The Salesforce Talent Ecosystem Report with Nick Hamm and Kristin Langlois

In this episode, we dissect the results from 10 K Advisor's research from their annual Talent Ecosystem Report and explore the up-and-coming AI-related roles, the decreased demand for talent, and the influence of the 'Great Resignation' on the hiring landscape. We also delve into the intricacies of Salesforce roles, the emergence of specialized roles, and the increasing need for fractional expertise. If you're an independent consultant or thinking about becoming one, we shed light on the challenges of finding the right match in the Salesforce partner ecosystem and how to stand out.

Can you imagine the electrifying energy of the Salesforce community at Dreamforce? Picture yourself amid a sea of fellow Salesforce enthusiasts, learning, networking, and sharing experiences. Our special guests, Nick Ham and Kristen Langalois from 10 K Advisors, join us in a lively discussion about the Salesforce ecosystem, this year's event, and its unique sessions, including a Lego extravaganza by Mike Martin, their Chief Customer Officer. They also bring insights from their research on current trends in talent demand within the Salesforce ecosystem, highlighting the complexities and evolvement of Salesforce roles.

Lastly, we switch gears to arguably the most crucial element - hiring. We discuss the potential risks and consequences of hiring the wrong skill set and how to navigate the complexities of splitting the Salesforce administrator role. We also get into the nitty-gritty of the job market, the hidden opportunities for independent consultants, and the increasing demand for specialized roles. Wrapping up, we share career advice for all Salesforce professionals, emphasizing the importance of staying up-to-date with AI developments and finding your niche within the Salesforce ecosystem. Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned professional, this episode is a gold mine of insights and advice, providing you with a fresh perspective on the Salesforce ecosystem.

Chapters

• 0:02 Dreamforce Recap and Career Discussions
• 11:10 Trends in Talent Demand and Hiring
• 16:42 Evolution of Job Market Specialization
• 29:21 Dominance of Top Partners in Salesforce
• 34:44 Salesforce Consulting and Job Market Trends
• 41:26 Challenges and Changes in Salesforce Roles
• 50:40 Hiring Salesforce Admins
• 1:01:35 Improving Hiring Practices and Avoiding Attrition
• 1:10:43 AI and Future of Business Roles
• 1:23:29 Career Advice for Salesforce Professionals

Transcript

Announcer: 0:02

And now the number one audio program that helps you to hire, get hired and soar higher in the Salesforce ecosystem. It's the Salesforce career show with Josh Matthews and Vanessa Grant.

Josh Matthews: 0:20

Well, welcome everybody. We've got a fantastic show today. We're coming off the heels of Dreamforce, where we everybody wrapped up on Thursday night, and we've got some special guests with us, including Nick Ham from 10 K. He's the CEO. Nick, go ahead and introduce yourself, if you can.

Nick Hamm: 0:41

Hey, josh, thanks, yeah, as you mentioned, nick Ham, CEO of 10 K advisors. We're a Salesforce partner specializing in on demand Salesforce, talent, global community of about 700. Salesforce experts around the world. And a good segue, because that is all Kristen's doing and what she is responsible for.

Josh Matthews: 1:02

That's right and Kristen, this is this is your second time on the show. It was a terrific episode, one of our best ever last time you visited us. Thank you to you and to Nick for joining us. Go ahead and give us an intro for you, please.

Kristin Langlois: 1:17

Awesome. Well, it's great to be back. I'm Kristen Langwa. I'm the chief people officer with 10 K advisors. My main responsibilities are to focus on growing our expert community, as well as the overall HR functions within 10 K.

Josh Matthews: 1:33

All right, and we're also joined by my fantastic co host, vanessa Grant. Welcome, vanessa. What's going on?

Vanessa Grant: 1:40

Still recovering from Dreamforce and actually just about to be in between jobs. More information to come.

Josh Matthews: 1:47

Okay, well, yeah, this is some pretty cool and exciting information, so I'm looking forward to getting into that. Let's talk about Dreamforce, guys. Oh, and I should probably introduce myself if you've never tuned into the show before. My name is Josh Matthews. I run the Salesforce recruitercom. We specialize in placing contractors and direct hire and we're approaching our five year anniversary. I'm trying to speak, guys.

Josh Matthews: 2:10

Look, I had a red eye last night and recovering from Dreamforce Coviz, I think we've got a couple other people in the room that are dealing with that right now and if you are thanks for you know, pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and joining us here today. Oh no, you got the dream flu. I got the dream flu, yeah, and I'll tell you it wasn't. It wasn't as bad as the first time I got it, so that's good, but still not the nicest, most fun way to depart San Francisco, and I didn't find out till Sunday. So sorry, everybody if I infected you deeply sorry, of course. I mean I've talked to at least five or six people that have hit me up and said hey, josh, just got it. So I'm going to go ahead and talk to you guys.

Josh Matthews: 2:43

Sorry, everybody, if I infected you deeply. Sorry, of course. I mean I've talked to at least five or six people that have hit me up and said hey, josh just got it. So I think that's going around. But let's focus on some positive things that happen at Dreamforce. Vanessa, you had no less than four sessions. How did that go?

Vanessa Grant: 3:02

Oh, it went really really well. I was really nervous for the first one that I did Thursday morning but, gosh, by the third one I was cracking jokes and everything, I think, ultimately went well. It's, it's. It's always the nerves, especially with the stage fright that I get, you know, kind of initially going on stage, but but yeah, once you it is really like having the people in the audience. That really helps. And I got to say like in the few days since I've come back from Dreamforce, just like looking back at photos and trying to remember everything that that happens, since it's all kind of a blur, gosh, I'm just like filled with so much gratitude and just so fortunate to be part of this community and all the friends you know, some friends you make along the way on the journey. But it really is true, it's, it's, it's quite the community. I even got to hug Mike Martin at one point for like briefly I saw him for like a hot second I think.

Josh Matthews: 3:57

Well, mike's a huggable guy, so I'm glad that you got that chance. That's fantastic. And Mike Martin, nick, tell us who Mike Martin is, because I don't want to mess up the title.

Nick Hamm: 4:08

Mike's our chief customer officer and he is really responsible for making sure that all of our customers using our on demand talent are wildly successful. He's also a Salesforce celebrity. He's been on the Salesforce website. I was actually one of my highlights. Dream force was getting to support a first of its kind session that he did where folks got the bill with Lego, which is one of his other passions. So that's awesome, that's a really cool experience.

Josh Matthews: 4:36

That's really cool. And, nick, you were there. You and I didn't get a chance to hang out, but you were there. What was your overall experience? I imagine this is not the first dream force you've been to, so how is this one different than others?

Nick Hamm: 4:48

Sure, yeah, I think this was kind of this count, especially with the COVID year, but I think this was 15 for me and you know the you're no, slouch buddy, you're just not a slouch I can tell.

Nick Hamm: 5:01

Well, you know I really go first and foremost for the community. It really is the best time of year to see. You know all the friends that I've made along this journey and so that's always the highlight. Never enough time to see everybody, but always. I think one of the best parts is just like the chance encounters that you have with folks on the street.

Nick Hamm: 5:25

The last day, actually, we were going to have a little bit of a team outing and one of our team members could make it and a friend of mine was a guy who was just having a walk up on the street and you're like, hey, man, you want to join us, and so he got to join us for a little bit of a team outing. And, by the way, there's a really cool like you all probably walk by this place. It's a virtual reality place right on Market Street, right there, and we've done that a couple times. So for anybody listening, if you're in San Francisco looking for, you know, just a fun little hour to spend. Very cool little VR place to go check out.

Nick Hamm: 5:59

But you know, I would say this reinforce overall it felt really crowded. Number one, I think, the way that they sort of condensed it to Moscone and didn't really use the satellite hotels, the host sessions along with you know sort of. The increased attendance made it feel really crowded, which you know, in some ways that's a cool energy in some ways. You know that's not fun sometimes.

Josh Matthews: 6:28

But yeah, it did feel a little crowd Like. It didn't feel much different than when there were 250,000 people there. Right, yeah, exactly. And I'm sure that was on purpose right. Yeah, but I can tell you my feet were more grateful because I didn't have to watch for miles a day, so that was kind of cool.

Nick Hamm: 6:44

Absolutely so. You know definitely had a good time in the trailhead zone Checking a lot of that out. That's where I usually spend most of my time when I'm there. We actually co-sponsored with Elements a space right off the 3rd Street where we that's really where I spent most of my time meetings with partners, customers and our experts. And then we co-sponsored a happy hour with Ricardo one evening and customer dinners and you know all the good stuff. But you know it was a good energy. I was lucky, you know, not to come back with the dream flute this time, but, like you have heard from many that did.

Josh Matthews: 7:29

Nick, I just hug more people than you, buddy.

Peter Ganza: 7:31

That's all that I have. I guess that's what I was.

Josh Matthews: 7:33

I'm just a hugger. I'm sure that's what happened. That's what it was. Yeah, I don't know if I can go back to not hugging, but we'll, you know, might have to next year, we'll see. Stay healthy, don't hug.

