This was a really baffling hiring process. Is Salesforce's general hire now all team-specific interviews instead of a unified track?
Round 1: OA — sent later on, an online test on the HackerRank platform. If I remember right it was LeetCode-style stuff, not too hard, but the test cases were kind of annoying.
After I passed, about a month later an HR person reached out — but it wasn't the general-hire process anymore. HR opened straight into an introduction to a specific team, pretty vague on the details, some iOS-related development role, and said they wanted a September start date. The timeline was really tight.
Round 2: manager screen. The manager went into detail about what the team does — mainly iOS app development. He said it's mostly front-end work but leaning more toward iOS Swift rather than web. Before that we'd already talked through my project details and experience; I told him my background is mostly front-end plus some middle-tier work, not much iOS experience. The manager said that's fine, they're at the 0-to-1 stage right now. Talking to him, he seemed like a decent guy, and he was willing to share the team's future roadmap — it's a brand-new team. After that we scheduled the tech round for the following week.
In between all this, HR emphasized again that they wanted the start date moved up to August.
Round 3: tech round, implementing an OOD problem related to the team. I wasn't super prepared for this round, but I got through it in the end. The senior engineer mentioned that this team seemed to be from a small company Salesforce had recently acquired — or merged with? — and the team was formed out of that. Everything was still in an early build-out stage. During the Q&A part I asked how they handle testing and QA, and he said the new team doesn't have any QA or feedback process set up yet... Overall it was a pretty pleasant conversation. I also mentioned again that I mostly do web work, and that my iOS experience is pretty general, not really Swift. The senior said their Claude usage has unlimited tokens, so I could just learn on the job. He said they'd have HR schedule an SF onsite for the following week (though that might have just been something he said to be polite).
In between, HR suddenly backtracked and said the following week was Independence Day, so it would have to be pushed to the week after.
By the second week, HR said team members were on PTO, so the onsite would have to wait even longer.
By the third week it was already July, and with an August start date the timeline was genuinely too tight. So I messaged HR again asking when the onsite would happen. Instead I got a template rejection email — no reason given, no feedback, just a flat rejection. At the same time, the general-hire position I'd originally applied to had also been filled, so I couldn't reapply to it. After that I messaged HR multiple times and never got a response. Meanwhile the system kept showing my application as "in progress," so I couldn't apply to switch teams either.
I don't know if Salesforce switched entirely to team-based hiring or if this was just a one-off case for me — getting pushed hard by HR and then shelved and ghosted. I genuinely can't make sense of it. And HR only ever replied on Thursdays or Fridays, always about a week after I'd reached out.
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