While hiring involves many important stages, interviewing qualified candidates is perhaps the most crucial in ensuring you hire the right fit. Preparing is paramount and includes finding Salesforce Lightning interview questions that accurately assess a candidate's technical skills, soft skills, and personality.
This guide will provide Salesforce Lightning interview questions to help you assess each candidate at various experience levels, as well as more information about what these developers do. Learn more about Salesforce Lightning interview questions and answers and how Revelo can help.
What Is a Salesforce Lightning Developer?
A Salesforce Lightning developer is a tech professional who works with Salesforce Lightning, an intuitive user interface designed to increase productivity within the Salesforce platform. This developer creates custom applications and components using the Salesforce Lightning Component Framework. This modern development framework allows for the creation of single-page applications with dynamic, responsive user interfaces.
You may need to hire Salesforce Lightning developers if your business needs to go beyond the standard capabilities of Salesforce. They can create custom components for Salesforce applications, design and implement new features, build responsive user interfaces, and even develop entire apps. Their projects often involve enhancing the functionality of existing Salesforce applications or creating new ones tailored to a company's specific needs.
Entry-Level Salesforce Lightning Interview Questions
Entry-level candidates are most likely recent graduates who either haven't had a proper job or worked as unpaid interns. Therefore, the emphasis should be on their potential to absorb and apply new information.
Below are some questions to ask when interviewing an entry-level Salesforce Lightning developer.
What are the differences between Salesforce Classic and Salesforce Lightning?
Asking candidates this question is crucial to gauge their understanding of the Salesforce platform's evolution. It helps assess their knowledge of the platform's two distinct user interfaces and their respective features and capabilities.
A strong candidate should articulate that Salesforce Lightning is a modern, more intuitive interface with advanced features designed for efficiency and speed. They should mention specific features like the Lightning Component Framework, which allows for creating reusable custom components, or the Lightning App Builder for drag-and-drop customization. On the other hand, they should also acknowledge that Salesforce Classic is the older UI, which, while less sleek and less customizable, is still used by some organizations and has its own strengths.
What is a Lightning Web Component, and how is it used?
An articulate response to this question demonstrates the candidate's technical knowledge and ability to leverage this feature to develop practical solutions. Therefore, when asked this question, the candidate should explain that a Lightning Web Component (LWC) is a custom element built using HTML and modern JavaScript. They should note that LWCs are part of Salesforce's Lightning Component Framework, designed to develop dynamic web apps for mobile and desktop devices.
The candidate should highlight that LWCs create reusable and encapsulated components on the Salesforce platform. Developers can then use these components to customize the Salesforce interface or build stand-alone applications, enhancing the overall user experience.
What is a custom object in Salesforce, and what does it allow the user to do?
This question is essential, as it assesses the candidate's understanding of one of Salesforce's most fundamental features: custom objects. The candidate should explain that a custom object is a database table that stores unique business data. This information allows users to extend Salesforce's standard functionality by storing information not accommodated by the standard object types.
The candidate should say that custom objects permit users to store information unique to their organization, create custom fields for data entry, establish relationships with other objects, and build a structure that suits their specific business model. Additionally, custom objects can create dashboards and reports, track processes, and even build new application functionalities.
What is Aura?
This question is vital for assessing a candidate's familiarity with tasks such as Salesforce Lightning development. A candidate should explain that Aura is a UI framework developed by Salesforce to create dynamic web applications for mobile and desktop devices. It's a component-based framework that allows developers to build responsive applications without any server-side code, making it possible to create highly interactive user interfaces.
A candidate may also mention that while the newer Lightning Web Component (LWC) framework is now a major part of the recommended approach for building new components on Salesforce, Aura still plays an important role.
Mid-Level Salesforce Lightning Interview Questions
When interviewing for a mid-level Salesforce Lightning developer position, your goal is to evaluate the candidate's ability to work independently while completing complex tasks, contribute effectively to team objectives, and demonstrate quality leadership.
Below, you can find some mid-level Salesforce Lightning interview questions to get you started.
How does data binding work in Lightning components?
