My 4-Step Job Search Method: How I Switched Careers to Google

Updated 2026/10/16

Job hunting takes a bit of cunning, which is another way of saying everything you do needs a purpose!

When you work on your resume or prepare for interviews, you need to know why you’re writing each line and why you’re giving each answer. Never leave the interviewer wondering what you’re getting at!

Hi everyone, I’m Jason. I write about studying abroad, careers, and growing efficiently. In the video below, I sum up the four things that helped me, at 24, reach a goal I had set for myself two years earlier: a career switch into my dream company, Google.

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First, get to know the target company and the role. Next, figure out the value you can bring. Third, compare the skills your target requires with the experience you have now, which makes it much clearer how to pivot. Last, carry out your career-switch or job-search plan with purpose.

Step 1: Understand the company and the role

Looking back on my career switch, the first thing I got right was researching the company and the role!

If you want to switch jobs, you’ll have a direction in mind: a field, a function, or an industry. Your job then is to break into that new circle by meeting lots of people and learning as much as you can. Whether the switch works out depends largely on whether you can get past the information barrier and understand and fit into that circle. So I spent a lot of time researching the company, the role, and the actual work, and that helped me show in interviews that I matched what they needed.

First-hand information

Speaking of insights, I have to share the methods that matter most of all for getting first-hand information.

What you can find online is usually second-hand information. You know it, and so does everyone you’re competing against. First-hand information is what really makes you stand out.

Say you want to move into tech. Beyond the public information and guides online, you can use networking to meet a few people in the field and learn a lot from talking with them about the industry, the company, and the day-to-day work, including things only insiders know.
These are the ways I recommend getting first-hand information:

• Coffee chats
• Researching other people’s career paths on LinkedIn
• Networking platforms such as OfferLand.cc

If you’re an introvert like me, reaching out to strangers probably takes real courage. Don’t worry. I broke coffee chats down into a four-part framework so I could contact people in the industry systematically, a bit like drafting what you’ll say in your head beforehand.

A four-part framework for coffee chats

In short, my coffee chats have four parts:

Opening

I usually start by thanking the person and briefly explaining why I asked for the coffee chat.
Whether the chat lasts 10 minutes or a full hour, good manners are a must. They leave a good impression, and they show you appreciate the person making time for you. Even if you already explained your request by email or message, restating your goal briefly helps them understand what the conversation is for and shows that you take it seriously.

Self-introduction

The self-introduction sounds simple, but I don’t mean reciting your experience the way you’d give a class presentation. Use a short introduction to break the ice and work your background in naturally. To me, a coffee chat is still a chat and not an interview. So instead of listing my experience stiffly, I often open with something we have in common. If we went to the same school, for example, I’ll share a bit of alumni gossip and then steer toward my background and where I am now, which also helps the other person relax into the conversation. Be careful, though: the light opener is only a way in, so don’t let the conversation drift or burn time on idle chat. Keep the small talk quick, move on to your experience, and briefly sum up how you see it.

Specific questions about the job and the industry

I strongly recommend preparing a question bank. Your questions can range from big topics, like their view of where the industry is heading, to smaller ones about the company environment, the team culture, or details of the role. I mainly prepared a few categories: career field, job field, future development, and networking/relationships. For example:

• Career Field: Which soft and hard skills does your industry value most? (Languages? Certifications? Negotiation?)
• Job Field: How did you find your current job and get started in it?
• Future Development: Which skills or abilities are you working to improve at this point in your career?

Gentle follow-up questions

Sometimes the person you’re talking to only skims the surface and doesn’t share many original or deep thoughts. Rephrasing your question, digging deeper, or building on what they said is a very important part of the chat. I’ll make a separate video on coffee chats in the future and share some tips on how to reach out.

Second-hand information

Besides gathering first-hand information, I also used second-hand information to learn about the company and the role:

The most basic part of any job search is going through all the public, second-hand information, including the job description. You can also use good sources such as blogs and podcasts to build up your understanding of an industry, pull out the main points, and work out what you still lack and which strengths you can use.