Vanessa Grant: 7:43

Yeah, and I'd like to just for any future Dreamforce attendees, I would like to make a public service announcement that the MVP party, yeah, even if somebody invites you to it, like, if you're not an MVP, don't go. They're pretty strict about that, as I found out firsthand at the stream forums, so I would like to dispel any rumors that I crashed the MVP party. I didn't mean to. Somebody invited me and we'll leave it at that.

Josh Matthews: 8:14

You're so funny, vanessa. If anyone deserves to be an MVP, it's you, and so, for all those listening here, you know you can nominate Vanessa to be an MVP this year. She definitely deserves it. So let's all get on that bandwagon. It's one worth hanging on to, I think.

Vanessa Grant: 8:30

Well, you know, the important part was that I managed to consume a little meatball appetizer and espresso martini before I was escorted out, so I got a little something out of my 10 minutes.

Josh Matthews: 8:42

Yeah, whenever you hear that I hear the words escorted out you know it ain't good, like something went down.

Vanessa Grant: 8:49

I thought it would be okay. Somebody said hey, you should definitely come by. Yeah, no, don't do it, they're very, very strict.

Josh Matthews: 8:55

Yeah, it's so future.

Vanessa Grant: 8:56

It's just an announcement for anybody.

Josh Matthews: 8:58

I crashed a couple parties myself. I crashed some parties, but I didn't get kicked out of any of them. So that's it. You just got to step up your game, Vanessa. You got to get Morgan Cognito.

Vanessa Grant: 9:08

We'll figure it out for you next year. If it's not a good time, it's a good story.

Josh Matthews: 9:12

There you go. I like that. Well, we had a great time and by we I mean me like me and all my friends and you know getting to hang out with Vanessa, current clients, future clients I mean a lot of future clients who've already been taking a bunch of job orders today from Ed, and maybe Steven can highlight some of those roles a little bit later on at the halfway mark. But we did host a little content creators party over at the Home for Marketers tent that was sponsored by Sir Conte and some other sponsors, and then we also ran a live podcast. This was the first time you've ever done a live show like in person. So we had a live audience and we were actually outside and thanks to my sound editor, daniel, he did an amazing job of getting rid of a massive, gigantic air conditioning unit sound that was running the whole time. But we were joined by Sarah, christina and and Sineka from I can't remember where Sineka works, I'm so sorry, very embarrassing. The other guys are from Sir Conte and you can listen to that because I just published that this afternoon. So just go on the platform and check out that live show.

Josh Matthews: 10:17

Talk about some interesting things that are a little bit different than we usually cover, but what I'm really excited about today is talking about this ecosystem report, this talent ecosystem, salesforce talent ecosystem report. I've been reading this for the last several years. It's produced by by Nick and his team over at 10 K advisors, and this is a really special episode because if you don't actually download it and read it, you're going to get some of the core highlights here and then hopefully, a better understanding of how to be approaching your career, moving forward and some things that you can expect so that you can plan for certain trends. So let's go ahead and dive right into it. Who would like to start, nick or Kristen, with some of the most compelling, surprising facts from this year's report?

Kristin Langlois: 11:06

Nick, I'll let you start, and then I'll chime in as well.

Nick Hamm: 11:10

Yeah, I mean, as far as surprises, I don't know that there were a ton of like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that. I think, yeah, honestly, a lot of the storylines that we found sort of supported, maybe anecdotally, what a lot of us might be seeing out there already. But you know, I think one of the most stark findings that we had was the significant decrease in demand for talent this year over last year by about half. Yeah 46% right I think it said yeah, yeah.

Nick Hamm: 11:42

So I mean that's that's, that's pretty significant. But one sort of interesting aspect of that is, you know, sort of we saw a lot larger decline in what we call established markets than in some of the emerging markets, which is sort of signaling a little bit of a trend that we see where, you know, folks are building up delivery centers in South America and India and Africa and other geographies to help support. There is still is a healthy demand for talent, right, but we're still kind of coming down off of the, the COVID-19.

Josh Matthews: 12:24

So you know, I would say get some clarity for from you real quick on this, before going further. So when we say that there's a 46% decrease in demand year over year, how are you, how are you, acquiring that information? What's the data that you're using to come up with that number?

Nick Hamm: 12:42

Yeah, so we have a methodology that we repeated for the past six years where we're looking at specific job boards and searching for job postings with the six titles that we that we look at now Salesforce administrators, business analysts, developers, solution architects, technical architects and consultants. So that's an aggregate across all those. Yeah.

Josh Matthews: 13:08

You know, it's interesting that we all know that there's been this decrease, right, but sometimes that's a daunting number and people can be like, oh my God, it's the end of the world. And it's not just like you said. It's not the end of the world, right, but what's the one?

Nick Hamm: 13:21

still, it's not a demand out there for sure.

Josh Matthews: 13:23

There's still a ton of demand, and we've got to remember that we're coming off of one of the biggest hiring years ever, right? I mean, the demand spiked so high after COVID for about 18 months or so. Maybe my numbers are off a little bit here, but this was my experience. They spiked so hard and so by comparison, of course, things are going to look a little bit different. And then also we had the great resignation, which is really the great chair hopping right. It's not like everybody just resigned and stopped working, they just went to different companies. How much of this do you think is economic versus how much of this is well? There was so much hiring going on before that now people are in these jobs and they were hired well, and they're not going anywhere.

Nick Hamm: 14:05

That's actually a really good question. I think it's a little bit of both. I would honestly say it's mostly economic. We've seen not only a slowdown in hiring but lots of layoffs that have been very public and those sort of slowed down a little bit but still even seeing a little bit of that. But I think we're hopefully at the bottom of that. Even sales forces said that they were going to hire, I think, 3,300 people and a lot of boomerang employees coming back. So I think a lot of it is definitely economic and probably a factor of over hiring when demand spikes so high, like you said about 18 months ago.

Josh Matthews: 14:49

Yeah, demand spiked like crazy. They hired 27,000 people in the prior year, so I saw a lot of buzz in the last two days. About 3,300 people are going to get hired. It's like, well, yeah, you're going to have to do that just to keep pace with the people with regular attrition. That's just to keep the numbers steady. So I don't know. I'm imagining that demand and where they're going to be putting those people is going to be a little bit more in data cloud, omni Studio, einstein, gpt, things like this. What's your take? Where do you think? I was going to say how did you not say?

Josh Matthews: 15:28

AI first right, yeah, right.

Nick Hamm: 15:30

Did you like that? It's got to be an AI. So, yeah, I think this is sort of a chance for Salesforce I guess we could use them as an example but a lot of companies to sort of retrench a little bit. Everyone was dealing with all the effects of COVID on business, and not just on business, but then worker expectations as well, and that's where a lot of new jobs came available, but they may not have been net new jobs, and so I think some part of this decline is sort of like what you alluded to. Right, the problem is sort of the chair hopping is not happening as much anymore, right, but this is an opportunity for companies to sort of rethink how they're building their talent teams, and so we've seen this before, right, this isn't the first time that something like this has happened in 2008.

Josh Matthews: 16:30

It's not the last time either. It's just part of a cycle.

Nick Hamm: 16:32

Yeah, right. So you know, when this happens, again, businesses are really quick to hire, they're really quick to fire. But then, as things sort of the dust settles right, there's this new normal, right, and I think that what we'll see next year, if I had to make a prediction on demand, is that we will see demand increase. But what we'll start seeing and I've been saying this for a few years is that we'll start seeing demand increase in more of the specialized roles, right? And so you know, this is sort of a signal to talent to say, hey, this is my opportunity to differentiate myself from sort of the masses.

Nick Hamm: 17:13

Because you know, the other piece that we haven't talked about yet is that there still is a significant increase in supply. So supply didn't drop, right, supply continues to grow. So when you contrast supply growing with demand dropping, you know, really that's a signal to talent that, hey, I need to find a way to stand out from the masses. I need to find a way to differentiate myself. I need to find a way to have skills that are going to set me apart from everyone else if I want to compete in this job market today.

Josh Matthews: 17:57

Yeah, it's critical, vanessa, and I talk about it a lot being the obvious choice for the role. And I'm assuming too, like I like your business model right, which is it's more fractional. You know fractional expertise and I understand it can go. You know they can go full time and they can go a long time, but it's you know, they can really kind of pick and choose. So you want to talk about your business model real quick.

Nick Hamm: 18:21

Sure, really, the genesis of this started when I was at a large consulting company and we started losing talent, even in a market where talent was super highly in demand. There was this question of well, this is really good talent, they don't want to work for us, they don't want to work for anybody else, they want to go out and do their own thing. But how do we keep them in the family Because they're good and we want to work with them? That's a little bit of how 10K came together, thinking how can we now support these entrepreneurs and these folks that don't want to work for anybody, but they're really good talent? How can we help partners and customers tap into this really good talent while still supporting the entrepreneurial efforts of these folks?

Nick Hamm: 19:15

That gave us a really unique opportunity when it comes to how we help customers to help them tap into this community. What we found is a lot of these folks do have specialized skills. They have specialized experience that sometimes companies need that for a little bit. They need to rent that, they don't need to buy it. That gives us an opportunity to help those companies come to where they are, at the same time supporting Salesforce entrepreneurs that want to go out and either. Some of them want to work 80 hours a week, some of them want to go hang gliding in Mexico for the summer. Some of them want to work five hours a day.

Josh Matthews: 19:56

Yeah, I want to do that. That sounds like a lot of fun.