Understanding data binding is crucial when creating responsive and interactive applications on the Salesforce platform. The candidate should explain that data binding in Lightning Components involves linking JavaScript controller properties with components in the markup. This allows data to flow from the component's JavaScript controller to the component's markup (one-way data binding) and vice versa (two-way data binding).
The candidate should also mention that one-way data binding is the standard in Lightning Components, ensuring that any changes to the JavaScript property reflect in the UI but not vice versa. Alternatively, two-way data binding is achievable using Lightning Component's built-in helper functions, allowing changes in the UI to update the JavaScript property.
How do you ensure that the Lightning components you develop are accessible and user-friendly?
This question is crucial for assessing a candidate's understanding of user experience (UX) and accessibility standards and their ability to create components that cater to all users. The candidate should demonstrate an understanding of accessibility best practices such as proper use of ARIA roles, ensuring sufficient color contrast, providing keyboard navigation, and more. They might also discuss using Lightning's built-in features that support accessibility, like the Lightning Design System, which includes accessible markup and styles.
Regarding user-friendliness, the candidate might discuss following UX design principles, gathering user feedback, the Salesforce mobile app, and conducting user testing as they add the Lightning component. They could also mention techniques such as creating responsive designs that work on different devices, minimizing load times, and making interfaces intuitive and easy to navigate.
Can you describe a situation where you leveraged Lightning Data Service in your development process? How did it benefit the project?
Lightning Data Service (LDS) is an essential tool that allows sharing data across components, caching, and record management without Apex code or an Apex controller. An experienced Salesforce developer should describe a specific project or situation where they utilized LDS. They might discuss how they used Salesforce to create, read, update, or delete records directly from a Lightning page or share data across components without making multiple server requests.
They should also explain how using LDS benefited the project. This might include reducing server-side code, improving application performance through client-side caching, and ensuring data consistency across multiple components.
Senior-Level Salesforce Lightning Interview Questions
Beyond technical skills, senior-level developers should also possess excellent soft skills and be able to solve complex problems, think strategically, work autonomously, and lead teams in developing solutions. These senior-level Salesforce Lightning interview questions will help you gauge a candidate's leadership capabilities and experience with the Salesforce Lightning experience.
What is Scratch Org?
This question assesses the candidate's understanding of Salesforce's development lifecycle, ability to utilize best practices for collaborative development, and knowledge of modern DevOps principles. An ideal answer would be that Scratch Org is a dedicated, configurable, and short-term Salesforce environment that developers can use for coding and testing. It allows developers to simultaneously work on the same feature or bug fix, streamline continuous integration and deployment processes, and easily create tailored environments for specific purposes.
How do you handle disagreements or conflicts within your team, especially regarding technical decisions?
When you ask this question, you're looking for an answer demonstrating the candidate's ability to constructively manage conflict and foster a collaborative environment. The candidate might talk about promoting open and respectful communication, encouraging team members to voice their opinions, and facilitating discussions to reach a consensus. The candidate might also discuss instances where they had to make tough decisions in the project's best interest, even if it wasn't the most popular choice.
Describe a complex Salesforce Lightning project that you led. What were the major challenges, and how did you overcome them?
With this question, you're looking for insights into the candidate's technical competency and experience with Salesforce Lightning in a practical context. The significant challenges they faced and how they overcame them can provide a glimpse into their problem-solving skills. You might expect to hear about technical difficulties, resource constraints, timeline issues, or team-related problems. How they navigated these challenges can show their resilience, adaptability, and decision-making skills.
Hire Salesforce Lightning Developers With Revelo
Sourcing, vetting, and hiring top Salesforce Lightning developers can be challenging, especially if you're on a tight timeline. That's where Revelo comes in. We understand the intricacies of matching the right talent with the right company and can help make that process as smooth as possible. Our developers are not just technically proficient — they also possess strong soft skills and English proficiency, making them well-rounded professionals ready to contribute to your team. Moreover, they are time-zone-aligned, ensuring smooth communication and collaboration.
Contact Revelo today to get started on your Salesforce Lightning developer hiring journey.
