Salesforce Admin Interview Questions and Answers

In this blog, we will discuss the most frequently asked Salesforce admin interview questions and answers to help you prepare for your next interview.

Question 1. Why do we use Profile and Roles in Salesforce?

Answer – Profiles define default settings for users. When you create users, you assign a profile to each one. With profiles, we can control actions of Create, Read, Edit and Delete. Roles help the user to enable record-level access. Whenever a user is created Profiles are required to assign, but roles are not compulsory.

Question 2. Changing the data type of which field type is not possible?

Answer – Changing the data type of the following field types is not possible:

• Formula fields
• Encrypted fields
• The data type of any field that is mapped for lead conversion
• Fields referenced in Flows, Apex etc.

Question 3. What are setup and non-setup objects in Salesforce?

Answer – Setup objects are the sObjects that influence user access to records within the Salesforce org. Some examples of these Setup Objects include ObjectPermissions, PermissionSet, PermissionSetAssignment, QueueSObject, Territory, and various others.

Non-Setup Objects refer to standard objects such as accounts, contacts, or any custom object. When attempting to execute DML operations on both setup and non-setup objects within a single transaction, it leads to encountering the Mixed DML operation error.

Question 4. What are the different ways of sharing records with other users?

Answer – The following are the different ways of sharing a record in Salesforce:

1. Manual Sharing
2. Owner-based Sharing
3. Criteria-based Sharing
4. Apex Sharing

Question 5. What are the different types of relationships in Salesforce?

Answer – There are 6 types of relationships in Salesforce:

1. Lookup Relationships
2. Master-Detail Relationships
3. Many-to-Many Relationships
4. Self Relationship
5. External Relationships
6. Hierarchical Relationships

Question 6. What are the different types of flows in Salesforce?

Answer – The following are the different types of flows:

1. Screen Flow
2. Record-Triggered Flow
3. Schedule-Triggered Flow
4. Autolaunched Flow
5. Data Cloud Record Triggered Flow

Question 7. What is the knowledge user checkbox on the user record in Salesforce?

Answer – To grant a user access to knowledge, you need to enable the ‘Knowledge User’ checkbox on their user record.

Question 8. Will records assigned to a specific record type be visible to users who do not have access to that record type in Salesforce?

Answer – Yes, the records will be visible to the other user but he/she will not be able to edit those records.

Question 9. How can a Salesforce Admin configure a custom mobile number field so the user always enters the value in the following format 123-456-789?

Answer – The Regex() function in validation rules can be used to validate if the mobile number entered by the user is in the correct format or not.

Question 10. What is a workbench?

Answer – Salesforce Workbench offers a versatile, web-based platform ideal for efficient data management tasks. It provides Salesforce admins and developers with a streamlined interface to interact with Salesforce data effectively.

Here are six valuable functions you can perform using Salesforce Workbench:

1. Simplified Password Reset

2. SOQL Queries

3. Bulk Record Updates

4. Seamless Record Creation and Deletion

With these capabilities, Salesforce Workbench empowers users to streamline their data management workflows and maximize efficiency within the Salesforce ecosystem.”

Question 11. State a few Salesforce Chrome extensions which you have used in your daily tasks.

Answer – Salesforce Inspector, Salesforce Mass Editor, Crazy Compare Salesforce Extension are the few to state.

Read more – 12+ Salesforce Chrome Extensions to boost your productivity in 2024

Question 12. What are the variables in Salesforce Flow?

Answer – Variables in flow are like a placeholder which you can use to store the values and can modify and use them.

Question 13. What is a custom label in Salesforce?

Answer – Custom labels offer a convenient solution for creating and organizing custom text values within your Salesforce org. They serve as a flexible tool for storing textual content used in various contexts such as labels, error messages, and help text, allowing for easy management and customization.

They are also useful for storing text values that need to be translated into different languages.

Question 14. Can permission sets be used to restrict access to an object or field?

Answer – No, permission sets can only be used to give additional access to the user.

Question 15. A user is not able to create an entitlement process what steps will you take as a Salesforce admin take?

Answer – Navigate to setup and check if the “Enable Entitlement Management” checkbox is checked or not.

