Exitforce: Should Entry-Level Salesforce Job Seekers Cut Their Losses? 

“I don’t know if what I’m feeling is crushed or just defeated.” So begins a Reddit post from one admin outlining a challenging seven months seeking a new Salesforce role. “At this point, my [employment insurance] is about to run out, and I’m thinking about going back to school,” the poster concludes.

“Laid off in February, 400+ applications with only three callbacks,” another Redditor writes. More and more, people in the Salesforce ecosystem seem to be asking: Is it even still worth it to pursue this as a career? 

This is a delicate question, and it’s one that we at Salesforce Ben do, admittedly, have something of a vested interest in, being very much an enthusiastic part of the ecosystem ourselves. Nonetheless, the question is being asked, and it should be addressed.

We sought opinions from top ecosystem voices to provide a much-needed morale boost for those who want to stay – and perhaps some valuable catharsis to those who are thinking of giving up entirely.  

I Want to Stay: Why Should I?

Paul Battisson, founder and CEO of Groundwork Apps and host of the Cloudbites podcast, told Salesforce Ben he believes the job market seems harder at the moment, because it was a “particularly easy job market” just a few years ago. 

“I don’t necessarily think that the job market itself is more difficult than other technology-based job markets at the moment,” Paul explained. “But I do think that because of how easy and booming the Salesforce job market was before, it feels that way.”

Paul added that he spoke to someone recently who had spent 18 months finding a role, but he also knows of people who have had roles offered to them. 

“They might be at different ends of the market in different places, but there’s still a lot out there,” he said. 

“I think the difficulty people are having at the moment is that the market itself is not as buoyant as it was. I think that the macroeconomics of the situation is more difficult. There is uncertainty because of certain changes in political positions both in the UK and in the US – I’m talking about the UK and the US job markets in particular – those things matter. 

“When there’s economic uncertainty, people are less likely to invest, and I think you could say that the UK and the US both have strong periods of economic uncertainty at the moment. So I think that that is a key factor there.”

Paul added that he believes there are fewer “accidental” admins and developers surfacing these days.

He said: “I started doing Salesforce because I applied for a net job and kind of got hoodwinked – you got told in an interview it’s this other programming language called Apex, that’s very similar.

“Every single person I’ve spoken to on my podcast, without fail, has said they ended up doing Salesforce because they ‘just ended up doing it’. It was either, ‘I was in an organization and someone said here’s Salesforce, enjoy!’ or they were a developer and they were at a company where someone said, ‘Hey you’ve got two options: learn Salesforce or continue doing your thing, but this is kind of new and it’s an interesting project.’ 

“Today, Salesforce is a chosen product, and there are fewer people accidentally falling into doing it. The sales and procurement cycle now is very different and is often a lot more structured, with far more partners being involved from the start.”

We asked Paul: If someone interested in becoming a developer came to him asking if it was a good idea to get on Trailhead and go “all in” on Salesforce as a career, what would he say?

He said: “I have always said to people when you start doing Salesforce, learn other things. I was a developer in other languages beforehand. I keep on using other languages because, more broadly, whatever your role in Salesforce is, understanding the underlying principles and having transferable skills is never going to hurt.”

Paul explained that at one point, SAP was the “big, dominant thing”, as was Oracle, and Microsoft, and so on, but technology changes over time. 

While Salesforce is currently the king of CRM, will it always be so? 

Paul added: “I’ve got a friend who’s a solution architect at Amazon, and when she started there, she was saying, ‘Do you think I’m doing the right thing?’ I said it’s a great role, go and do it, you’ll learn a ton – but make sure you learn why underneath it. 

“Don’t just learn how to set up a gateway on Amazon, learn why it’s that way. Learn how the underlying thing works, what is an API, and what that structure means. Should you decide to want to play with something else, it’s easy for you to learn it. But also, those are transferable skills – should you need to use them.”

So, the job market may be tougher than it was just a few years ago, but it will bounce back… right? 

A ‘Cataclysmic’ Shift

According to our 2025 Admin Salary Guide, established regions (which account for 90% of overall demand) have seen a 28% decline in admin roles. 

Additionally, 88% of Salesforce admins we surveyed said that the job market has been harder than in previous years, and 33.9% noted a decline in admin salaries.

Jeff Sample, Founder of E-Learning Provider Clicked, told Salesforce Ben that it’s common knowledge at this point that the Salesforce job market is “super saturated” at the moment. 

“There are just way too many people who are sold a false narrative, which is, you can get a 100K job and this is going to be super easy and you can be remote,” Jeff said. 

“The reality is, at some point, there was some truth to that, but even when it was moderately true, it was still a stretch, and now it’s just completely plateaued. So I think, even before some of the changes that have happened in workforce development or workforce globally, it was already going to be hard, and now it is going to be exponentially harder.”

He added that it now appears that the “on-ramp” time for workers is “literally gone”. 

“For entry-level job seekers, it was already hard, and now it is even undeniably harder because of some of the changes,” Jeff said.

“The reality is, the global workforce is going through a cataclysmic shift.” 

He added that we are going to see “even bigger” problems, not just in the Salesforce community, but across most “white collar” positions. 

So it’s Not Just Salesforce? 

It could be argued that most companies will likely not invest in the workforce ecosystem as a whole, and will instead be thinking about their own business perspective and, essentially, their own bottom lines.

This means they are not going to have the incentive to properly consider that senior professionals are not going to be available for hire if these entry- and mid-level roles dry up, and no single business is going to want to be the one to “take one for the team” – and invest in fresh faces for the sake of the ecosystem as a whole – when outsourcing to AI tools will be more profitable. 

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in the not-too-distant future: Three companies are all competing in the same marketplace, and two of them start using AI tools that do the work that junior staff used to handle, but faster, cheaper, and better (again, this is hypothetical). 

In such a scenario, how do you convince the third company to bite the bullet and keep hiring entry-level people? If, hypothetically, it was a clear advantage in every way to lay off all your junior staff and simply have senior staff oversee the work of AI tools instead, would any reasonably-sized business take the hit and keep their junior staff around, for the sake of the future? Even if they did, there’s no guarantee the entry-level people they train up will stick around. 

AI proponents often say that new roles will spring up to replace the old ones. This opinion is arguable, but always remember that it is just that – an opinion. And it is one concerning a subject where quite a lot is at stake, for quite a lot of people.  

Final Thoughts 

Dario Amodei, CEO of the firm behind Claude AI, Anthropic, earlier this year warned that executives and politicians should stop “sugar-coating” the threat that artificial intelligence poses to workers, particularly concerning mass layoffs. 

When discussing in an interview with Axios the possibilities that AI could unleash, Amodei outlined the following future scenario: “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced – and 20% of people don’t have jobs.”

Are we in the Salesforce ecosystem simply undergoing a sharp reality adjustment after the pandemic boom? Or are we feeling the first little ripples of this cataclysmic shift in human society? 

Make sure to leave your thoughts in the comments below.