Salesforce Hiring Edge

The Lightning-Fast Hire: How Speed, Clarity, and Flexibility Win the Salesforce Talent War

• Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire • Season 3 • Episode 69

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n this episode of Salesforce Hiring Edge, Josh Matthews and Josh LeQuire break down two real-world Salesforce hiring stories—one a textbook win, the other a slow-motion fail. You’ll learn exactly what separates high-velocity teams who land top talent from the ones who lose momentum and miss out.

Josh unpacks a step-by-step playbook on how one fast-moving company hired a Salesforce pro in under 48 hours—from job order to offer. No red tape, no games, just clear priorities, time-blocked interviews, and decisive leadership.

💡 Learn why:

  • Speed is the #1 hiring advantage in 2025
  • Onsite requirements kill pipelines
  • Expert recruiters are your best asset
  • Poor candidate experience will cost you big

Perfect for Salesforce hiring managers, delivery leaders, and anyone tired of watching top talent slip through their fingers.

🔗 Subscribe, review, and share this with someone who needs to hear it.

Keywords: Salesforce hiring, remote hiring strategy, talent acquisition 2025, Salesforce recruiter, fast hiring process, staffing strategy, candidate experience, HR tech, Twilio hiring automation, AI recruiting tools

Josh Matthews:

What did this company do right? Well, first of all, they moved fast. He knew that he needed someone really, really quickly. So he had already carved out time for conversations and interviews the very next day, Because we all know when we're trying to put out fires constantly and then you're not even carving out time to meet the people who are going to put the fires out for you. Well, good luck with that. It doesn't really work. Welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge, the show for leaders who want to hire smarter and scale faster with Salesforce.

Josh LeQuire:

Whether you're building a team or bringing in a consulting partner.

Josh Matthews:

We're breaking down what actually works in the real world.

Josh Matthews:

All right, let's get into it. All right, guys. A tale of two hires, how one company nailed their Salesforce hire and another missed the mark. What happened? Oh my God, what happened? Okay, I'm going to tell you a little tidbit about AI. I get about three to 400 emails a day. It can be a little bit much.

Josh Matthews:

So I knew one thing about me that I was going to miss some really important emails and messages that come from my website. When a client logs into the salesforcerecruitercom and says yes, josh, I need help, please help me. Sometimes I'm just a little late, maybe it's an hour, maybe it's 24 hours, but everyone who's in sales knows that whoever's first to that to respond to that client is going to win. So what did I do? I jumped on lindyai this is not a paid ad, by the way, but I jumped on lindyai. And then I jumped on Twilio. I set myself up with a nice little SMS phone number. By the way, it was a total pain in the ass to set this thing up, but I did it. I pushed through. It was really late at night, kind of like right now you can see the cleaners are in, okay, but kind of like right now and I just pushed through until I got it set up. I basically set it up so that whenever this email, an email comes in with this subject line, I want to get a text message and a Slack notification.

Josh Matthews:

So the next day I'm driving here to my office in Palm Beach Gardens I live in Florida and ding my Slack, goes off Boom email notification. It's got all their contact information. As I'm driving I go ahead and jump on hands-free, dial the number and get on the horn with this hiring manager. Now, this guy is neat, super, super neat guy. I was texting with him today. Actually Super neat guy, vibrant, energetic, like knows what he wants. A total doer. Okay, big time dude Done crazy cool stuff. I get on the horn with him. We schedule a meeting for a little bit later on that day. We talk, not long, maybe half an hour, 40 minutes. Boom, by one o'clock. Had a signed agreement by that evening.

Josh Matthews:

I had set him up with three interviews for three candidates. These were remote roles but all three candidates were in Florida. So if they wanted to drive over to the Orlando area where he's based and have some meetings and have some conversations, they could totally do it. He met all three candidates and, by the way, guess what All three candidates could do the job? Super dope, okay. But he picked his favorite, and I knew he would, because I've got a track record here at Salesforce staffing wherein and I've looked at this and I review it every year 50% of the candidates that are hired from us are the very first person that we send across. Well, I'll talk about that another day, but it's a pretty cool stat. So he said you know what? This is the guy? All right, the following Monday, that individual met with HR and met with head of marketing, and then he had an offer just a handful of days later and he started today. Started today, okay.