Question 16. What is the maximum number of Custom Labels that can be created in a Salesforce org?

Answer – You can create up to 5,000 custom labels, and each label can have up to 1,000 characters.

Question 17. Can we delete custom labels installed as part of a managed package?

Answer – No, You cannot delete custom labels installed as part of a managed package or those referenced by Apex or a Visualforce page. You can only override the existing translations.

Question 18. What is an Account team in Salesforce?

Answer – The Account Team functions as a collaborative unit, pooling the efforts of multiple users to manage and enhance a shared account. It provides a structured framework for accommodating multiple users who wish to contribute to the same account effectively.

Question 19. State some updates from the latest Salesforce release (Summer’24)

Answer – The following are some of the highlights from the Summer’24 release:

• The new Automation Lightning App serves as a central hub for all automation-related activities. Users can view flows, errors, and community-based links directly within the main app.
• Einstein for Flow is a generative AI tool that creates workflows from text prompts, allowing users to describe their automation in natural language to generate a draft flow. This feature is currently in beta.
• We can now add blank spaces to aligned fields on Dynamic form pages.
• You can now manage tracked objects and fields from the Field History Tracking page in Setup.

Question 20. What are permission set groups in Salesforce?

Answer – Permission Set Groups streamline the management of permissions by consolidating multiple Permission Sets into combined units that can be assigned to users. By assigning a Permission Set Group to a user, they gain access to the collective permissions from all the Permission Sets within the group.

Want to Learn Salesforce Flows? Checkout our Salesforce Flow Course

Question 21. What is the significance of the “Failed Login Attempts” field on the user record?

Answer – You can keep track of how many times someone tries and fails to log in to their account. If they fail too many times, based on the rules you set up for passwords, their account gets locked. If needed, you can unlock their account from the user details page.

Question 22. How can you assign different page layouts to users with the same profile in Salesforce?

Answer – To provide two different page layouts to users sharing the same profile in Salesforce, you can follow these steps:

1. Start by creating two distinct Record Types.

2. Next, design and configure the page layouts according to the needs of each user profile. You can customize the fields, sections, and related lists displayed on each layout to tailor the user experience.

3. Associate each page layout with its corresponding Record Type.

4. Finally, assign the appropriate Record Types to the user profile. Navigate to Setup -> Profiles -> Record type settings

Question 23. The edit button is not visible to the system admin on the profiles list view in Salesforce. How will you approach this issue?

Answer – First check that the Salesforce admin profile has set the “Manage Profiles and Permission Sets” checkbox to true. It can be accessed under the Administrative Permissions section on the Profile detailed page.

Now if the Enhanced Profile User Interface toggle is enabled under User Management Settings then the edit button will not be visible to the user on profiles. Under User Management Settings if the Enhanced Profile List Views toggle button is disabled then the user will not be able to see an option to clone a profile.

Question 24. What are knowledge articles in Salesforce?

Answer – Salesforce Knowledge Articles is a built-in feature that serves as your central hub for creating, storing, and managing informative articles.

Customers can easily find solutions to common issues and product inquiries through a searchable knowledge base.

Question 25. What are restriction rules in Salesforce?

Answer – Restriction rules enhance security by allowing certain users access only to specified records, preventing them from viewing sensitive or non-essential data.

Question 26. What are custom settings in Salesforce?

Answer – Custom settings are used to create data sets that can be linked to a profile, or individual user. You can control their visibility by designating them as public or protected. Custom settings data can be utilized in formula fields, validation rules, flows, Apex, and the SOAP API.

Question 27. What are the different types of custom settings in Salesforce?

Answer – Types of custom settings are:

• List custom settings
• Hierarchy custom settings

Question 28. What is the maximum number of fields per custom settings can be created within Salesforce?

Answer – We can have up to 300 fields per custom setting.

Question 29. What are the different ways to make a field required while creating a record?

Answer – The following are the different ways of making a field required:

• We can make a field required while creating that field.
• Using validation rules we can throw an error if the field is blank.
• On the page layout, we can set the field as required.
• Using apex we can throw an error if the field is blank

Question 30. What is territory management in Salesforce?

