25 MIN READ

How to hire freelance Salesforce developers in 2024

Updated on October 30, 2024
Platforms to find talented Salesforce developers
Toptal

What we liked the most:

  • 98% Hiring Success
  • Fast Matching within 48 hours
  • Risk-Free Trial for up to 5 Days
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Upwork

What we liked the most:

  • Secure payments
  • Fixed-price protection
  • Expert-Vetted program
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Guru

What we liked the most:

  • Post jobs for free
  • Worldwide platform
  • Developers bid on your jobs
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Kelly Wilson
Written by Kelly Wilson

Strategist and entrepreneur, with experience in hiring developers across various industries. Kelly has established herself as a trusted expert in identifying and recruiting top tech talent. She shares advanced tips on how to identify the right talent, create hiring strategies, develop your tech teams and much more.

Expertise: IT Recruiting, Tech, Marketing

Unlock the power of Salesforce for your business with our comprehensive hiring guide. As businesses increasingly rely on Salesforce to streamline operations and drive growth, finding the right Salesforce consultants and developers can be a daunting task. Our guide provides expert insights, practical tips, and a step-by-step approach to help you navigate the hiring process successfully. Discover top talent platforms, learn how to evaluate candidates, and build a high-performing Salesforce team that will propel your business forward.

Find the best site to hire the right Salesforce developers in under 60 seconds.

We'll ask 9 quick questions to better understand your needs and then provide you with personalized recommendations. No sign-up required.


1. What type of hire are you making?
Full-time employee answer
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One developer
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Here are the top 5 sites to hire freelance Salesforce developers:

Based on our research among online hiring platforms


1. Toptal

Toptal is full of some of the greatest developers to hit the tech industry, as only the top 3 percent make it through their vetting process. Your Salesforce app needs Salesforce professionals, and this is the place to find them. Its services can help find freelancers with years of experience in Salesforce. Many are certified Salesforce developers and recognized as top specialists.

Besides hosting some of the top Salesforce experts on the web, Toptal makes the hiring process efficient and easy. There's no recruiting fee, you get a trial period with your developer, and it's relatively cheap for what it offers. If all that sounds perfect, all you have to do is apply to Toptal as a client, and you'll be on your way.

Key points:

  • Enjoy a risk-free trial for up to 5 days.
  • Completed over 60,000 projects for 25K+ satisfied clients.
  • Trustpilot rating of 4.8 out of 5.

2. Upwork

Upwork is possibly one of the most popular job boards to find Salesforce freelancers of almost all skill levels. You even have access to an automated shortlist of the best candidates when you post your job. Anyone can join Upwork and apply to your jobs, and you screen and test applicants yourself.

If you need to hire Salesforce developers that are experienced, try Upwork Pro or Enterprise. While these come with more features and more of a quality guarantee. However, unlike Upwork, they're not free. We suggest its standard service for companies looking for Salesforce freelancers for individuals rather than teams.

Key points:

  • The top 1% of Upwork’s developers have Expert-Vetted badges.
  • To locate developers whose portfolios include similar projects, use free Talent Specialists.
  • Fees and pricing vary, with many features available without a subscription.

3. Guru

Companies of all sizes from around the world come to advertise their services on Guru. With this platform’s flexible payment system and extremely simplified hiring process, it's no wonder why so many people prefer this site when looking for developers.

Whether you need a Salesforce developer to help you set up your CRM and learn the ropes or help you develop applications and optimize your platform, Guru can help find you a freelancer for the job. A lot of agencies specializing as Salesforce consultants are also available on Guru.

Key points:

  • Guru doesn’t screen or vet developers on its platform.
  • Post jobs free and only pay an invoice handling fee.
  • Use various site tools to find developers suitable for your project.

4. Qubit Labs

Ukraine-based Qubit Labs can help you build a small team of Salesforce developers for your next project. Hand-pick your remote development team and work with them directly as they help you develop your Salesforce application.

If you're looking for CRM solutions, we recommend Qubit for long-term engagements. Why? You can even create an offshore development center, complete with project managers, consultants, platform developers, Salesforce experts, and designers. This company wants to help you design a dream team that will get the job done efficiently, at a lower cost, and with finesse.

Key points:

  • You can hire one developer and expand your team when needed.
  • It may take 4-6 weeks to assemble your team.
  • You’ll pay a fixed monthly fee for outsourced offshore development.

5. Freelancer

If you have a tight deadline, Freelancer is the site to go to for getting your Salesforce project started almost instantly. With live chat, a time tracker, and a mobile app, staying in touch with your Salesforce developer feels almost effortless.

Not to mention, it's free and hiring an expert to hand-select the best fit for the job is fairly cheap as well. You can also buy tags that will further increase exposure. Freelancer also has constant support in case you have a question or problem. We believe this is a reliable place to search for Salesforce specialists.