Vanessa Grant: 20:00

That's operational. I'll add a little bit of my own personal perspective on here, having been in the ecosystem for over a decade. As Salesforce has increased in complexity, we've seen roles in this ecosystem change the standard roles how you build a team that would support a Salesforce org Initially we had an admin could be anybody that worked at your company that cared about data. Then it turned into an admin is also a slash. A developer. We had these admin helpers that existed. Then all of a sudden those turned into two separate roles. We realized that all of a sudden we had these five to 10-year-old orgs that are mired in technical debt because nobody was doing any documentation or business analysis. Now all of a sudden we've introduced business analysts as being a much more prominent role here. Now we're talking about DevOps, experts and all these. Totally to your point, nick, how we're just getting so much more specialized, and not even necessarily in roles, but even in clouds.

Vanessa Grant: 21:05

Then the other thing I just wanted to add to that is, having been in consulting now for a number of years, there's a huge resourcing problem where, when you do have just a pool of consultants that you're working with, it's very challenging to really mix and match the projects to the expertise that you have on staff. I have seen where there's been a lot of contractors coming in because they do have that specialized expertise. Otherwise, you're forced to basically take your full-time consultants and maybe put them in boxes that they don't fit necessarily perfectly in. I know that while my title has been consultant for a number of years, I've been billed out as a UX designer. I've been billed out as a business analyst or billed out as a solution architect. It really varies and it can be difficult to specialize when you're full-time consulting.

Nick Hamm: 22:02

Yeah, I agree, it's not just, even, like you mentioned, not just roles, but the breadth of the platform has expanded so much.

Nick Hamm: 22:11

I tell people a lot when I started doing Salesforce stuff in 2006, in the first couple of years I felt pretty confident that I could speak to almost anything that Salesforce did. Right now I feel like I don't know anything about Salesforce. It's so broad, with all the capabilities that they built, the acquisitions that they've made, it's created lots of niches and lots of opportunities for folks to specialize in certain skills or in certain clouds or in certain areas, not only across one role, but even multiple roles potentially. That's where maybe you have a company who has a lot of experience in that they might not need somebody on staff full-time to manage that. They might just need somebody to come in and help architect the program that then their team can take over. We definitely see a lot of that type of work.

Nick Hamm: 23:11

Sometimes you also have just burst capacity needs. You have a big project, you acquire a company or you want to migrate and sunset a system. You just need some people for a little bit more time than your team can handle. I think for NASA, to your point, what customer needs are now compared to what they were 10 years ago, when you had a lot of people that were migrating from the Siebels and Oracles and the SQL databases and all that stuff on to Salesforce, versus now where you have these older orgs that have lots of capabilities built into them. Frankly, that are mostly should be retired or rebuilt or are technical debt. The nature of how customers are working with Salesforce and what they need has changed quite a bit over the last few years.

Josh Matthews: 24:00

Yeah, it definitely has. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, yours or Chris. Clearly there's been an increase in partners globally. I don't have that stat right in front of me, maybe you do. I was reading your report and it talked about what the growth was for partners. Do you think that the increase in overall partners is just keeping demand with the need for doing implementations, migrations, configurations for new firms, things like this? Or do you feel like maybe there's less full-time hiring going on because there's more managed services being provided by some of these partners?

Nick Hamm: 24:44

I think in any downturn again I'll go back to 2008,. You see the need for consulting partners go up because companies are more risk averse in hiring talent full-time, but they still need to get work done. I've seen this a couple times over the last 17 years or so, the cycles where when you do have these economic blips, if you will, that customers still need to get work done. They're still paying for their Salesforce licenses most of them anyway and they still have work to get done. Typically they're turning to partners to get that work done for accounting reasons and other reasons.

Josh Matthews: 25:30

I've seen it too, I mean for 25 years. It's normal Back in Robert in the Robert Half days when Stephen and I were there, it was when it's a great market perm, perm, perm or direct placement headhunting Then when it's a down market, that always tanks. Sometimes we'd wind up without a team. The demand was so low in 0809. It just went away. No one was paying fees. Then everything was contractors. Then eventually it's a contract to hire and then eventually direct hire came back on the scene.

Nick Hamm: 26:05

Yeah, I think again, just the nature of how Salesforce is evolving at companies is going to change that sum. I think you're going to have very few companies who are not going to want to have any full-time talent. We actually don't recommend that. We prefer companies have some concentration of talent there that are really close to the business and really close to the problems. Let us help with the hard technical stuff while they can really be close to the solutions.

Nick Hamm: 26:39

I think that right now we're seeing more partners come in for a few reasons. One is the expanded capabilities. You have lots of companies who, for example, might have been marketing consulting firms that are coming in to now do the technical side of this. With Marketing Cloud they're going to become a partner or commerce consulting companies who consult across a number of commerce platforms who are now a Salesforce commerce cloud partner, as well as, just again, what we see and Kristin can really speak to this more is the growing number of entrepreneurs who are going out on their own and starting their own consulting companies for additional earning opportunities or flexibilities or quality of life or whatever it might be.

Josh Matthews: 27:22

Yeah, why don't you speak to that, kristin, for a moment?

Kristin Langlois: 27:25

I'm definitely happy to do so. We've definitely seen the demand increase or supply increase for those that are going out on their own, want more flexibility, want more freedom to choose the projects they work on, when and how, how many hours they work. That is definitely something that we're seeing. We're also seeing with this economic downturn, or changes, that people again want to turn to take their own career in their own hands and have, like I said, more control over it. I think that is a big driving force for those to want to pursue being their own business owner.

Josh Matthews: 28:07

Yeah, it's almost like people who got started five years ago and they've got some chops and they've been mentored and they've maybe been exposed to 12 or a dozen, 20 different customers. They can develop a different sense, a spidey sense, of how to navigate multiple challenges with doing implementations and integrations, which is general work. Also, the more time people have in the seat, the more they're going to want to go out on their own. If we look back five years, the growth's been incredible. What did the report say again on? Has it doubled since 19 or 20? I can't remember the stat.

Nick Hamm: 28:52

As far as the number of partners, it was 20% this past year. It's 19%.

Nick Hamm: 29:03

The growth rate in 2020 was the highest one we've seen, and that was 29%, but this was the highest we've seen since 2020. Not only were we seeing the increase in the number of partners, but the large firms are growing like crazy. This is not a new trend. This is not just this year. This has been happening for years, where there's this massive hazem opening up where you have really the top 30 partners, I think, have about 62% of the talent. We're talking about 2,500 partners. It's not like there's 100 partners.

Nick Hamm: 29:38

The top 30 partners have more than half of the consulting talent, which is crazy to think about when you think about the high hundreds of thousands of consultants in this ecosystem and how locked up those folks are in those few firms and how few customers they can work with.

Nick Hamm: 29:58

You think about the total customer base of Salesforce. The rest of the customer base is left with 20,470 partners to fit through to figure out who the right partner is for them. That's where we've become not a broker, if you will, but a clearinghouse or a way for not only other partners to be seen, but for customers to find those partners. A lot of those smaller partners, especially, have great talent. Those are the folks that we talked about, that you just talked about that have been doing this 5, 10, 15, sometimes 20-plus years now that have gone out on their own for quality of life. If you're a customer who doesn't know John or Jane at this small little niche partner, you're never going to find them through the app exchange. Even if you do, how are you going to know that they're really?

Josh Matthews: 30:52

good. I always joke about that. Peter talks about it all the time. Peter Gons is on the show here too right now. He's also known as the app whisperer. He talks about how everyone's got four and a half or five stars on the app exchange. How do you tell? It's almost impossible.

Nick Hamm: 31:10

You have to be an educated buyer too. To be honest, most Salesforce customers I won't say this, I won't say it that way Some are more informed than others. There you go, there you go. It's hard. I just admitted I don't know that much about Salesforce anymore. It's hard for customers to know what they need to look for. There's a lot of confusing information out there around. What should you expect from an admin? What's reasonable? What do I need based on what products I have or what my team looks like? You got to talk to an expert like yourself to really figure that out. It's just hard for customers to know it's really.

Josh Matthews: 31:48

yeah, it's difficult. Peter Gons go ahead.

Peter Ganza: 31:52

I just wanted to point out not every partner. You don't have to be on the app exchange to be a partner. We don't necessarily know what that number is Salesforce doesn't disclose it but you can be a partner and not be on the app exchange.

Josh Matthews: 32:08

Okay, yeah, but it's the number that we can look at. That's the barometer. It might be a little cooler, a little bit warmer, the pressure might be a little bit heavier. Lighter barometer, but that's the measuring stick that we're using.

Nick Hamm: 32:25

Also, that's true. You don't have to have an app exchange listing. You're given one if you sign up as a partner. Really, I think the most important point to that is there's lots of people who are not actual partners of Salesforce that still do Salesforce work. We know that that 2,500 number is unique business entities that are doing Salesforce work because many of them don't even sign up to be a partner. If you sign up to be a registered partner, I think they've actually started waiving that fee since COVID. Really, the benefit you get is two free Salesforce licenses. It does pay for itself, but there's really not much other support that you get from Salesforce. Frankly, If you're a one-person shop, they're not just like I'm so glad that you signed up as a partner, here's 50 leads and here's a bunch of customers. It's definitely not like that.

