- Yun-Yu Lin's career evolved from semiconductor engineer to senior product manager at Google.
- Lin's resume strategy emphasizes customization and segregation of applications by career level.
- His resume has helped him land roles at Meta, Visa, PayPal and Google.
Yun-Yu Lin has changed jobs three times during his 18-year career as an engineer.
Having graduated from Taiwan with a degree in Computer Science, it was a natural progression for me to enter the semiconductor industry.
He worked as an engineer for a Taiwanese chip manufacturer for about five years, but realized that hardware was not his passion. In 2011, he switched to being a software engineer at Yahoo!, where he first saw a product manager role and knew he wanted to take it in the future.
Three years after joining Yahoo, he was craving a change and decided to advance his career in a new country.
“I thought, 'OK, maybe I can move to another country, or maybe I'll try and become prime minister myself,'” Lin told Business Insider.
He moved to the US to earn an MBA from the University of Southern California, and after graduating he took a data science position at Meta.
After three years at Meta, he remembered his long-held goal of getting into product management.
In 2018, he joined Visa as a data platform product manager. For the next five years, Lin worked at PayPal and then Google as a senior product manager.
Throughout his career in the US, he continues to update the CV he first created as an MBA student.
That resume has led Lin to roles at Meta, Visa and PayPal, and he's set to receive $350,000 a year in compensation from Google in 2022, which will include a base salary and restricted stock units.
Looking back at the resume he prepared in 2015, Lin said there were four elements to it that worked in his favor.
1. Connecting the dots
As Lin looked for jobs in different countries and industries, and changed roles from engineer to data scientist to product manager, he tried to highlight the commonalities in his experiences.
“I'm always looking back and trying to find the right intersection of what I can leverage from my past experiences,” he said. “I've always been focused on one particular area: data.”
2. Customized for your career level
It's important that resume structures evolve, Lin says.
“I didn't have much real work experience coming out of school so I tried to focus more on my education,” he said.
In recent years, he has relegated his studies to the bottom and instead taken up his latest job.
He's also shifted how much emphasis he put on each role: When he applied to Meta in 2015, he described his roles at Yahoo and Surplus in three or four bullet points; now, “it's basically one sentence about my first company, Surplus Technology.”
3. Additional Information Section
The section at the bottom of Lin's resume serves two purposes, he said.
First, he uses it to showcase the additional competencies and certifications that companies don't expect from a product manager but that he has gained from his diverse experiences.
Secondly, this section is his way of tailoring it to the job description.
“If you find any specific requirements specific to the job or company, make sure you find the relevance. Customize your resume a bit by adding any certifications or classes you've taken.”
4. Isolate your applications
As an immigrant to the United States, Lin knew she would have to apply for many jobs before she could find one that would allow her to get a work visa.
“Time is an applicant's biggest enemy,” he says. While job hunting as an MBA graduate, he devised a system for categorizing every opportunity into three levels and modified his resume in various ways.
“The first phase is about 20 to 30 different positions that I really, really want,” Lin said. For these companies, he customized not only the “additional information” section, but also work experience bullet points.
“There are 30 to 50 positions in the second tier that are very related to the first tier positions, but the company or industry may not be in my top tier, but I would still apply if I am lucky enough to be hired,” he said. “I don't have much time to customize every single application in the second tier, so the only thing I customize is the 'additional information.'”
The third tier would include the remaining 200-300 positions, which Lin considered to be more of a Plan B, although relevant.
“I basically use one resume to apply to all of the third-tier positions.”
Lin currently works as a senior product manager in Google's San Francisco office. BI reviewed his employment and compensation history.
