We’ve seen a number of blockbuster acquisitions made by Salesforce in the last five years. As recruiters, we view these shifts as opportunities to support our clients with their new requirements for niche Salesforce experts in the burgeoning space. Let’s take a look at some of the recent acquisitions and how those shifts have affected the Salesforce talent markets.

First, the MuleSoft acquisition from 2018. With the ebb and flow of bundling and unbundling in SaaS, middleware integration tools like MuleSoft are set up for success in periods of growth. Post-acquisition, we saw an immediate need for MuleSoft developer contractors amongst our partners. 3 years later, technical MuleSoft talent continues to be a hot commodity amongst our partners and end clients. Demand for onshore MuleSoft developers and architects continues to outpace supply.

Next, let’s look at the Tableau acquisition of 2019. At first, we didn’t see an immediate uptick in our clients requesting Tableau experts and we also saw a drop in client requests for Einstein experts. Over time, we started to see ‘experience with Tableau’ pop up on more and more job descriptions, especially Salesforce Business Analyst or Business Systems Analyst roles. But now with Tableau’s newest business data and analytics platform, which incorporates Salesforce Einstein’s predictive modeling and machine learning technology, our partners are turning to us for Tableau experts. We anticipate the Tableau consulting space to grow in the coming years.

And most recently, Slack. While we have yet to see clients requesting Slack experts like they had previously requested MuleSoft Developers and Tableau Consultants, the leadership behind Salesforce has been bullish on the Slack acquisition.

Benioff was recently quoted saying that Salesforce is “going to rebuild all of our technology, once again, to become Slack-first to help our customers have a harness to work in this new world.” Benioff also said that Slack improved Salesforce's Service Cloud case close rate by 26% (La Roche).

But maybe the Slack acquisition won’t present as many opportunities to solve talent problems for our clients, because the Slack integration solution will already be baked into the Salesforce platform, while MuleSoft integrations or Tableau implementations will take more of a heavy lift from partners or the end clients.

We want to hear from you! Let us know if you disagree with any of our takes or if we missed something. Which acquisition do you feel will make the biggest impact on the Salesforce talent ecosystem moving forward?

La Roche, J. (n.d.). Salesforce CEO: We're going to rebuild all of our technology to become Slack-first. Yahoo! https://money.yahoo.com/salesforce-ceo-marc-benioff-on-slack-acquisition-135151402.html