember also to add an expiration date, if the licence requires renewal in the future.

Skills

Your CV's skills section CV's skills section is a great place to showcase some of the key skills necessary for the role. Check the job description to understand which skills are most essential, and provide a combination of hard and soft skills, reserving space to include some unique qualities that can help you to stand out from the competition. For a Salesforce CV, it's essential to include relevant skills for the role that match your skill set, such as stakeholder management and visualforce page creation proficiency, to impress the reader and show you're qualified for the Salesforce developer position.

Hard Skills

Hard skills and technical skills are specialist skills that are essential for carrying out the main responsibilities of the role. You might acquire hard skills through study, or through on-the-job training, and some hard skills may require a certification or licence. For Salesforce developer roles, key hard skills you've gained, such as apex trigger development expertise, and api integration data management, are typically among the most critical for the job. After checking the job description, include a list of four or five key hard skills in your CV to confirm that you have the necessary expertise for the role.

The best hard skills to include are typically listed as 'essential' or 'required' in the job description. Aim for a mix of the most desirable skills, together with those you have the highest proficiency in. For the best chance of success, you'll want your strongest skills to match closely with those most desired by the employer.

See below for examples of skills that are frequently included in the hard skills section of a Salesforce CV:

Soft Skills

Your soft skills list should contain a list of your personal strengths that make you suitable for the role, and a good fit for the team and the organisation. In contrast to hard skills, these tend to be transferable and applicable to different roles and levels. As a result of rapid technological changes in the world of work, soft skills are becoming ever-more valued by employers. Soft skills can also be particularly valuable for junior or entry-level roles where candidates haven't necessarily had the time to develop hard skills and career achievements.

Adopt the same approach as you did with your hard skills list, reviewing the job description to understand the requirements, before assessing which soft skills you can provide evidence for throughout your Salesforce CV. Draft a list of up to five key soft and transferable skills, combining the most essential skills from the job description with your strongest personal qualities.

The section below provides an overview of soft skills often highlighted in a Salesforce CV.

Language Skills

If you speak a foreign language, it can be beneficial to include a languages section on your Salesforce CV. Whether languages are a requirement of the job description or not, if your CV lists additional languages, this typically reflects well on you as a candidate. In this section, include any foreign languages you speak to a standard that could be useful in the world of work, with an indication of your proficiency level.

There are several ways to cite your proficiency in foreign languages. Firstly, you could use a simple descriptive word to indicate your abilities, such as:

• English: Fluent
• Spanish: Intermediate

Alternatively, use an internationally recognised framework for languages, such as the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR). This gives your language skills a standardised competence indicator, as follows:

• A1: Beginner
• A2: Elementary
• B1: Intermediate
• B2: Upper intermediate
• C1: Advanced
• C2: Proficiency

Certifications

If you've invested your time and resources into gaining extra qualifications beyond the minimum requirements for the role, you could highlight these in a certifications section. It can be a valuable way of differentiating yourself from other candidates and showing employers your dedication, motivation and commitment to professional development. Furthermore, the CV certifications and training section is a great showcase for official licences and certifications when applying for roles where these are a key requirement listed in the job description. These could include positions where the use of specialist software and equipment is a routine part of your everyday responsibilities.

Here are some key examples of certifications and licences that you could add to your CV for Salesforce developer positions:

Optional Sections

Adding optional sections to the end of your Salesforce CV is a good way of showing you have the necessary skills for the job. If you're struggling to show all the necessary skills for the job through your work experience or other core sections, optional sections can give your CV the boost it needs to progress you to the interview stage. This could be particularly helpful for entry-level candidates or career changers.

You’ll find more in-depth guidance on structuring your CV in our career resources, designed to help you present your skills as effectively as possible.

Hobbies and Interests

One valid way to show you have relevant skills for the job is by listing your hobbies and interests. In addition, hobbies and interests can showcase your personality, helping to differentiate you from other candidates. However, a hobbies and interests section is only valuable if it helps you to show relevant skills you've been unable to evidence in other parts of your CV. If your hobbies and interests are unrelated to the job, it's best to leave them off your CV.