Josh Matthews:

So what did this company do, right? Well, first of all, they moved fast. There was no red tape. He had the authority to sign and he signed the agreement move forward. He knew that he needed someone really, really quickly, so he had already carved out time for conversations and interviews the very next day. He time blocked. That's number two. Okay, what else did he do?

Josh Matthews:

He followed up to make sure that, while he was going away for like three or four days, that HR and marketing were going to connect with this candidate, this terrific candidate. He was pretty smitten and then a verbal offer came very quickly. It was the right amount. No one reneged, nobody changed. The candidate didn't change their number, the client didn't change their number. It was a very fair number and the candidate started 14 days later after the offer Boom done, pretty stoked.

Josh Matthews:

So what they did right was well, and this is a little bit braggadocio and I hate to do this. I really do kind of hate to do this, but this is actually kind of an important step. He brought in a specialized Salesforce recruiter. I am not the only Salesforce recruiter in the world, by the way. There are lots of people out there. I happen to think I'm the best, but I've met some really wonderful recruiters out there. I'm definitely not going to knock them. They're great people out there. The there are great people out there, okay.

Josh Matthews:

The other thing is he had the decision-making authority right and the budget, so he was ready to go, not like, oh, I got to get this approved, oh, I got to go talk to Mr Dr no up in Dr no, the CFO, right. He cleared his calendar for three hours to have the conversations necessary to make his life dreamy and light right, because we all know, when we're trying to put out fires constantly and then you're not even carving out time to meet the people who are going to put the fires out for you, well, good luck with that. It doesn't really work. And then he made a fast and a very strong offer with no red tape. So the result was zero confusion, a clear and confident hiring process, lots of candidate excitement and commitment, right, and a rock star hire who's adding tons of value.

Josh Matthews:

I mean, this guy. This guy is an admin, actually has a doctoral degree as an admin, but it's really more of a junior architect. But his company that he was working for didn't see the light in him. But my client did and he made a move and he made a good offer. All right, that's a perfect, perfect tale, right? But this is a tale of two job orders. Now I'm going to tell you what actually went wrong with the other one and I I can clearly remember the conversation that I had with the candidate and I'm going to tell you a secret the candidate that accepted the offer that started work today, actually interviewed at this other company. This other client brand new client of mine never worked with him before referred by a friend actually interviewed with them. He did not get an offer from this company, even though they wanted on-site and he was 10 minutes away. Again, good luck with that.

Josh Matthews:

That's really hard to do when you're looking to bring people on-site and I'm talking like on-site, on-site five days a week Doesn't matter. If you've got free beer and a pool table and mini pot pot in the main lobby, doesn't matter, right? The pool of candidates goes from like this freaking big and it just shrinks right down to next to nothing. It's very, very hard to fill those roles, okay, and you wind up generally paying a little bit more and on average, they perform approximately three weeks less of work every single year than a remote employee. Bet you didn't know that, but that's fact. Yeah, you can look it up, jump on perplexity and ask it Okay, so what went wrong?

Josh Matthews:

Well, we had a solid job order, right, took a little bit of time to get things scheduled. The interview was a 30 minute interview and the feedback that I got from my candidate was basically this I couldn't read the guy. I don't know if he was ever really looking at me. He never smiled once, right? No rapport was developed. Well, guess what, especially if you're going to go into the office. Don't you want to actually enjoy working with the person, feel some kind of connection, right? So then it took days to get feedback from my client, even though I'd already relayed some information. Took three days to get them on the phone Finally got it. So we had some momentum kill, right, like real momentum kill.

Josh Matthews:

And, guys, when you're trying to hire someone, this is like catching a wave when you're out surfing. I used to surf back in the day. It was a lot of fun. You missed the wave. You missed the wave. It's just going to slide right out under you and now you got noodle arms because you're exhausted from paddling so hard. What you want to do is catch the wave, the energy, and let the energy of the wave cascade you down so you can have a nice cruisy ride. So you gotta catch that wave early when you're hiring. This is absolutely critical.