Answer – Salesforce Territory Management enables businesses to organize and manage their sales teams based on criteria such as industry or geographic location. This helps companies allocate sales resources, assign opportunities, and efficiently track performance.

Question 31. What does the term “trusted” IP range refer to in Salesforce?

Answer – Trusted IP Ranges establish a range of IP addresses from which users can log in without encountering a login verification challenge, like a code sent to their registered contact, to confirm their identity.

Question 32. When Field Audit Trail is enabled, field history data is retained for up to how many months in Salesforce sandboxes?

Answer – One month

Read more about the Field Audit Trail here

Question 33. Can standard Salesforce objects be on the detail side of the master-detail relationship in Salesforce?

Answer – In Salesforce, standard objects like Accounts or Contacts can’t be the detailed part of a master-detail relationship. They can only be the master side because Salesforce has already defined functionalities and those aren’t suitable for the detailed side’s needs.

Question 34. Can we encrypt a formula field in Salesforce?

Answer – No, we cannot encrypt a formula field value.

Question 35. When a lead object record is converted which object records can be created?

Answer – Account, Contact and Opportunity

Question 36. What is the significance of the Sales console app?

Answer – The Lightning Sales Console is a standard Salesforce Lightning app that provides all your sales tools in one place, helping you prospect leads, close deals, and manage relationships efficiently.

Question 37. What is the difference between public groups and queues?

Answer – A Public group is a set of users in Salesforce. This group can include individual users, other groups or users who share a specific role or territory. It can even include users in a particular role or territory along with all the users below that role or territory in the hierarchy.

Queues are helpful for your teams to handle leads, cases, service contracts and custom objects. When records are added to a queue, either manually or through automatic assignment rules for cases or leads, they stay there until a user takes ownership of them.

Any member of the queue or users above them in the role hierarchy can take control of records in the queue. Queues are a useful tool for directing lead, case and custom object records to a group for efficient management and distribution.

Question 38. Can the Import Wizard in Salesforce help users import all the opportunity records they received from a marketing campaign into their Salesforce org?

Answer – The Data Import Wizard can only handle a few standard objects and unfortunately doesn’t allow the import of opportunity records.

Question 39. As a Salesforce admin, how would you improve the case assignment process by considering agent skill sets and available capacity?

Answer – Omni-channel in Salesforce is a feature that routes cases to the appropriate customer service agent based on priority and relevant skills of the service agent.

Question 40. Can we delete a user in Salesforce?

Answer – No, we can deactivate a user and make the Salesforce license available for assigning to a new user.

Question 41. What is WhoId and WhatId?

Answer – “WhatId” is the API name for the “Related To” field on activity-related objects, while “WhoId” is the API name for the “Name” field, which looks up to contact and lead objects.

Question 42. What might be causing the “Login As” option to be invisible for a Salesforce administrator attempting to login as another user to troubleshoot an issue encountered by a user with a Standard license?

Answer – From setup navigate to login policies and check “Administrators Can Log in as Any User” checkbox is enabled or not.

Question 43. What are the best practices to remember while working on Salesforce Flows?

Answer – The following are the Salesforce flow best practices:

• Utilizing entry criteria ensures that the Flow is solely executed when the specified conditions are met decreasing the number of Flow interviews.
• Always add a description to your Flow elements as it provides clear understanding to the team members involved in the project.
• Try to create only one record-triggered Flow per object.
• To avoid encountering SOQL limit exception errors, it is advised to avoid performing DML operations within a loop.
• Avoid hard coding record Ids.
• Subflow are reusable Flows that can be called from other Flows, allowing you to break down complex processes into smaller, more manageable steps.

Question 44. Where can the administrator locate information on customizations made within the Salesforce org to help a user keep track of changes effectively?

Answer – Setup Audit Trail. You can download your organization’s setup audit trail for the last six months.

Question 45. How can you convert a 15-digit Salesforce ID into an 18-digit ID using a function?

Answer – using the CASESAFEID() function

Question 46. We are using the Salesforce Professional Edition, can a user rename the page layouts?

Answer – If you’re utilizing Salesforce Professional Edition, page layout renaming is unavailable.

Learn more about page layout limitations here

Question 47. How many sharing rules can we create per object in Salesforce?