Vanessa Grant: 33:18

I would actually love to ask a question, since we've got Nick and Kristen here, something that I've seen, I think, especially with post-pandemic, and there are those career accelerator programs that have come from more of a financial independence retire early background, a lot of folks looking to transition their careers into entrepreneurship, but maybe don't have any Salesforce experience. Approximately how much experience do you think that you need before you actually go out on your own? How much experience do you need before you can sign up with the 10K and dictate your own terms on things?

Kristin Langlois: 34:02

Sure, I'll take that one. I would say on average, those that come into our community have about five to seven years of experience. A majority of that would be within the Salesforce ecosystem. There are some outliers for those that maybe have really just gone deep really quickly and specifically, maybe in a niche, cloud or industry. From that perspective they built out an expertise that they stand out and where we would say, yes, you are considered and you are looked at as an expert in this area in Salesforce.

Kristin Langlois: 34:44

For those that I think are the average, that come into average years of experience or exposure to Salesforce, they've had a significant amount of time of working with a variety of clients so they built that consultant acumen. They've experienced a wide breadth of challenges within clients, different communication styles. They've known how to navigate different scenarios where that's what you run into by being an independent consultant. And they themselves have built that deep technical expertise within Salesforce as well as consulting Acumen to be able to now say I'm going to bring this to the market. And then that's where we also can come in and really say, hey, how can we support you in your journey as being an independent consultant? And that's also what our clients expect from 10K and our independent consultants that we partner with.

Vanessa Grant: 35:46

That's fantastic. Yeah, I have heard people that are just like thinking that they're going to go through a career accelerator program and then just be an independent consultant. And certainly I mean I don't have the. I've been doing this 13 years and I think I'm too scared to do it. So it impresses me, I think, when certain people think that they can, but I don't see how that's possible. So I love your perspective and thank you for sharing that.

Kristin Langlois: 36:15

Of course I think it's. I mean, if you look at the ecosystem report too and specifically I'll go, you know, speak to the. The increase of administrative supply However there is, you know, the administrator job postings only made up 7% of Salesforce job postings this year. So that to me, you know, just shows that those that are breaking into Salesforce, getting their admins or certificates going through these career accelerators, it may be a little bit harder for them at this point in time to break in.

Josh Matthews: 36:57

There's no may about it. It's definitely harder, and it has been, and it's been increasingly harder progressively every year over the last five years, you know it's just gotten more and more difficult, and you know we cover this at other shows.

Josh Matthews: 37:13

I woke up well, what do you do? How do you get experience, like, how do you stand out? All of those things, because there are ways to do it, but it's definitely not the. I mean, it used to be just like show up, take a test, get a gig. Year later, double your salary from whatever you were doing before, right, and it's not really the case right now. And to your point, you know there's this massive reduction in admin posts.

Josh Matthews: 37:40

But I think a lot of that it's not just that there's less demand. Look, the hidden job market is 80% of the job market. So when we look at these numbers, you know maybe not like in the heyday of you know, everyone needed a technical architect and there were like four of them in the whole country because that happened. Basically I'm being a little bit satirical here, but like it's serious stuff but there's a hidden job market and now, as more and more junior admins gain enough knowledge about how to navigate LinkedIn, develop their network and make themselves known, companies, I believe, are not wasting dollars on advertising job posts for admins. They can find them without it right, or they can do a Craigslist ad for 30 bucks, and we're not tracking Craigslist, are we Right? So you know, there's definitely there's some nuance to this report of the things that are happening in the background. The numbers are the numbers and they're not to be denied, but there's these hidden numbers and these hidden things that are happening, like the hidden job market, right?

Josh Matthews: 38:47

For instance, I think you guys talked about this big reduction in demand for architects in general and specifically technical architects by. I want to say it was over 50%, 50, 55%, and have to look at it more carefully. I've got 22 pages spread out in front of me and my eyesight is not that good, so I don't know like it's in here, right, but so talk about that. Do you think that people are? And here's the other thing. So I'm going to throw a second part in here. So there's this hidden job market where people just are finding ways to connect with one another without needing to post an advertisement. So there's that.

Josh Matthews: 39:24

Then, when the economy gets a cough, recruiters get pneumonia. This is normal, right, we expect it. And so staffing firms go out of business fortunately not ours, fortunately not yours, but some companies go out of business or they sell and they consolidate. We see this with partners also right. I noticed that over the last five years there's been a 986% increase in companies that are in that partners, that are in the 100 to 500, you know certification headcount I think it was certified experts okay which is massive. It's more than twice any other group. We've got 300% growth over five years for the 500 to 1,000, 220% for 1,000 and over and the one to five 77% right In the last five years. So it's a massive delta here between these 100 to 500. And I've got a theory about it. I think it's consolidation. I think that these are the this is the size of company that's buying the one to five person teams or the one to 20 headcount teams and integrating them. What do you think about that? Do you think that's part of what's happening here?

Nick Hamm: 40:36

Yeah, I mean sort of two separate pieces, but yeah, absolutely I mean there's. We've seen this as long as I've been around I've seen it where any sort of smaller partner who gets to 50, 100 people and starts to get some traction and is ready to sell could easily be bought because that next tier is trying to move from mid-market to enterprise and needs people right and there's been this gap and sort of the lower and mid-market customer consulting base for larger consulting companies, because anybody who services that market and gains any traction is going to get sucked up. And then you know they're the next traction on demand or acumen or whatever, and they're working on the big clients now. So that's definitely happened quite a bit and I think the data shows that.

Nick Hamm: 41:26

From an architect perspective, you know customers just struggle to hire them. Number one. Number one I think most customers don't even know that they need one. They think that developers can solve the problem. Informed customers know, but I think you have a lot of customers who just don't even know, like that they need an architect or what they would use an architect for. So that's problem number one.

Josh Matthews: 41:52

Yeah, I had a conversation like that today with the tiniest little partner and I'm excited about working with this group. But it's the same thing. And when they're new to the ecosystem and or maybe they're doing Azure and AWS and now they want to do Salesforce and it's a different market, right, it's really hard to understand, but yeah, it's a huge thing. So many times this is the typical order. I hear I need a Salesforce developer, so okay, and then by the end of the day, after two months later, when everything's kind of washed out, planned out and someone's hired on board, what they've got is a temporary architect to help them kick things off and then to be in the wings for the duration of the project or for the next six months or a year. What have you right? A little bit of development and predominantly what most companies, these partners, need our consultants.

Josh Matthews: 42:43

Talk about the consult demand for consultants and how you define a consultant, because I've seen, you know, I've looked at hundreds, if not thousands of job postings and sometimes they say they'll title someone a consultant, but really their developer. Or they'll title title someone a consultant, but they're really a BA, right, it's sort of this all inclusive thing, saying that you're going to do your job, whatever that job happens to be, but you're not going to do it for us, you're going to do it for our clients. That make air go your consultant right? What do you think about that? Like, how many people are actually like true, real consultants versus you know, I mean, how many BA's at Accenture are actually just full time working for another company through Accenture? You know what I mean.

Nick Hamm: 43:30

Yeah, no, it's a good point and I think when we started this six years ago, the stratification of roles was less than what it is now. Right, you know it pretty much used to be like you were a admin, developer, consultant or architect, right, those are kind of the four things that you did in Salesforce. You know now there's a lot more specialization as part of the complexity of the install base has grown and you brought in some more of the kind of traditional IT type roles like solution architect and business analyst and technical architect and enterprise architect. So DevOps, yeah, yeah, part of it's a titling thing, right, and, to be honest, we might see that, like over the next hour, many years, consultant role kind of gets phased out and all that kind of moves into business analysts or admin. Right, it's sort of the catch all roles or maybe something completely new that we haven't even thought about yet. So you know, I think I think it's very subjective and I think every company just like how you define an admin, could have a different definition of what they expect there.

Nick Hamm: 44:39

But that was sort of the catch all.

Nick Hamm: 44:40

Like you can be a business analyst, but you can also configure the system right, very much like an admin but you work for a partner, right, and so I think that's right.

Nick Hamm: 44:50

You know, it's sort of an admin who has worked for a lot of different companies and seen a lot of different situations, right. That's how I think about a consultant is not only do you have the technical acumen, not only do you have sort of the business acumen, but you've seen a lot of scenarios that have helped you kind of hone how you recommend solutions and, like I told a lot of people over the number of years I've been doing this in the hundreds and hundreds of orbs, that scene that's sort of got my MBA that way right, by just seeing all these different scenarios how these companies work, how they work well, how they're dysfunctional, how they've done things really good with Salesforce, how they've done things really bad with Salesforce and those are the things that really move you from sort of starting out as an admin into consultant and eventually solution architect. And if you want to pursue a technical arc yeah most definitely, vanessa.

Josh Matthews: 45:42

you've got your hand up. I don't know why, because you're in charge of people with hands up. That's weird.