Key points:

  • Create contests, post projects, or browse profiles to find developers.
  • You’ll have to screen and vet all applicants.
  • Pay for satisfactorily completed work using Freelancer’s secure payment system.

Guide to hiring great freelance Salesforce developers

Overview of Salesforce Development

Salesforce is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform. The software helps businesses expand and grow by understanding their customers’ needs better, using cloud-based apps designed for marketing, sales, and service.

What is Salesforce?

Salesforce development is the practice of developing and building Salesforce applications across various PaaS (Platform as a Service) platforms. Salesforce developers don’t have to work for Salesforce to build software and applications.

Salesforce is relevant for companies and developers alike. This is primarily down to the fact that remote work has more and more organizations looking at digital selling to stay afloat. The usage of Salesforce to assist remote sales teams is on the rise.

Salesforce’s digital-first approach led to the launch of Sales Cloud 360 in March 2021 to support digital selling and boost remote sales productivity. Furthermore, Salesforce has combined platforms like Quip and Salesforce Meetings with Salesforce Anywhere and acquired Slack to improve collaboration among team members. This gamut of product offerings makes it a lucrative option for Salesforce users and drives the platform's demand.

Importance of Salesforce Development

Salesforce’s popularity is down to the fact that it is a cloud-based platform. In today’s digital world, cloud-based software providers offer convenience and various advantages that make it ahead of the competition. A cloud-based CRM can be accessed from anywhere there is an internet connection.

Salesforce is very easy to customize, and companies can personalize it to suit their specific requirements with the option to add more modules and customize the software. Salesforce offers great reporting tools and prioritizes its security. Additionally, Salesforce can be integrated with other third-party software and applications.

Salesforce development for businesses
What is Salesforce used for?Manage customer relationships, Automating & streamlining business processes, Developing custom business applications
Advantages:Customization and Extensibility, Scalability and Flexibility, Integration Capabilities
Disadvantages:Learning Curve and Complexity, Licensing Costs, Dependency on Salesforce Platform Updates and Changes
Related programming languages:Apex, Javascript
Freelancers average hourly rate:$100/hour-$145/hour, depending on factors such as skill lever, experience, location and complexity of the project.
Where to hire?Freelance marketplaces, talent platforms, outsourcing firms, development communities, Salesforce-specific job boards

Advantages and Challenges of Salesforce Development for Businesses

Advantages:

  1. Cloud-Based: Since Salesforce is a cloud-based solution, it is much more cost-effective than on-premises CRMs. Additionally, a cloud-based CRM can be accessed round the clock from anywhere on the planet. Being cloud-based means it’s simpler to configure and manage Salesforce.

  1. Customization Abilities: Salesforce can be customized to fit a business’s specific needs. Salesforce offers rich customization capabilities where users tailor-make their solution. Depending on your needs, the solution can be configured to introduce custom objects, fields, and tabs for objects, email templates, and more.

  1. Products for every use: Users can also build their app or portal to enhance communications using the Lightning Platform. Users can also create a website with the Salesforce solution called Site.com.

Challenges:

  1. Possible lack of control: The lack of control over system upgrades and planned downtimes can become a real problem for companies.

  1. Excessive customizations hamper usability: With the many customization options available, users can easily over-customize the Salesforce solution making it harder for your employees to leverage them all in full, resulting in low CRM adoption and poor employee productivity.

What is a Salesforce Developer?

According to simplilearn.com, a Salesforce developer should understand how Salesforce works, coupled with experience in the platform. The customer usually hires a Salesforce developer to customize Salesforce to the specifications of the hiring party. A Salesforce developer can also be an in-house programmer who is well-versed and skilled at working with Salesforce. Salesforce developers use tools such as Apex and Visualforce and frameworks like Lightning Component to develop apps.

How to Hire a Great Salesforce Developer?

There are several promising platforms to hire Salesforce developers like Upwork, Fiverr, Turing, Arc, and more. Toptal is a platform to hire skilled, proven Salesforce developers, as each candidate is put through a series of rigorous tests.

When it comes to hiring a Salesforce developer, there are three different options. Hiring a full-time Salesforce developer is wise for companies that are building dedicated Salesforce-based solutions or building products that require constant upkeep and tweaks of the Salesforce-based solution. Depending on your requirements, a full-time Salesforce developer may be a smart choice to include in your permanent dev team. Smaller companies that do not require a dedicated resource to build or maintain a Salesforce software can consider hiring a part-time Salesforce developer. Hiring freelance Salesforce developers gives employers the opportunity to build a global team of talented workers. Employers can save a lot of money by hiring highly talented freelancers from overseas. This way a company can get the highest quality output in an efficient and cost-friendly manner.

