- Yun-Yu Lin's career evolved from semiconductor engineer to senior product manager at Google.
- Lin's résumé strategy emphasizes customizing by career level and segregating applications.
- His résumé helped him secure roles at Meta, Visa, PayPal, and Google.
In his 18-year tech career, Yun-Yu Lin changed careers three times.
As a computer science graduate in Taiwan, getting into the semi-conductor industry was a natural path.
He spent nearly five years as an engineer at a Taiwanese chipmaking company before realizing hardware was not his passion. He shifted to work as a software engineer at Yahoo in 2011, where he first saw a product manager in action and was inspired to take up the role down the line.
Three years into Yahoo, he craved a change and decided to explore a career in a new country.
"I was like: okay, maybe I can relocate to a different country or even try to be a PM myself," Lin told Business Insider.
He moved to the US to pursue a MBA at the University of Southern California and landed a data science role at Meta after graduation.
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. Over the next five years, Lin worked at PayPal and then Google, where he is a senior product manager.
Throughout his career journey in the US, he has been updating one résumé he first created as an MBA student.
This is the résumé that landed Lin his roles at Meta, Visa, and PayPal, and, in 2022, a $350,000 annual pay package at Google. The pay includes a base salary and restricted stock units.
Looking back on the résumé he created in 2015, Lin said there are four components of the document that worked in his favor.
1. Connect 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 a common thread between his experiences.
"I'm always trying to look back, trying to find the right intersection — what I can leverage from my past experience," he said. "I was always focused on one specific domain, which is data."
2. Customize according to career level
It is important for résumés' structures to evolve, said Lin.
"When I just graduated from school, I didn't have much experience with real work, so I tried to put my school education higher," he said.
In recent years, he pushed his education to the bottom and replaced it with his most recent job.
He also changed how much he emphasized each role. When he applied to Meta in 2015, he described his roles at Yahoo and Sunplus in three to four bullet points. Now, "my first company, Surplus Technology, it's basically just one sentence."
3. Additional information section
This section at the bottom of Lin's résumé serves two purposes, he said.
First, he uses it to show additional capabilities or certifications that companies don't expect from product managers, but which he has because of his diverse experiences.
Second, the section is his way of tailoring to the job description.
"If you see any specific call out that may be unique for the position or for the company, then you certainly need to find a correlation — add either a certificate or any previous class you have studied into your résumé to do a little bit of customization."
4. Segregate your applications
As an immigrant in the US, Lin knew that he would have to apply for many roles to find one that could sponsor a work visa.
"As a candidate, your biggest enemy is time," he said. When he applied for jobs as an MBA he devised a system to categorize every opportunity into one of three tiers and changed his résumé in different ways.
"Tier one 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 the bullet points under work experience.
"Tier two is about 30 to 50 positions. They're highly correlated to the tier one positions, but maybe the company or the industry is not my top tier, but I will still take it if I get lucky enough to get out to get the offer," he said. "I don't have so much time to really customize every single tier two application — so that's the type when I customize only 'additional information.'"
Tier three includes the remaining 200-300 positions, which Lin saw as relevant but more of a plan B.
"I pretty much just use one single résumé to apply for all the tier three positions."
Lin is now a senior product manager at Google's San Francisco office. BI has verified his employment and compensation history.