Vanessa Grant: 45:50

Of course I have it. Yeah, no, I agree with that With the consultancy. That is something that I noticed in the job report because, like I said, I do kind of think of consultant just from my experience lately it's been more of a title rather than what I was build out, as I don't know that there are too many folks that are necessarily build out as like generic consultant, because it's hard to pick out what are the things that a generic consultant does. But I like the way that Nick explained it on how it is a way of are you actually qualified to advise on something? So talk through options, talk through risks and present things and do client management in that way. But I almost kind of wonder if consultant is almost going to be like a skill set rather than an actual role, Like are you a BA that can also consult? Are you a developer that can also do some consulting? And I think in general this also kind of I kind of want to direct the conversation a little bit to the changing roles in the ecosystem.

Vanessa Grant: 46:58

One of the great things about Dreamforce is being able to have conversations with people that are working at Salesforce and hearing some of the challenges that they have. And while I won't name names, I did speak to somebody fairly prominent in the Salesforce community on the changing role of the admin, and there is that admin skills kit, which is great to. If you go on to Trailhead, you can see the admin skills kit so you could see the different hats that a solo admin would wear. But then we're also throwing AI and prompt manager on top of it and at a certain point I do feel like we're going to end up splitting that up. Maybe instead of just there being generic admin, maybe it's junior admin, maybe it's going to be your AI admin Just how that role might actually change, because it's definitely too much even now for a solo person coming in as far as I'm concerned.

Nick Hamm: 48:07

Sorry, Kristen, go ahead.

Kristin Langlois: 48:08

I was just going to comment on that. Even if you go to the toolkit and you look at it today, it would be daunting to me to think that, okay, this is the role I'm taking on, and especially in companies. Even if you look at the job postings, I think they add to what their expectations are of their postings for admins. What, wait, what I know? How could that be you?

Josh Matthews: 48:35

mean they're asking for more than they can get.

Kristin Langlois: 48:38

I know who would do that?

Josh Matthews: 48:40

Yeah, you've never heard of that.

Vanessa Grant: 48:42

You've got to be an internal consultant and code fluent and all sorts of stuff. It's wild how, what the expectations that are put on admins these days.

Kristin Langlois: 48:50

I agree, and so I 100% agree with you that I think we're going to definitely see again. I don't know if it's title or just specializations, but I think we will see that in the admin role and other roles within the Salesforce ecosystem.

Nick Hamm: 49:09

Yeah, if you look at that skills kit, there's some things on there that especially when you talk about folks that are trying to enter into the ecosystem, that maybe don't come from an IT background, for ear switchers and there's just no way Product management, project management I barely even know how to differentiate between those two and those are two different skills that we're saying that every admin should have. It's not wrong. Those are skills that the perfect admin that I would love to hire would have, along with all the other ones, but most do not have all of those skills. We actually have talked to probably some of the same people that you're talking about, vanessa, about this and they're listening. I mean, they understand, I think, what they're challenged with a fast-evolving ecosystem as well.

Nick Hamm: 50:01

A lot of folks coming into the admin role. They are super keen on supporting admins and making sure that they have all the training and are equipped with all the stuff that they need. But the other side of that is also helping companies understand and set proper expectations with companies on what's reasonable for you to ask of an admin that you're going to pay $50,000 a year, versus an admin you're going to pay $120,000 a year. What types of things should they be able to do, because those are two different people. Not everybody is going to be one of the other of those. How do you know?

Nick Hamm: 50:40

I think that's part of what's been challenging with folks trying to break into the ecosystem as well and finding the right fit, the right job. Fit is that the company expectations have sort of been set that, like, hey, admins should have all of this stuff. In reality, a lot of them do not and don't need to, frankly, especially if you're going to be part of a larger team. So I think that we'll see over the next I don't know how long, but sometime in the future a little bit more fragmentation and potential white levels where we maybe split this admin role, which is really unique to the Salesforce ecosystem, by the way.

Nick Hamm: 51:21

I think this is a problem that is hard to solve because it hasn't really been solved some traditional IT problem like business analyst, which spans lots of different technologies. The admin role for Salesforce is very, very different than almost any other technology that I've seen. So it's a really hard problem to solve. But I think what we'll start to see is, as the functionality of Salesforce has expanded, admins have grown in their careers, expanded their capabilities and skills as well. It's hard to see if that's ever patient, ever title or whatever will be, but I'm glad to hear that you had that conversation too, vanessa, because I think it's really important not only for the talent in this ecosystem but for the companies trying to hire the talent too.

Vanessa Grant: 52:05

Exactly. I was just thinking, as you were talking, that it's almost like we're putting the responsibility on the people that are looking for the jobs to have all these skills, rather than educating the people who are responsible for their Salesforce orgs to ensure that their teams have all these skills across, however many people. But do we have somebody who's in charge of project management? Do we have somebody that's going to be wearing that BA hat? Do we have somebody that's considering user experience design? That's where I think maybe we're just putting too much on the folks that are looking to break in, as opposed to companies teaching them how to maintain their orgs in a healthy way, so that they don't have to burn the thing to the ground every five years and rebuild.

Josh Matthews: 52:53

That's tricky. That's really, really, trust me. I mean I talked to more companies than Salesforce partners than anyone else I know. Salesforce partners generally, fortunately, tend to get it, but Salesforce customers, I mean, they can't even figure out compensation. They don't know what to do, they have no idea. They go to salarycom and they go to the Mason Frank guide and those numbers aren't always really super accurate, they're just not. Some years I've seen it be better than others, but it's just a little bit inaccurate. When we're taking into consideration US citizens and green cards, people who are here in the States, they command a higher compensation wage than people who are here operating through a third-party vendor who's holding their passport for them, who's holding their H1B visa. Do you guys agree? I mean, this is what I see. It's like there's two ecosystems there's the direct higher ecosystem, or the citizen ecosystem, and then there's the H1B or visa ecosystem, which is huge. It's enormous, but I think it can skew numbers. What do you guys think?

Nick Hamm: 54:13

Yeah, I think it can, and Kristen probably based on her past experience. We could speak to this and should. But I would say, in addition to that, it's really mostly around just how were their expectations set, around what they should pay and what they should be looking for. How were they informed on that? Was it salarycom? Was it through a recruiter like you, josh, or was it through a friend at another company? Or there's no de facto standard for this. Like he said, most partners know this because it's their business, but most customers this is not their business. This is just another role that they have at their company and they don't really have great resources to figure out what to ask for and what to pay.

Josh Matthews: 54:58

Yeah, and that's why they should really be working with experienced recruiters, even if it's just a free session and we offer that, by the way, I'm sure you guys do as well it's like, well, what do you need? Like, what's your challenge? And, like I said, I had a conversation today it's like, oh, we need a developer. It's like, I don't know, maybe you need an architect and a consultant, like, maybe that's the way to go forward. And when we look at to your point, vanessa, these folks who are sort of adding on to their toolkit, these Swiss Army Knives of you know, the Swiss Army Knives individuals, they can do a lot of different things, right? The question is, which of them can they do really well?

Josh Matthews: 55:39

If I'm going out backpacking, if I'm going to go do some solo backpacking right, I don't want a Swiss Army Knives. Swiss Army Knives is for the glove box. As far as I'm concerned, if I'm going out, I want my Becker BK99 inch, you know, log splitting knife. Like that's what I want. That's my preferred knife when I go camping, because I don't need to bring an axe and I can chop up wood and have a nice campfire Maybe not here in Florida, but in the Pacific Northwest, where I did most of my camping Right.

Josh Matthews: 56:08

So how do you find that that nine inch knife that's designed just for you know X, y, z, versus thinking that you need to go get a Swiss Army Knife when you don't Right Now everyone's just wasted a hundred bucks, so you got to be careful with that stuff. This would be a really good future episode, I think, just an educational episode specifically for customers, about how to identify what their actual needs are and then how to set reasonable expectations about what kind of value they're going to get from a consultant or from a direct hire in those compensation ranges. So that's what they can expect. What do you guys think?

Kristin Langlois: 56:50

No, I think so, josh. I was going to say, you know, in my previous life working for another consultancy but also hiring for people internally to work across the enterprise system org, a lot of times when we are pulling comp it was more general roles versus truly looking at, you know, specific skill sets within, like the Salesforce ecosystem. You know we would work with Mercer and understanding their comp data, but it was so wide of ranges it just did not align to what our town acquisition team was seeing in the market but that's what the budgets were set at. So then the budgets are set there and then you as the town acquisition team go to recruit and there's just such a huge misalignment. So I agree with you of being able to educate customers on what to look for in the roles, what those roles are, as well as you know, compensation alignment, especially for different regions, and I think if you

Kristin Langlois: 57:59

look at the report. That's why you're also seeing, you know, there was an increase or the demand for developers was, even though it slowed right, it slowed the least. But I think in that instance some of that was because people were firms were potentially looking outside of North America for that talent, and that's not, and trying to, I guess, a square peg into a circle or whatever it's called, because maybe it is a little bit less expensive.

Vanessa Grant: 58:40

So just a quick thing I could just want to remember. At one point I threw out on Twitter that I wish that whenever somebody bought a Salesforce license for the first time, that it would kind of be like Petco when you buy the hamster for the first time and Petco hands you that like little how to care for your hamster. That I wish that there was like a nice booklet, you know, with lots of pictures on how to you know the care and feeding of your healthy Salesforce org. And I thought I remembered 10K actually putting out something like that.