Josh Matthews:

Okay, there were very rigid, outdated hiring requirements Full-time onsite well, that's kind of a deal breaker in 2025, not 100% of the time, but for the most part, I gave a lot of recommendations, that expert guidance. It was dismissed. They were already working with a number of IT generalist recruiters, apparently. Just for full disclosure, my understanding is the role. Now, a month later, has been filled. I don't know how good the person is. Fingers crossed. I wish him the best. I hope it goes great.

Josh Matthews:

The competition, it was basically the same, the job requirements basically the same Be someone's right-hand person and get to work on cool projects and manage a relatively small team of professionals within a much larger, high-, multi, multi, multimillion dollar organization. So how did this individual miss the mark? Well, rapport, rapport, rapport. No eye contact, none of these smiles. I don't care what your teeth look like, you still got to smile, right, you got to be curious. What do you do for fun? What do you like to do? And then there was a little bit of cognitive God I can't a little bit of cognitive dissonance around some of the responses, because I know exactly what my candidate had said to this person, because he had told me this is what he was going to say to the client. And the client said oh well, he said this and that means that and that means this.

Josh Matthews:

There's this thing that people do where they're constantly looking for subtext. You know what I that people do where they're constantly looking for subtext. You know what I mean by that. They're trying to read between the lines. But guess what? Sometimes there's nothing in between the lines. Sometimes the lines are just the lines right, we talked about.

Josh Matthews:

I went to art school. There was so much BS going on when people would critique my work. Oh, I think it means this. I think it means that no, dude, it's just a cool picture. Okay, move on. Sometimes there is no subtext. You want subtext. You want people to really want to read a candidate.

Josh Matthews:

Well then, incorporate someone who's really good at reading people. And, by the way, if you're a CIO or a CTO, you might be awesome and you might be pretty good at reading people, but my guess is that you're not highly trained in it. Right, go with someone who, like you, might be able to sell your house, but you'll probably sell it faster and possibly for more money if you use a really good realtor. Well, you might be okay with numbers Doesn't mean you're not going to hire an accountant to process your tax returns for your business. You might not want to do that, right? So you've got to put the trust in the people that are actually skilled at this stuff, and it might be your Aunt, jenny, it might be your wife or your husband, it might be that your cousin is an FBI profiler. Give it to them, have them jump on a call for half an hour or an hour with these folks. But just assume, maybe I'm really really really good at things and maybe I'm pretty darn good at people, but maybe I'm not an expert at reading all of the signs, the behavioral clues, the micro facial expression analysis. Maybe I haven't been trained in lie detection and things like that.

Josh Matthews:

Like top recruiters in any field are Like you've got to pay attention to that stuff and when you do, when you spend a little man, you de-risk things. And when I say de-risk, it's not just about not getting the right hire, it's not just about, like, protecting yourself from a bad hire. It's not missing out on a great hire that you said no to foolishly, all right. So key takeaways on this great hire, fast action, no hire, delays great hire. Strategic clarity, no hire or delayed hire. Process confusion, flexibility on the good side, rigidity on the bad side. Trusted expert input on the one side, ignored expert input on the other side. Market aligned compensation, low ball offer or zero traction on another.

Josh Matthews:

Remote friendly, remote friendly, onsite, limited flexibility. Okay, the reality is is that only 8% of remote workers are willing to return full time to the office. Did you know that? And that 90 plus, a 90% plus of all Salesforce professionals are actually currently in fully remote roles? So what does that mean? Well, if you do the math and I'm okay at math, I'm not great, I'm not a whiz, right, but if you do the math and I'm okay at math I'm not great, I'm not a whiz, right but if you do the math, I'll just say this it sucks. Okay, it really really sucks. It's 2% of the population is actually interested in an on-site role and, by the way, they're only interested in it because they're not working. If they are working, they're pretty much not interested at all. Right, and God forbid. You hire someone on site and the market picks up and the job orders start to flow like we used to see two years ago 45,000 jobs being posted every single month on LinkedIn. Man, you're in for a world of hurt. They talk about the great resignation, which was really the great musical chairs experience. That's what we're talking about here, guys. So bottom line speed, clarity, market awareness and flexibility wins. Rigid processes, outdated expectations, poor candidate experience You're going to lose. That's what hiring is going to be like in 2025. Everybody welcome to Salesforce Hiring Edge.