Answer – There are two kinds of sharing rules and limits for each object:

There’s a standard limit for all types of sharing rules, including those based on criteria. It starts at 300 but can go up to 500 through a support case.

The default limit for the criteria-based Sharing rule is 50 and can be increased to a maximum of 200 through a Support case.

Question 48. For Many to Many Relationships, we need to create a Junction Object. The Junction Object has a Master-detail relationship with both the Objects. For Master-detail relationship, the OWD setting is “Controlled by Parent”. If the two objects have different OWD then what will be the OWD setting for Junction Object?

Answer – The first master-detail relationship you create on your junction object becomes the primary relationship and its OWD settings are enforced on the junction object.

The second master-detail relationship you create on your junction object becomes the secondary relationship. If you delete the primary master-detail relationship or convert it to a lookup relationship, the secondary master object becomes primary.

Question 49. What are static resources in Salesforce?

Answer – Static resources enable you to upload various types of content, like archives (.zip and .jar files), images, stylesheets and JavaScript that you can then refer to in a Visualforce page.

In Visualforce, you can utilize the $Resource global variable to reference static resources directly or use it as a parameter for functions like URLFOR().

Question 50.  What is Data Skew in Salesforce? How to avoid it?

Answer – Data Skew refers to an imbalance in the distribution of data within a large dataset. In Salesforce, this occurs when a single parent object record is associated with more than 10,000 child object records or when a single Salesforce user owns over 10,000 records of any object.

There are three types of data skew in Salesforce:

1. Account Skew

2. Ownership Skew

3. Lookup Skew

Question 51. What is the difference between IsNull Vs IsBlank methods in validation rules in Salesforce?

Answer – ISBLANK() provides the same functionality as ISNULL() but extends support to text fields. Unlike text fields, which are never null, ISNULL() with a text field always returns false. Additionally, when referenced in ISNULL() functions, empty date and date/time fields always return true.

If ISBLANK() is used with a numeric field, the function returns TRUE only if the field has no value and is not set to treat blank fields as zeroes.

Question 52. What are Duplicate rules in Salesforce?

Answer – A duplicate rule is a set of instructions that decides what to do when someone looks at a record that seems to have duplicates or when they’re trying to create a record that might be a duplicate. Salesforce comes with standard rules for spotting duplicates in business and person accounts, contacts, and leads.

For each type of record, you can have up to five active duplicate rules.

Question 53. A Salesforce admin wants to delete 10,000 records but does not want anyone else to recover them. What can I do?

Answer – Hard delete

Question 54. How to convert a 15-digit record ID to an 18-digit record and vice versa?

Answer – CASESAFEID()

Question 55. How many blocks can we create in the Joined report?

Answer – Upto five report blocks can be created

Question 56. How can you grant access to a private report for other users in Salesforce?

Answer – We need to share the folder in which the report is present

Question 57. Some Users can edit fields set as ‘Read-Only’ in field-level security and page layout. How do we identify this issue?

Answer – This behaviour is seen if the Profile associated with the User has ‘Edit Read Only Fields’ selected. Remove the ‘Edit Read-Only Fields’ permission via profile or permission set.

It is important to note that not all read only fields are editable. System fields like ‘modified date’ and ‘formula field’ are still not editable, even with this permission.

Question 58. What are the parameters to consider while converting a Master-detail relationship to a lookup relationship?

Answer – To change a master-detail relationship to a lookup relationship, ensure that the master object has no roll-up summary fields. If roll-up summary fields exist, they must be deleted before making the conversion.

Question 59. Can we delete a record using Flow?

Answer – Yes, using the delete record element in Salesforce Flow we can delete the records.

Question 60. What happens when you delete a field in Salesforce?

Answer – After you’ve deleted this field, it appears in the deleted components list for 15 days. During that time, you can either undelete it to restore the field and all data stored in it, or delete the field permanently.

Conclusion

Preparing for a Salesforce admin interview requires a solid understanding of Salesforce fundamentals, as well as hands-on experience with Salesforce configuration and automation tasks. By familiarizing yourself with common interview questions you can confidently showcase your skills and ace your next interview.

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