Salesforce Interview Internship Experience (Off-Campus)
Introduction
Hey, I’m Priyadarshini Roy, a 3rd year student currently pursuing B.Tech in Information Technology at IIIT Allahabad. I would like to share my interview experience for my 2 month summer internship at Salesforce in this article.
Salesforce is an American cloud-based software company which provides customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Salesforce was accepting applications for its Salesforce Women in Tech Program.
Job Profile: Summer Intern (2 Months)
Role: SWE
Eligibility Criteria: Female, 6.5+ CGPA, Graduating in 2025.
Preparation Strategy
For DSA, I primarily focused on Striver A2Z sheet along with regular Codeforces and Leetcode contests. After I completed A2Z to some extent, I utilised Interview Bit for revision. According to me, doing this covers up a majority of the standard questions asked in interviews.
For subjects, I referred to GFG last minute notes, college notes and other websites and made my own version of notes from it. You can refer them here. Additionally, mastering SQL queries is also crucial for DBMS, so I would recommend practicing using Leetcode’s SQL 50.
Recruitment Process
1. Coding Round 💻
The coding round was conducted on HackerRank and contained 3 DSA questions. The OA asked 1 easy implementation based question, 1 medium question of Binary Search (Aggressive Cows) and 1 medium-hard question of Math (A variation of Codeforces 1514C).
Those who solved a minimum of two problems completely and the third problem partially got the call for the interview round.
2. Technical Interview Round 👩💻
This round was also conducted on HackerRank (live code-pair) and majorly focused on CS Fundamentals knowledge.
The round began with interviewer asking me a subject of my choice. I chose DBMS as I felt confident in it at the time.
Then the interviewer gave an example table that was something like —
A table of student marks where the students belong to different sections.I was asked to write a couple of queries according to the requirements on grouping, ordering and aggregation with 2–3 follow ups each.
I would advise that in such a scenario, please understand the example clearly before writing the query. I messed up a few times due to misunderstanding, but later it was clarified so I wrote the correct one.
Such questions may be practiced on Interview Bit or Leetcode.
Then he asked me to design a database for a Library Management System. I was asked to think of various features of the system and how would I would design those features in the database. So, I gave some examples of the tables and their attributes highlighting the important primary and foreign keys. Also I suggested some features related to book issue tracking, categorization, etc.
This part was more discussion based and required some on-the-spot thinking.
Now, I was again asked to choose another subject and this time I picked up OOM as I was a bit under-confident with OS. Then he asked me some standard questions —
- Is Java purely object oriented or not? Justify.
- What are the 4 pillars of OOM?
- What’s the difference between an abstract class and interface?
Finally, I was asked to write a Java code to display the OOM principles by designing a chess game.
I was unable to write the exact Java code, as I had studied OOM on a conceptual level but didn’t remember the syntax properly and it wasn’t compiling on the Hackerrank IDE. I tried not to panic.
Noticing the struggle, the interviewer asked me to continue writing pseudocode and asked some follow up questions on my proposed solutions.
I was able to verbally justify all of these examples and also write the pseudocode to demonstrate the design I was thinking about.
Now, only 10 minutes were left in the interview, and he decided to kill the time with thankfully, a very easy question!!
Write a C++ program to find the square root of a number.Usually, one would iteratively on brute force, but the interviewer said to hurry up so I wrote the optimised binary search code directly. I was then asked the time complexity along with the necessary justification.
I received a call from the HR that my next interview the same day, just 2 hours later. 🎊
3. Projects + HR Round ⚙️
The interview started with a brief introduction and then I was asked about my projects, where I spent some time talking about them — what was the topic, what was the tech stack, the main features of each, etc. I tried to use some technical words to showcase my understanding (recommended, only if you know what they mean).
I was then asked some questions on authorization, authentication and user flow related to one of my projects.
Authentication and authorization is quite a basic and common question in the projects round if your project has a login/signup system or multiple users.
Also, having 2–3 good full-stack projects on your resume makes sure you have a fertile topic to talk to your interviewer about in a project/HR round and possibly impress them.
The discussion continued with some more questions —
- What is the difference between DSA and DBMS?
- Have you used DSA in any of your projects?
- Why do you do Web Development?
and some others — I don’t remember all of them as they felt quite vague at the time but I answered each of them as clearly and descriptively as I could.
After my second interview, I closed my laptop and went off to sleep — only to be woken up by a friend who called me to inform me to check my phone because I had been selected! 🥳
Believe me, I’ve joined Salesforce as an intern now, and I STILL cannot believe I’m actually here, Imposter syndrome is real.
Few Tips from my side
- I was expecting DSA but I was majorly tested on subject concepts and project knowledge, so be prepared for everything.
- Try to talk 80–90% time in an interview (but don’t forget to listen to the interviewer’s questions).
- Try not to panic or go silent if you get caught off guard. Even if you want some time to think, do respond and say that you’re thinking about it.
- NEVER underestimate yourself — you’ve made it till this college, you can make it to your dream company too!
I am glad you have read this far! Do leave a clap if the blog was helpful for you :)
All the best!
