In part 1 I discussed how to define out your specific needs and to look for "My Rockstar" instead of just "A Rockstar". This point is important to consider in our second part. The term Junior or Associate gets a bad wrap these days. I'll admit, I'm a little bias myself when I see it. We think it means "No Experience", "Average Performance", "Not worth my time", etc. This may not always be the case but I think everyone has run into this "junior" wall before.
If you're reading this post you're likely looking at hiring your first Salesforce Professional and that can be scary if you've never done it before or not sure what to look for. I'll send you down two paths:
IF this is your first Salesforce hire then my suggestion is to hire someone with a bit of experience under their belt. Even a few years of working experience in the Salesforce ecosystem gives people a skill set that can't be replicated in school or in other roles. For example, Admins with experience often know how to determine the right way to do something as opposed to the way you know how to do it. On the other end, you are likely to be inexperienced in working with an Admin and thus the relationship may not blossom as much as you hope.
There are some other options if you have never hired a Salesforce Admin before that will help you determine what you need and help define the skill sets you are likely to need in a resource.
Contracting:
There are several options to hire short and long term contractors on full-time, part-time, or even by project or ad-hoc basis. For example, Upwork.com has a large collection of Salesforce experts at a wide range of price ranges and expert levels.
Salesforce Partners and Consulting shops are also a good way to hire an Admin-As-A-Service type role.
Finally, link up with your local area's User Group and ask for help. The User Group leader for your area usually has their finger on the pulse of who's available and you get the bonus of getting a local person. Likewise, area businesses are almost always willing to share contacts of people they have worked with in the past.
IF you have hired some Salesforce professionals before and are familiar with your requirements for the position I implore you to think creatively and go "Junior". As I mentioned before, this doesn't have to be someone that is in-fact Junior but might be someone that doesn't have a strict Salesforce background but has complimentary skill sets that enhance their value.
I'll give you an example. I recently hired a Full-Stack Engineer out of a coding boot camp who was a career shifter from the banking industry. Their background is in ReactJS and they did several projects with this language in the coding boot camp they graduated from. I recently had a project handed to me to investigate Twilio Flex and the integration into Salesforce that integrates a softphone into Salesforce Service Cloud. Surprise, the front end of the softphone can be customized using... you guessed it, ReactJS.
You can learn Salesforce if you have a strong technical background. Salesforce Trailhead makes that easy. But its a little more difficult to go the other way and take a pure Salesforce Admin and teach them complimentary skill sets you might need. Exploring options in hiring "Junior" help to tackle this sort of need and gives you the freedom to train and mold a candidate.
