Do you need to hire Offshore Salesforce Engineers?

Companies are increasingly turning to a truly global hiring strategy when it comes to building internal Salesforce teams. However, there are questions to ask yourself when determining if hiring a team of offshore Salesforce Engineers is the right fit for your organization.

Let's take a look at the potential benefits for your company; how other companies are hiring offshore Salesforce Development teams; and the best way to start the process.

Benefits of hiring Offshore Salesforce Engineers

Are you thinking of adopting an Offshore Salesforce Support strategy to assist with ongoing project work?

There are a number of ways you can go about it and the different options provide different benefits. For starters, you can partner with an Offshore Development company, which is a vendor that supplies a team of their employees to work on your projects. Alternatively, you can hire a team of Independent Salesforce Consultants directly, which allows you to have more control over team selection and management of the work to be done.

Regardless of which approach you take, here are some of the key benefits that make Offshore Salesforce Development an attractive option for US-based companies.

Increases your Talent Pool

Why limit yourself to hiring only people who live in the same time zone, country, or city as you?

By deciding to hire offshore Salesforce Engineers, you immediately increase the pool of talent in the market, which is especially necessarily when dealing in a highly competitive market like Salesforce. You are more likely to find higher quality Engineers if you are willing to hire people based anywhere in the world.

Hire for Specialized Skill Sets

The challenge with hiring full-time Salesforce Engineers is that you need to identify skill sets that can be used on an ongoing basis, across a wide range of projects.

For example, you might only have 2 months worth of CPQ Cloud projects - what are you going to do with that individual when the CPQ work finishes?

Offshore Salesforce Freelancers are available for short-term project engagements, so you can onboard an Engineer for a specific set of tasks and offboard them when the work is finished.

Allow Your Company And Projects To Scale

Hiring Offshore Salesforce Engineers can help you easily increase your company’s development capacity when projects call for it and decrease it during slower periods of work. Perhaps your in-house team is fully occupied with strategic projects and you need a Salesforce Engineer to focus on inbound requests when they surge.

There is incredible flexibility for companies hiring offshore teams of Consultants.

Save Money

By hiring Offshore Salesforce Engineers, you can save a lot of money.

On average, a Sr. Salesforce Engineer in the United States will charge an hourly rate of $120/hour-$145/hour, while a Sr. Salesforce Engineer in India is typically around $50/hour-$65/hour.

Companies that are willing to invest in onboarding offshore Development teams and building the processes necessary for them to succeed can ultimately benefit from huge cost savings.

Receive The Completed Work Faster

When building a global Salesforce Development team with Engineers scattered across different time zones, you are able to adopt a continuous development process.

That’s because there will always be someone working on the project, essentially 24 hours a day. This is in contrast to hiring Salesforce Engineers based in a single time zone, where you only have work getting done for 8-10 hours per day.

Companies hiring global Salesforce Developers see massive productivity gains and reduction in overall delivery timelines.

Challenges hiring Offshore Salesforce Engineers

Adopting this strategy may have a ton of benefits but it doesn't come without challenges. This resource model requires proactive decision making from a company, so they can plan and prepare for onboarding a global Salesforce Development team.

Quality Control

Companies are typically hiring the majority of their teams from existing networks - previous colleagues, referrals, friends of friends, professional recommendations etc. However, when companies start hiring in different countries, they are inevitably wading into unknown territory.

It's particularly important to take your time with the vetting process. Conduct multiple rounds of video interviews to meet the Salesforce Engineer and communication at length. Be sure to conduct technical assessments (ideally a live coding exercise, so you can watch how they work) and most definitely check previous references on the individual.

Dev Ops Process

This is perhaps the most important factor when hiring offshore Salesforce Engineers.

Because you will have a continuous development process with multiple individuals working on a code base simultaneously, you need to have proper Dev Ops processes and controls in place. The development org can get messy and delay production timelines if you don't have the proper tools, processes, and QA methodology implemented at the start.

Expectation Setting

At the start of an engagement with Offshore Salesforce Engineers, you want to be clear on what you expect from them.

What is the turnaround time you expect to see on new requests? How often are they attending stand ups? Are they interfacing heavily with other team members and stakeholders?

Set these expectations upfront to ensure everyone is aligned.

Companies hiring offshore Salesforce Engineers

As US companies become more comfortable with remote work, we are seeing a huge increase in the adoption of offshore Salesforce Development services.

Cargill, a global manufacturing company has a team of 14 based in India, spanning Salesforce Engineers, Administrators, Architects, and Business Analysts. Other companies building offshore Salesforce Development teams include PayPal, Workday, Coupa Software, Uber, Snowflake, MongoDB, and many others.

FoundHQ recently partnered with ACV Auctions to scale an Offshore and Nearshore Salesforce Development team. Over a 6 week period in early 2022, we helped them define the needs and successfully hire a team of 7 Salesforce Engineers, based throughout Latin America and India.

Where You Can Find Offshore Salesforce Engineers

There are still limited options for reliably hiring Offshore Salesforce Engineers.

There are some Development Partners that exist with HQ locations in various countries and teams dedicated to recruiting, interviewing, and hiring Salesforce Engineers to put on projects with US companies. Some of these can be good options; however, companies that operate locally are paying in that local currency, which means the Engineers they are able to hire tend to be junior.

The most experience Salesforce Engineers are either taking full-time jobs with US companies or they are Freelancing directly with US based companies, both of which offer them a significant increase in earnings compared to joining a company Headquartered in their Region.

For that reason, the best option is to build a direct relationship with these Engineers.

This is where some of the risk comes into play if you don't have an intermediary helping to vet the talent and guarantee reliability.

To save time and be assured that the team you hire is made up of true Salesforce Experts, you might want to consider hiring through a specialized Freelancer platform like FoundHQ.

Our team has spent 10 years focused entirely on Salesforce talent acquisition. We have built a trusted network of 2,500+ Salesforce Freelancers globally and every individual on the platform has been pre-vetted and verified by our team.

These include offshore Salesforce Engineers from companies like Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, Stripe, Uber, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other Fortune 500s.