Salesforce Developer Salary

The cost of hiring Salesforce developers depends on various factors. Rates usually vary based on expertise and experience, location, and market conditions.

Salesforce Developers on Upwork cost around $25–$40/hr. Also, you can hire Salesforce developers offshore or remote from India starting from $2100 per month.

Hire the best Salesforce Developer for your team

According to Lucy Mazalon, head of operations at Salesforceben.com: “What does a Salesforce developer do? Years of experience is not the be-all end-all indicator. Developer career progression focused more on skill set rather than experience.”

Here are the skills or requirements to look for before hiring a Salesforce developer:

  • Create web services using tools like Apex
  • Knowledge and preferably experience with the lightning framework for the Salesforce Lightning component
  • Experience in data management, security, and modeling
  • Apex object-oriented programming language
  • Salesforce app customization
  • Good hold on Salesforce Object Query Language (SOQL) and Structured Query Language (SQL).
  • Salesforce Developer Console
  • Visualforce basics
  • Search solutions basics
  • JavaScript is an important language for Salesforce Developers
  • Problem-solving skills
  • Communication skills
  • Analytical mindset
  • Solutions-focused and result-oriented work ethic
  • Project management abilities to ensure timely completion and high quality

Choose the right site to hire Salesforce developers

Salesforce.com (also known as SFDC) is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform and one of the largest cloud companies in the world. Many businesses depend on the Salesforce marketing cloud to monitor their deal flow, business processes, and contact records throughout the sales cycle. Many businesses have dedicated Salesforce developers and Salesforce administrators to help maintain their instance of Salesforce and the service cloud.

Because of the business-critical nature of Salesforce, Salesforce integration and Salesforce development is a key part of many other SaaS tools that a business may use. Popular Salesforce integrations include Microsoft Office, Dropbox, Pardot, Docusign, and others.

Therefore, great Salesforce platform developers, project managers, and consultants are needed on how to best organize and interact with the immense Salesforce ecosystem and the sales cloud.

Salesforce is a big CRM, so there are many Salesforce consultants out there looking for new consulting opportunities to solve your business needs. This is good news for you, but it also makes it difficult to pick just a few websites to utilize in your search. Let's narrow it down further so you can figure out the hiring sites that will fit best with your project.

Among the easiest freelance platforms to use, as well as the ones best for employing newer developers for short-term projects, are freelancing and job boards that anyone can join. These include PeoplePerHour, Upwork, ZipRecruiter, and Guru. Due to the sheer variety of developers on these sites, you'll need to carefully screen applicants to make sure they're skilled enough for the job.

If you're looking for something similar, but with more certified Salesforce developers, try Dice or Github Jobs. These sites are designed for large projects, and thus are more expensive -- but come with extra marketing features.

In the middle, companies like Qubit or Geeks Per Hour, rather than allowing you to choose from a pool of freelancers, either start the hiring process for you or give you a list of their own developers. Mid-range, somewhat long-term projects work well with a setup like this.

Finally, you have matching services such as Toptal, Arc.dev, and Remote. These can range from very expensive to fairly cheap or even free, and have developers of any experience level. If you use these services, you'll be matched with many suitable developers and have a chance to interview and hire whoever you'd like.

Ultimately, which sites you employ depends on a multitude of factors, such as:

  • How quickly you need to hire a certified Salesforce developer on your development team
  • Your business requirements for Salesforce projects and the length of that development project
  • How much experience you have working with Salesforce developers
  • Whether or not you're equipped to test technical skills and proper Salesforce solutions
  • How many SFDC developers you need to hire
  • The years of experience those Salesforce developers need
  • Whether or not you're open to full-time, part-time, contract and remote Salesforce consultants
  • What your budget constraints are for improving your Salesforce CRM
  • How important quality is to your project(s)

Hiring Salesforce developers - FAQ

Is Salesforce a language or framework?
Software and user interfaces in Salesforce can be created using Apex, Salesforce's proprietary programming language, which has a Java-like syntax. Visualforce: A markup language to help developers create custom Salesforce pages with HTML-like code, and developers can also opt for a powerful combination of Apex and JavaScript.
What cloud does Salesforce use?
Several Salesforce software solutions and products run on AWS. Salesforce also enables its customers to build on AWS to augment their Salesforce capabilities. While Salesforce has its own data centers worldwide, they are playing the multi-cloud game and use AWS for most products, while its Marketing Cloud will use Microsoft Azure and Alibaba Cloud in China.
What is the purpose of Salesforce?
Salesforce creates cloud-based software to help businesses streamline sales, service, and marketing activities by offering industry-specific products and seamless software integration. Salesforce offers solutions for Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Field Services, CPQ and Billing etc. The primary purpose of Salesforce is to help businesses efficiently manage their operations.

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