Key Achievements

Creating a section for your achievements and awards can help you draw attention to the things you're most proud of in your career to date. If you've been awarded any prizes or accolades, or reached any key career milestones, these can all help to show you have the required status and experience for the role.

Volunteering

Another alternative to showcasing your skills and experience through work experience is by adding a volunteering section. This can give you a valuable showcase of your skills, particularly if you're a junior candidate or career changer without much relevant work experience. In your volunteering section, use a similar structure to your work experience section.

Add your job title or a description of the volunteer role, the organisation name, its location and the dates you volunteered (start and end date). Under this, add bullet points to show the skills you used, and evidence of how they contributed to positive achievements for the organisation.

References

For UK job applications, it's rare to include references on a CV. However, it's a good idea to check the job advert and have some references ready to go in case the employer wants you to include them on your CV. If you need to include references in your CV, aim for two or three and list their name, their contact details, their job title and the organisation they work for.

Always seek permission before you add them to your CV. Alternatively, it can be neater to simply add a line to your CV confirming you can provide references at the appropriate juncture, such as 'references are available upon request'.

Top action words to use in a Salesforce CV

Using strong action verbs in your work experience bullet points is a great way to focus this section and show the impact you've made in your career to date. Starting each bullet point with an action verb that reflects the skills required for the role will help the reader to easily cross-reference your skills to the job description. When adding action verbs to your work experience bullet points, just remember to always provide quantifiable evidence that shows the value you added for each employer. Use past tense for any action verbs that describe previous roles (for example, 'developed') and present tense for current roles (for example 'collaborating').

Salesforce CV example

Now that you're aware of the key steps to creating a winning Salesforce CV, you can review a complete example to see how a final CV looks:

If you're not sure what your one-page, finalised CV design might look like, check out our examples.

Tips for optimising your CV for ATS

Applicant tracking systems (ATS) are becoming more and more integral to the recruitment process for many employers. These systems ease the burden of the recruitment process by performing various tasks, including scanning and ranking CVs based on their likely fit to the job description. By assuming this role in the recruitment process, ATS apps can reduce the amount of time employers need to spend reviewing CVs. With hundreds of applications for a single vacancy becoming increasingly commonplace, this increased efficiency is extremely valuable for employers.

Because ATS software is becoming more common in the recruitment process, it's important to make some concessions in your CV to give yourself the best chance of progressing beyond the initial screening. With that in mind, here are some tips on preparing your CV for ATS screening:

• Include keywords and phrases that match the job description, giving you the best chance of appearing as a strong fit for the role.
• Use clear, standard CV headings that are easily recognisable, such as 'work experience', 'education' and 'skills'.
• Choose a simple, standard CV structure and omit any design elements that might make your CV less easy to read by automated systems, such as text boxes and columns.
• Select a font that enhances the readability of your CV, including recognised serif and sans serif fonts between sizes 10 and 12 for body text, and 14 and 16 for headings.
• Use bullet points rather than writing long, full sentences, as this will make your CV easier to scan and parse, and help your keywords and phrases to stand out.

You might feel there are a lot of steps to creating an ATS-compatible Salesforce CV, but with just a few small changes, you can ensure your CV passes this stage. Use one of our ATS-compatible CV templates, which are designed by experts to give you the best chances of success.

Key takeaways for a winning Salesforce CV

For the best chance of impressing employers, always tailor your CV for every application and include keywords and phrases that reflect the job description. Choose the most fitting CV format for your experience level, and focus on showcasing how you've developed the necessary skills for the role, and used them to positive effect in previous roles.

Finally, using an eye-catching, expert-designed CV template from Jobseeker can really give your CV an edge over those from rival candidates, helping you to achieve success in your job applications.

Sources:

1. Transport for London (TfL), Writing a CV and cover letter
2. Jobseeker, Hiring Trends