Nick Hamm: 59:11

Yeah, I was gonna. Not exactly. You know I would aspire to something that good because I'd agree with you, customers need that. It's gotten better. But especially in the early days they were not informed on what they really needed to make success happen with Salesforce. But a few years ago we put out our Salesforce operational excellence handbook and you know, josh, to your point.

Nick Hamm: 59:36

What we were trying to help customers understand is what are the factors that you need to think about in building a Salesforce team? Right, not necessarily how many people you need or what are the specifics of. You know, if you have this product, you need this. Right. But you know what are the sort of pillars that you need to build a center of excellence, right, that is so important to think about rather than just thinking about I need a developer or I need an admin? Right, because it has to be in the context of so many other things.

Nick Hamm: 1:00:08

Right, what's your organizational structure? Is it under the business or is it under IT? What other resources do you have to support Salesforce, if any, you know? Do you have governance? Do you have a support process? Do you have other centers of excellence within your company? Are you looking for somebody to just manage the org and use consultants, or are you looking to have the majority of the talent in-house? How many clouds did you buy? How many users do you have?

Nick Hamm: 1:00:33

There's just so many different factors to that, but I think specific to the admin role. You know we've talked about the stratification of how many different skills you're expected to have. Well, if you're part of a huge team that has technical architects and tech leads and developers and solution architects, you probably and project managers and product managers and business analysts, like you can go with an admin who doesn't have all those right, because you really might need that person to do a very specific set of tasks so that they don't require them to have all that. But if you're hiring a solo admin, you're gonna need more of those different types of skills, right? So the environment that they're coming into and how that company is planning to support Salesforce and that investment that they're making into it it's still critical to figure out really what they need, but most companies don't think about that, right, they're thinking about that one. Well, I need somebody, right, because I bought this and maybe do some stuff right Exactly.

Josh Matthews: 1:01:32

Unfortunately, it's harder than that. It's much harder than that. You know, I had an interesting experience on Thursday, just before we did the podcast. I thought, okay, I'm gonna go do some.

Josh Matthews: 1:01:41

Billy on the street, I went over to Yerba Buena Park where everybody was having lunch and I walked around with my little PodTrak P4, zoom PodTrak P4 microphone and I just went up to strangers and asked him if I could ask him some questions. I'd say, like you know, half of them said no, they didn't wanna be on the microphone. But the ones that I did talk to, I talked to several folks who were hiring managers and I used to ask this magic question right, like if you could push a button and maybe I asked it once or twice, I don't know but like, hey, if you could push a button and have someone in your company right now, what would that role be? That's how I used to ask it. And last week I switched it up and I was asking folks okay, if you could push a button and have someone show up, what would you be having them do?

Josh Matthews: 1:02:32

Right, like what needs to be accomplished in your organization? That's a way better question than asking a customer specifically a customer that might not know too much about the ecosystem, what job title they want, right, because they'll say developer and they mean consultant, they'll say technical architect and they mean BA, like they just don't always have it down right. So, whether whoever's listening to this show, if you're also in the ecosystem and you're a recruiter, it's not a bad little bit of advice to take, which is to stop asking what the job title is that you want to fill and start asking what are the responsibilities or what they're trying to accomplish on their team, and then you can help them, then you can coach them, yeah.

Nick Hamm: 1:03:18

At least half the people that approach us are initially asking for developers, like I need a developer or I need a couple of developers, but then that's an immediate signal to ask okay, what are you really trying to accomplish? And the majority of the time we'll help with the developer, but that developer is supported, just like you mentioned earlier, by an architect, by a tech lead by QA, by BA, right, by a more well-rounded team, because you can't really expect a developer to be able to do all those things, just like you can't expect the BA to be able to do all those things. Right, but all those things are required for success and most companies just don't know that, yeah, they don't.

Josh Matthews: 1:03:57

It's like, yeah, what kind of car do you want? Well, I want a sports car that's really good in the snow and can clear a 12-inch curb. Like that doesn't exist, right, like it's just not the same car. You can't get it, you gotta pick one. But more likely it's better to have a garage full of sort of fractional cars that you get to use, depending on the conditions. And it's no different when it comes to, particularly, a customer that doesn't necessarily need full-time people, but they're trying to build something out, or they just. Maybe it's a partner and they just landed some big new account and they know that they're gonna have to have an extra five resources for the next six months, but maybe they won't need them six months down the line, right, and it's way better to build a team and have people basically sharing those hours and applying their expertise for the hours that they are involved, then hiring five people and losing your shirt because you're spending too much money, right, or hiring one person who just doesn't put it together the right way.

Nick Hamm: 1:05:05

Or what happens a lot of times and this goes back to the point about architects and the drop in demand for them they go somewhere else because they're bored or you're not utilizing them in the right way, right, that happens all the time, totally, totally.

Josh Matthews: 1:05:20

I hear it all the time. People are like yeah, I wanna hire an architect and then after three months they're mostly gonna do development and it's like after three months they're gonna leave, they don't wanna do development, they're an architect.

Nick Hamm: 1:05:32

And the same goes for admins, too, right? I just use architect as an example. But same goes for admins, right? Even though there's less demand, there's still lots of mobility. So you're not only wasting sort of the money on potential roles that you don't need, but that cost of hiring someone and then then leaving and then having to find somebody else to fill that role, right? I'm sure you've seen it a ton of times, your point about doing an episode on just that. It might be a series.

Josh Matthews: 1:06:04

Yeah, it could be a series.

Nick Hamm: 1:06:06

It's a great idea?

Josh Matthews: 1:06:07

Yeah, definitely, and maybe we'll have you back for that, because it's important and it's gotta happen. Educating the customer so that they're knowledgeable, it's critical. Look guys, the reality is attrition in the United States it's 47%, right? That means that the average employee 47 out of 100 employees aren't in that role a year later. Now, that's a bad number. It's a pretty normal number, okay, and that number has not changed that much over the last 15 years. It's still the case. I think it's a little bit better in tech because we're including all non-farm jobs in that sort of a number. But tech attrition is 30% a year, and so often it's just because, well, either A don't know how to attract the right people. B don't know how to manage them once they're on board. C they thought they needed A, but what they really needed was B, so they just hired the wrong skill set for the role too Like. There's so many reasons why these things don't go well, and usually it's because you've got the giddy person who can't wait to land a job, so they're all gung-ho on everything. Oh yeah, I could do that, I'll figure it out right. And then you've got the clients that don't know how to ask the questions to differentiate between poor, average and highly successful. And so, and there you go. Now you have high attrition.

Josh Matthews: 1:07:38

I was having dinner with one of my favorite people in the world, my uncle Dennis, who lives in the Bay Area. So we went out to a waterfront restaurant where they were having the manufacturing cloud dinner or something like that, and he quoted someone who was in charge. I think this person was in charge of I don't know. It was a very, very senior person, a president level at Wells Fargo where he'd worked, and he had told Dennis years ago he'd said look, for every person that you hire, you're gonna have to hire two. Right, you gotta hire two people to get one person.

Josh Matthews: 1:08:13

Now, it doesn't have to be like that, but that is the majority of companies experience that they have to go through two people to finally get to the right one. So it's smart to work with a good recruiter, it's worth it to work and sorry if this sounds like a plug, it is a plug, but honest to God. I also feel like it's a moral obligation that we've got to protect people from blowing their money from hiring the wrong people, because you can I saw this the other day. It's like you can either infect or affect a team. Right, I know what it was.

Josh Matthews: 1:08:48

I was watching Coach Prime with my buddy the other day and Deion Sanders was saying that you're either gonna infect the team or you're gonna affect the team. And it's just as easy to hire someone who infects the team and poisons the team poisons the family, so to speak as it is to hire the right person. But if you don't know how to do that, get the help. At least watch some videos, something like that. I'd like to, if we can. I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Nick Hamm: 1:09:15

No, josh, I was gonna say one thing to that, because I think one of the sort of most underrated aspects of using a recruiter and we see this in our business too is having a mediator when things don't go right. Right, so things might be great during the interview process. You get in there and all of a sudden there was a mis-expectation or something. There's a hiccup, whatever it is. That doesn't mean it has to be the end right. But a lot of times when it's just employee and company or consultant and company, it's really easy for them to just end it right there, right. But a lot of times, having sort of that third party that's been up a part of the journey, come in and help make that decision, maybe the decision should be yeah, that's right, get out of there, right. But maybe it's like hey, let's all get on the same page here. That can help save a lot of time and headaches as well.

Nick Hamm: 1:10:09

So I know that's probably not a service that you preach about, but that's something that like at 10K, we're not a marketplace. It's not like you just come to us and say, hey, I need some talent, and we introduce you to somebody and then you're off on your way, right. We wanna make sure everyone there is successful. Of course You've got someone successful, the expert successful, because there will be other opportunities with both at some point in the future. So it's in everyone's best interest for that relationship to be successful and a lot of times when companies are just going direct higher, they're missing out on that opportunity and that service.

