What it does: Salesforce is an American software company offering customer relationship management software and applications for business organizations.
Mission: Building bridges between companies and customers.
Best known for: Customer 360, its CRM product.
Size & presence: 74,000 people working worldwide.
The good bits: One of the world's leading SaaS companies, with their products used by companies worldwide.
The not-so-good bits: Work-life balance is quite hard to achieve when working there.
Salesforce had its start in 1999 when it was founded by four people: Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff, and Frank Dominguez. At first, they were known for its customer relationship management (CRM) product, known today as Customer 360.
Since then, Salesforce has acquired many software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies and even several consulting companies, sometimes with the intent of integrating their products and services into their CRM product. Two of its most recent and major acquisitions are Tableau in 2019 and Slack in 2020.
Salesforce believes in five core values: trust, customer success, equality, innovation, and sustainability. Many of their actions are reflected in this—for example, Salesforce believes in letting people work from anywhere and most recently tried out several experiments such as working without having any meetings for an entire week.
Aside from that, current and previous employees both rave about the growth opportunities, which are abundant in the company. They always give out the chance for internal promotions over external hires. To cultivate talents from within the company, Salesforce offers a lot of chances for further development through learning in both informal and formal settings.
There’s a downside to this, however. Salesforce is not exactly known for its great work-life balance—according to several reviews on Glassdoor. But if you want to further your career, the company is a great place to begin your journey as a professional in your field of choice.
Salesforce offers a multitude of opportunities for both recent university graduates and current students to work at their company. For current students, internship opportunities are available year-round. However, salary and employee benefits for those hired for placement in Colorado will be different from those working in other states.
Recent university graduates can also apply to entry-level positions available in Salesforce, and previous internship experience in Salesforce can help you in the process.
As an additional note, Salesforce's leadership development program is only available to its current employees.
The selection process in Salesforce is quite similar to those in other companies. If you are interested in working there, you'll have to send an application to their website. Sometimes, Salesforce's hiring team also does campus visits too and you can also send an application in person.
Then, you may be asked to complete a series of assessments and case studies. If you pass that, you'll undergo several interview rounds.
If you work as an intern in Salesforce, you may earn around $40,000 to $120,000 per year, depending on your role - the highest paid being those who are doing an internship as a Software Engineer.
These differences in pay, however, are not too apparent in Salesforce roles when you work full-time—for example, a Senior Account Executive and a Lead Software Engineer would earn around $200,000-$250,000 per year.
Aside from salary, Salesforce also gives out other employee benefits such as paid time off, health and life insurance, free food, and flexible working arrangement.
Salesforce's primary concerns when it comes to its philanthropic contributions are in the following fields: providing free product subscriptions for non-profit organizations and pro-bono consultations, done mainly through their charitable organization, Salesforce.org.
Aside from product donations, Salesforce also operates impact labs, where individuals come together to solve major world problems as delineated by the UN's Sustainable Development Goals.
Salesforce has several current problems (between 2020 to 2021) relating to employee discrimination both in the U.S. and overseas (Japan). The U.S. case did not go into legal proceedings, but the Japanese one did. Both reported instances of microaggressions from colleagues and management.