In the world of Salesforce in particular, there have been a number of articles written in the last few years that speak to the real challenge that firms of all sizes are having finding Salesforce Developers and Admins. Doesn’t matter if you are a big consulting company like Accenture deploying a massive instance for a Fortune 500 company or a small business using Salesforce Essentials. Everyone is having a hard time finding people.
Salesforce: The Skills Shortage Is Real
If you are at all plugged in to the CRM ecosystems that exist today, Salesforce, Hubspot, Dynamics etc… You will find that they all have at least one thing in common. Nobody can find enough human beings to help deploy and maintain software applications delivered via the cloud. Meaning, even if you are investing in a SaaS application that takes the burden of managing the application backend, infrastructure, scaling etc, you still have system configuration, deployment and admin needs that are specific to that application.
Most of the emphasis lately has been put on the shortage of Salesforce developers, but we have found from our time in the market that even just finding qualified folks that can accurately diagnose a problem, fix it fast and with high quality as a part of admin duty is near impossible to find. And then when you do, they are typically not at all in the price range that small businesses in particular are able to pay.
I decided to just take a whirl in the job posting world for a few min today and see what the outstanding number of job reqs are out in just one job engine for Salesforce Admins. The engine I used was Indeed and in 3 seconds, they showed that just in the US alone, there are currently 1038 jobs open, most of them for more than 30 days, for admins of Salesforce. And most of these openings were for small businesses that can afford to pay people like big consulting companies can, as we mentioned earlier.
Salesforce Admin: Not What It Used To Be
So, why the shortage? If I am being honest, I don’t really have the foggiest idea what the true reason is for the massive shortage of Salesforce admins, let alone for the even bigger shortage of Salesforce developers. It might simply be that Salesforce is growing faster than there are people getting educated to become an Admin. Part of it might be that smaller companies and even medium sized companies go into deploying Salesforce with a mindset that Salesforce is so simple to work with that they will just let someone on the current team figure out how to do admin work.
But, my sense, having worked in and around the Salesforce ecosystem now for 10 years, is that fewer and fewer people want to have the role of admin. Even at big companies. While it used to be a bit of a badge of honor to be an Admin on a new or innovative platform like Salesforce, I think people are more interested in moving up the stack of jobs to becoming a developer or a business analyst. Generally speaking, the work is more interesting, the work is more rewarding and the work is much better paying.
A New Solution: Task Based Help
The unintended consequences of this “move up the stack” mindset is that the work will either fall onto unwitting folks in finance or operations at a small company that have no interest in being a software admin. Tasks that initially seem small begin to create a backlog of work that needs to get done to just have a functioning CRM system. Often times, companies hiring some consulting firm for a pretty penny to come in and fix the broken mess that could have been avoided from the get go if a plan was put in place for doing the care and feeding basics of the CRM system.
So what are small businesses to do if they can’t find people to hire as Admins for their Salesforce instances?
They turn to companies like Placeshift to provide on demand, dedicated and cost effective Salesforce Admin support that lets you get back to running your business without the worry of your CRM system turning into a big mess.
Placeshift’s Salesforce and Hubspot Assist subscription can help you make the most of your CRM and Marketing Automation investments by giving you access to on-demand Salesforce and Hubspot admin’s. Visit Placeshift.io to find out more