Josh Matthews: 1:10:42

Yeah, absolutely. I remember, looking at some scary numbers it was something like the average tech staffing firm for contract this isn't for direct higher for contract that there were issues in 30 to 35% of all placements within the first 30 to 60 days. I mean that's bad, that's bad, it's expensive and fortunately, yeah, if you're working with a reputable company and a smart recruiter, you can sort of figure it out and navigate it and hopefully save it 50 to 75% of the time. Sometimes it just was a bad placement. So the reality is is like you've gotta get this stuff right and you gotta get it right from the get go. And you're gonna see more of that, nick, I think in fractional placement and in contract placement than direct higher, which is, of course, a much more exhaustive process because it's a much greater fee and it's a little bit. It's paid up front. It's not necessarily paid over a year or two years or what have you. So we're gonna see that more with contract. I certainly saw it more when I was working in a firm where the majority of our work was contract.

Josh Matthews: 1:11:52

But yeah, figuring that out when it goes sideways, what do you do? Where's the miscommunication? And, by God, did you document stuff? I mean we document everything. I type pretty much as fast as I talk, so everything that's being said is being typed. Of course, you don't need to do that anymore. You can just have AI recorded for you. Now we're coming to about. It's been about an hour and I wanna make sure that we cover the a little bit about the ecosystem trends, and I wanna say it was on your second to last page of the report where you talk about AI for a little bit. So I know some people are nervous about how AI is going to affect their role. Some people think that it's going to enhance it, other people think it may put them out of a job. But you have a nice take on it. That I really appreciated. Maybe you could just summarize that for us here.

Nick Hamm: 1:12:40

Sorry.

Nick Hamm: 1:12:40

I'm trying to get off mute there. Yeah, I mean, hey, pandora's box is open, right? You can't put that genie back in the bottle. And so, number one, my advice is, afraid or not, you have to embrace it and don't just stand on the sidelines and wait to see what happens. Be part of making what you want to happen happen, and you'll be in a good spot. So there's lots of learning opportunities out there. Nobody really knows what's going to happen, but I think we do know that, at a minimum, ai is going to be a tool in the toolkit, just like an IDE is.

Vanessa Grant: 1:13:27

For a developer.

Vanessa Grant: 1:13:27

You know what I'm gonna throw it out there, because I think this also applies to this report, where it says that the role that had the highest level of I believe was it supply growth and demand growth was business analysts. And if we're talking about AI, exactly what you said, nick and this is actually part of my presentation at Dreamforce is the idea that we don't know what's coming in the future. But we do know what we can do now to prepare for the future, and I think business analysts are kind of at the forefront of that. You know, how are we doing our documentation and our orgs? How are we documenting our business processes? How are we moving forward on cleaning up our technical debt so that we can get things prepared for whatever AI comes in the future? How are we updating our descriptions so that AI can read them properly? I think business analysis is going to be huge and I don't know how much of that number is based on the AI future that's coming, but I don't know that I see that number decreasing anytime soon with AI coming.

Josh Matthews: 1:14:42

Well, I'm a little confused here, because I thought business analysts was one of the lowest increases in demand year over year, in fact showing a 51% decrease overall. Did I get this wrong?

Vanessa Grant: 1:14:57

I see business analysts saw the highest global supply growth 34% year over year and highest demand growth 55% year over year, suggesting that administrators are leveling up to more specialized roles.

Kristin Langlois: 1:15:09

Was that that might be last year's report?

Vanessa Grant: 1:15:12

Oh no.

Josh Matthews: 1:15:13

That sounds like last year's report. This year it's not so good for the BAs, Vanessa.

Vanessa Grant: 1:15:18

Oh no, tell me the bad news I was reading last year's there.

Kristin Langlois: 1:15:22

We did see a big increase last year, but this year the supply growth for business analysts was the lowest. What Among all?

Josh Matthews: 1:15:33

roles at 18%.

Kristin Langlois: 1:15:35

I'm horrified.

Josh Matthews: 1:15:36

Yeah, it's tricky number there to work with.

Kristin Langlois: 1:15:41

So one of the things that we were I guess our hypothesis was just looking at what, the certification coming out last year and the I would say that the marketing behind it, behind Salesforce, that's why we saw such an increase. But this year it kind of took a downturn again.

Josh Matthews: 1:16:03

I think it's a luxury role for a lot of companies. I would agree with that, like technical architect luxury role, business analyst luxury role, and whether they, even though they need it we all know that and, by the way, I'm pretty certain, vanessa, that demand last year that it grew so much, partially because of you. That's what I think, just so you know.

Vanessa Grant: 1:16:25

So you're saying I'm 30% less effective than I was last year? No, that's disappointing, no that's disappointing.

Josh Matthews: 1:16:34

Look, it's a luxury role, right? So it's the first one to get cut. That's just how it goes.

Vanessa Grant: 1:16:41

Yeah, I mean I do see where, like admins, again it's the let's put responsibility on admins to be everything where BAs can turn into a hat, whereas admins I think it's very difficult to turn them into a hat that somebody else wears. That's in another full-time role. But gosh, with the complexity increasing, especially with AI, I just that shocks me a bit that BAs aren't becoming more prominent. Very disappointing.

Nick Hamm: 1:17:16

But Well, what I think you'll see to Vanessa's this data is basically from kind of last August to this August or last July, this July, right. So it was really, I think, what the beginning of this year, end of last year, when we started seeing a lot of the noise around generally AI start. So it'll be interesting to see next year, once you sort of had a full cycle, how that affects a lot of these roles. But I think what both Patrick Stokes at Salesforce and what we think is there's a couple of roles that really stand to benefit from these tools today quite a bit, and that those are admins and developers and I would include BAs in that as well, sort of in that admin camp, just because of the efficiency gains that those roles and not only efficiency but productivity gains that those roles can experience. I mean, we've seen it in our own business, right, how we can do things more efficiently with these tools and make our consultants more efficient with these tools and more effective with these tools at really no added cost to our customers and no additional expense of these experts. And so those are the things that companies are going to be looking for with AI. Number one how can I do things that I couldn't do before. But really, more importantly, especially in the economic environment that we're in, how can I do things more efficiently? So if you're, for example, a developer who's like like I, like writing code and AI is going to take my job and I'm just going to put my feet down and I'm not going to do it because I love developing, that's the sort of developer that is going to get left behind.

Nick Hamm: 1:19:11

The developer that is going to be prepared for the future is a developer who says look, this is a tool that can make me way more effective, help me write way better code I can have the productivity of. I can have better productivity than anybody else on my team. Companies love those people. It's a business, right. They are there to do things as cheaply as possible, right, and make the most money that they can out of it. That's how business works.

Nick Hamm: 1:19:35

So if you look at it from that perspective, then the folks who can really harness these tools to drive more productivity and better quality work at a higher volume, which these things can do it very well those are the folks that, in the short term especially, are going to be poised for success. But then this is all just the foundation for what's going to happen over the next decade, right, and it's moving so fast that if you just kind of sit on the sidelines and wait to watch it happen, the advances are going to happen so fast that it's going to be harder to break in the longer you wait. So really, my advice there is don't wait. Just even if you're reading stuff or taking a class or playing with it, just expose yourself to it if you can and don't just kind of say, hey, like I'm scared of this, I'm not going to touch it.

Josh Matthews: 1:20:32

Yeah, don't be a Luddite in the Salesforce ecosystem, right, come on.

Vanessa Grant: 1:20:37

Yeah, and one of the things that we touched on last week and our presentation was also don't get overwhelmed by looking at everything in your org and going, okay, how do I make AI read it properly. We talked about kind of building an AI backlog where you have it by business process, so getting educated on AI and then so that way you understand the vocabulary, understand the capabilities, and then looking at your business processes and starting from that top business process, so what's the business process that could benefit the most based on your organization that would be able to benefit from AI? And then seeing where that business process touches your org so what are the fields, what are the automations, and working on those first. So you're not just starting from like, okay, let me look at every field in my org, from A to Z, and start updating the descriptions and deprecating things and cleaning up that data, like you'll barely get past A before you're frustrated, whereas if you prioritize a bit, it'll be a little less daunting.

Josh Matthews: 1:21:39

Yeah, I think prioritizing things is a really good idea, and you're right. I mean, it's like how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time, but you got to take those steps. That's the critical thing here. Man, this has been a fun show. We've covered a lot of stuff. I want to be sensitive to time and also find out do we have any folks who have some questions that Nick and Kristen can answer, or for our normal panel? Or Mike even, or me, or Vanessa? Vanessa, do you want to share with people how they can ask a question on the show real quick?

Vanessa Grant: 1:22:11

Sure, if anybody wants to send me a DM on Twitter, I'm RLVanessa Grant feel V-A-N-E-S-S-A-G-R-A-N-T. Feel free to send me any questions, if you have them, and either we'll cover them now or we'll cover them on the next show.

Josh Matthews: 1:22:28

All right, and I'm kind of curious, kristen, if there's something based on this report, I'm kind of looking or interested in you sharing, if you can, two bits of advice. One would be for a newcomer, right, sure, and then the other one would be for someone who's a little more established, say three or more years. What do you think they can expect and what might they do to adapt to the current state of affairs in the economy and the ecosystem?