Josh Matthews:

If you've been following us for the last few years, you're probably aware that the Salesforce Career Show has now morphed. There's a lot of information out there, gosh, don't you think there's like tons of information out there like how to get involved in the ecosystem? There's a lot of information out there about how to grow your team and improve your team, but there's very little information in the marketplace that has a clear understanding of how can someone in this specific ecosystem, this field, with this software, these types of employees that they're hiring, these types of engagements. There are some unique attributes. Now, I happen to believe that there are basic hiring and team building principles that can you know. They cover everything. Right. If everybody followed all of those core principles like everyone would be fine, no big deal.

Josh Matthews:

But even so, it can really help to have information that's truly catered to your situation. Maybe you're a CIO, maybe you're a CTO, maybe you're a CIO, maybe you're a CTO, maybe you're a VP of delivery, maybe you're an HR recruiter, a talent acquisition person working inside a mid to large sized Salesforce consulting practice, and the challenges that you face are going to be a little bit different than others. They're going to be a little bit unique to your specific situation. So that's why we decided to change the Salesforce career show we have over. I think it's like 100 hours, 2000 pages of transcripts. They're served, they're going to be okay. They've got access to the information that they need. So we're not really worried about them.

Josh Matthews:

But we are a little bit worried about you because I have, in my seat as the Salesforce recruiter running the salesforcerecruitercom, I have seen time and time and time again the same kinds of mistakes being made People going with gut feel, people not taking enough time in their interview process, people not expediting their interview process fast enough, asking trick questions that have absolutely zero value to the quality of the hire. So we created this show specifically for you. It's not just me. I'm also with my friend, josh LaQuire. Josh has been in the industry since 2011. He's been helping to build teams and execute projects and create applications since 2003. He's a personal friend. He's also been a client of mine when he was running a PDO. So, josh, go ahead and tell us a little bit about you real quick what do you do, and a little bit more about your background and why you're actually even on the show.

Josh LeQuire:

Yeah, no. Thank you, josh. I think you invited me on the career show a few months ago and really enjoyed the topics of conversation around how to help folks get hired, what to look for in terms of scaling up and how to develop talent and lead teams. I think those are great topics and you brought some great people on the show. So it's been an honor to speak with you and certainly an honor to be here again today.

Josh LeQuire:

I run SeaCurrents. We're a systems implementation partner. That's the letter C and then the word currentscom. It is a play on words because I live right next to the ocean in Charleston, south Carolina, and I love getting out on the water, so it is near and dear to my heart.

Josh LeQuire:

But, as Josh mentioned, since 2003, I've probably had my hands in and have led teams and been a part of teams for building nearly probably about a thousand apps no kidding between implementations, appexchange work and various teams that have covered that.

Josh LeQuire:

So I've had my hands in a lot of different projects and I think what I've learned over many, many years is that the technology is a nice thing and certainly can do a lot, but you have to really understand the business, you have to understand people, dynamics. You have to understand service dynamics for any of your work to be successful in this business. 90% of it, perhaps even more than that, is just understanding who you're working with, what you're trying to do and how to get them to use the solutions that you're building. It's remarkably more focused on the human and less focused on technology than a lot of people think, so I spend eight nine hours of my day getting deep in the technical side, but looking forward to talking more about the business side with you in terms of how to build effective teams and get stuff done in this world.

Josh Matthews:

That's right, and it's the business side, but more importantly, it's the human side, and that's what we're here to talk about. So we would love it if you would not miss a single episode. We're going to be producing 30-minute segments once a week. They're going to be released Wednesday mornings for the podcast and Wednesday afternoons for the video. You can find the videos at Josh Forrest one word on YouTube and you can find the podcast on your favorite platform Spotify, apple, you name it. It does help. If you like the episodes and if you don't want to miss any of them, I recommend that you subscribe and, if you like them, make sure that you share it with your friends. So stay tuned.

Josh Matthews:

We have a number of wonderful guests coming on, including in our next episode. We're going to have David Kestenberg. David's I got to tell you very quickly has become one of my favorite people. He has scaled teams. He's got so much depth in the ecosystem and he brings about a very structured way to go about and help you learn how to scale your teams in the Salesforce ecosystem. We'll be back next week.

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Josh Matthews

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Vanessa Grant

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