Kristin Langlois: 1:22:59

Definitely so. For somebody that's new, I would say. It's not just all about certifications, right, it's where obviously certifications are crucial and it's really important to your training and learning. But I would spend more of your time. I would get one or two certifications. Then I would spend your time really looking at how can you get access to a potential org to be able to have real hands-on experience. I always talk to people about are there nonprofits you can volunteer at? And I know I'm sure lots of. I think people are starting to hear that over and over again and like, what else can I do? But that's crucial is getting that hands-on experience in alignment with training and how you do that. You do it through networking, right. You put yourself out there. You put yourself out there like crazy. It's not an easy thing to do, but once you kind of get into that routine of promoting yourself, you'll you'll become more comfortable with it and nobody's gonna promote yourself like For you, right, you have to do it. So that's, I Would say more than a green thing.

Kristin Langlois: 1:24:09

That's what I would. I would suggest and you know, just put your else. You know, reach out to people within the ecosystem and say, hey, I'm really impressed with how you've gotten to where you are in your career. Well, you might just talk to me about how you've done it. You start to get people that are advocates for you and that will turn into an opportunity. But you do have to be, I would say, just really tenacious and want it Can.

Vanessa Grant: 1:24:39

I just I was just gonna ask if the same advice would apply. I noticed on the lease the report that I saw. Apologies, I didn't have the 2023, but if you're still covering International, is it the same advice that you'd given more of the emerging markets?

Kristin Langlois: 1:24:56

I Think that advice can go across completely. There's probably it, there's probably more opportunity In emerging markets at this point. As you're seeing, there is more demand happening at a, I'd say, at like a higher pace For emerging markets. So I would say there's probably more opportunity for those in those emerging markets. But you should still do whatever it can do, whatever you can, to stand out. So I I think that just goes across all markets.

Josh Matthews: 1:25:34

Right on. And then what about advice for people who are more mid career or minimum three plus years?

Kristin Langlois: 1:25:41

Yeah, I mean, I think, as we've talked about on the podcast, we've seen, and you know, just talk about how you know Just how big Salesforce has gotten in all the different areas the clouds, the verticals, the industries. So I think really, specialization is going to be, you know, big area to focus and especially continue to keep yourself, you know, up to speed on AI. I think doing those two things will will definitely help you stand out when it comes to the Salesforce ecosystem.

Josh Matthews: 1:26:16

Thank you, kristen. Nick, what about you? Final parting words of advice for a couple different groups of our listeners.

Nick Hamm: 1:26:24

Yeah, I mean I would echo everything Kristen said, but I think your level of experience, find something that you love to do. Right, you could chase the most in-demand thing, but if you get plenty of work and you hate it, you're not gonna have fun. So find something. Explore your trailhead or Community groups or whatever it is fine. Find something that you're really passionate about that you can really sink your teeth into and go deep on, because that is what customers Are really looking for in a niche, not just somebody who knows lots of niches, somebody who's really deep on one or two right that are related.

Nick Hamm: 1:27:07

And again, I think the most important thing is you know you got to be passionate about it. Customers want to want to see your passion, they want to feel your passion and if they don't and Just because you're really smart doesn't mean you know you're gonna get the role or that you're gonna be selected they want to know that you know this is something that you are really into and that when you run into that roadblock that you're gonna hit eventually You're gonna figure it out, because you really want to figure it out, because you're passionate about figuring it out. So you know that's just my advice in general is there's especially a lot of people coming in this ecosystem, maybe because They've heard that there's a lot of opportunity, job changers, and I'd love that. But also make sure it's something that you are passionate about and you're not just doing it because you think you can make more money.

Josh Matthews: 1:27:54

Exactly.

Nick Hamm: 1:27:54

That's gonna show customers are gonna recognize that.

Josh Matthews: 1:27:57

Yeah, and so will your family, because you won't be super happy. In fact, we cover this in you know, to a fair amount of you know in a fair amount of detail on the last show which, again, it got launched today, so you can just go to type in Salesforce career or Salesforce career show on your favorite podcast platform. If you're listening live right now, if you're listening when this is actually released on the actual podcast, well then you already know where to find us. But if you just track back one week's, you know one week ago, from when this gets released next Tuesday or Wednesday, listen to that, because it is it's absolutely important and you got to try different things. Just try it out. You know, try it on for size. You know, I don't know how, how. You know how successful people have been. You know order. You know ordering a shirt or a suit online and then being surprised when it doesn't fit it helps. You go to the store, try it on. You know One of my sons, he's 17.

Josh Matthews: 1:28:56

He's a senior and he said you know, dad, he just said this week and he said you know how I thought I was kind of interested in maybe going into finance. I said, yeah, he's like well, forget it, man, I'm taking a class. I'm not into it at all. It's like, oh good, now you know, and sounds like you're a lot like me Because I'm not into finance either. So you know, figure out what, figure out what you want to do, and You'll hear it in the last episode.

Josh Matthews: 1:29:21

I recommend, if you're really brand new, take a personality test Now. You can't hurt, you know, and it can be very practical and helpful. You can take these different career tests. Just take a good one. If it costs a little bit of money, spend the. Spend the 20 bucks or the 50 bucks or whatever it costs, just to help kind of affirm what you might be challenged. Articulating, saying about yourself and you can use that as a guide to a to a degree doesn't mean cut off all other opportunities Just because you know you're now fitting in this little tiny bot personality box to. You know she shared that she'd found the technical person inside of her right. Remember that. Yeah, so, yeah, so like you know, you can emerge.

Josh Matthews: 1:30:04

You can grow. It doesn't have to be, it can be a little bit like you know a song on an album back when people used to listen to entire albums and I don't know if they're doing it so much these days is playlist. But back in the day you know, you'd get your album and it was a tape and you just like put it on, you listen to the whole damn thing. And I remember I remember being it at Tower Records in London I was 14 years old and I was like, oh my god, what is that song? Well, it was kiss me, kiss me, kiss me by the cure. Now, I'd never listened to the cure before, but that song it grabbed me. Oh, sorry, no, it wasn't kiss me, kiss me, kiss me. That was the album. It was just like heaven, which is a really great pop song, okay, and I loved it and I bought the CD and I listened, or bought the tape and I listened to the tape like Till till it was, you know, basically shreds and destroyed.

Josh Matthews: 1:30:53

That was not my favorite song on the album. There were others that I liked more, but I was kind of uncomfortable with some of that music because I grew up on like pop music and disco, basically right. And so listening to some of this heavier stuff that they produce on the album is a little bit new to me, sort of like me, listening to Jane's addiction for the first time is like well, what's? This is a little heavy for me, you know. But eventually you get comfortable with it.

Josh Matthews: 1:31:14

And then your favorite song on the album isn't the one that caught your ear, it's not the catchiest one, that's the one that's most likely to burn out Fastest, right, it's the least complex, it's the most pop, right, and so careers can be like that too. So try them on, for size, whether it's, and. And then make sure that you're giving that album more than one listen, because just because you don't like it the first time, chances are you don't like it because you don't really understand it yet, and understand it Shouldn't be your barrier. Yeah, and that's where having a great manager that'll, that'll let you.

Vanessa Grant: 1:31:47

Try out different things and and really kind of nudge you in different directions and be supportive. If you're not, amazing, day one is is a huge help. I mean, I I know we don't talk about Finding good managers, but man, are they they important in careers? Yeah, they're critical. That's another episode. How do I get to?

Josh Matthews: 1:32:09

that. Yeah, they're critical. That's another episode. How do I identify this person's going to be a you know, a good manager, Like that's these. I'm glad we're coming up with these good ideas. One thing I mean you.

Vanessa Grant: 1:32:21

But one thing I did want to ask before we close out the show is uh, where can we find this salesforce talent ecosystem report, the most current one, please?

Nick Hamm: 1:32:30

Yeah, for sure. If you go to 10kviewcom I believe it's on the home page you could also click on the thought leadership Uh link at the top to find this report, as well as Everything else that we referenced last year's report, if you want to read that one or any going back to 2018, as well as the operational excellence handbook.

Josh Matthews: 1:32:50

All right. Well, thank you, nick, thank you christin. This has been a great episode. I've really enjoyed learning more about the the salesforce talent ecosystem report. I enjoyed reading it, but I I enjoyed even more getting more insight, um from the two of you. Thank you for all of the clarification, all of the insight and all of the recommendations to our listeners as well. We will be back in two weeks with our live show. This show will air probably next wednesday morning, is my guess, and I'm hoping to put together For a just a small, maybe a little 20 minute little um podcast the following week, which will be those conversations that I had out at yerba buena park where I met venessa for the very first time, even though she'd been on the show.

Josh Matthews: 1:33:34

And we have a nice old video from df19 Up on the salesforce recruitercom so you can check out that old one. It's the first time we met. And then, if you go on to linkedin, you can see me and venessa hanging out at this michael force cigar shindig and some other photos of us at dream force last year. And if you're curious what we all look like when we were doing a purely live show, like live audience show, you can check out that picture. It's the most recent post I've got on twitter right now and you'll see me and our friends from circante Um right there.

Josh Matthews: 1:34:06

Okay, everybody, thank you for a wonderful episode again. Christin, nick, you guys are fantastic. I love all of your contributions to the ecosystem and also to our programs the second time we've had you guys on, so thank you so much for spending your valuable time with us and helping to enhance the lives of people who are trying to Boost their careers here in the ecosystem. Everybody have a wonderful week and if you need to get in touch with Christian or nick or you want to download the report, remember it's 10k view one zero k wcom. All right, everybody, have a great week and we'll talk to you soon. Bye for now.