Another tip that helped me a lot: read the company’s press releases, public financial reports, and published success stories.

When I interviewed for the account manager role at Google, for example, I had no advertising knowledge and didn’t know what products Google had. By searching online for Google’s customer case studies, I quickly learned how Google had helped these big clients succeed. Those success stories showed me which products Google had and how clients in different industries used them.

Beyond these public facts, what makes an interviewer think “this person is worth hiring” is the insight you form after digesting the information. It’s like a video game: knowing the walkthrough helps, but you also have to use your items and skills well to have a shot at clearing the level.

One way I digested these facts was to find people in the industry through coffee chats who could act as guides, and learn from their views. An insider’s perspective may rest on years of knowledge built up in the field, which I couldn’t match quickly as a newcomer.
This bit of “stealing from the pros” is where my cunning comes in. The name aside, it’s really about absorbing what I learned in those conversations, adding my own fresh eyes as an industry rookie, and combining the two into an insight that’s my own.

This approach helped me understand the company’s products and solutions quickly, and it gave me insights to use in later interviews to show I had done my homework.

Once you’ve researched the company and the role in this first step, most of the information barrier is gone, and you start to see what abilities the job requires.

Where to find people to talk to

Researching other people’s career paths on LinkedIn

Plenty of career creators have shared how they network on LinkedIn, and some have landed referrals or built great professional relationships that way. Here are a few do’s and don’ts for reaching out:

Dos
– Build a complete LinkedIn profile
– Briefly explain how you came across the person and why you’re writing
– Don’t put pressure on them! Thank them for taking the time to read your message, even if they don’t reply

Don’ts
– An empty LinkedIn profile (no photo, no education or work history, no summary)
– Asking for a coffee chat right away without introducing yourself or saying what you hope to get out of it
– Unprofessional language: casual is fine, flippant is not

Networking platforms such as OfferLand.cc

You can also use communities, groups, or platforms built for networking, such as OfferLand (offerland.cc), which I’ve introduced before (allow me a little self-promotion, haha). It’s a one-stop platform for studying abroad and careers, and one of its main features is an interactive networking hub. I recommend using it to find people you’d like to have a coffee chat with, and even to build your own community of contacts at home and abroad.

Step 2: Understand yourself

I’ve sorted the common reasons for switching careers into three levels, from shallow to deep:

An outside pull draws you toward a change

New kinds of jobs keep appearing, like running your own media channel or organizing group buys, both of which have boomed in recent years. Or you might stumble on an opportunity you didn’t know existed; some humanities graduates, for example, consider becoming engineers. The outside conditions that come with these new turns in life make you eager to try a switch.

Choosing based on your abilities

This motive goes a bit deeper. Every few years at work, you’ll notice your skill tree has grown, and you may even have developed expertise that’s hard to replace. If you plan to keep growing in that direction, ask yourself: What exactly are you good at? What value can you offer? Does anyone need that value?

After you’ve confirmed your abilities and value, don’t forget to look at where the industry is heading, so you can feel more confident about your choice.

You’ve found what you really want to do

If you know what you want and have found what you really want to do, congratulations: this is the best time to make your move.

The first level is driven by outside factors, and the second by a skill tree that pushes you toward what you’re good at. This third level is the real internal drive. Nothing matters more than finding the work you love doing.

Of course, this assumes you’ve thought seriously about what you really want and what you want to do, and that you’re willing to put your passion and energy into it. If you picture these three levels as three big circles, the closer they move together, the more at ease you’ll be.

That’s what I wanted to share about understanding yourself. Use these levels of motivation to sort out your reasons and thinking, and never choose your future direction based only on an outside pull. I used to see stories about Silicon Valley engineers earning huge salaries all the time, and I nearly threw myself into learning programming before I knew whether I was good at it or even liked it.

In short, self-reflection and self-awareness matter a lot. When you prepare for behavioral interview questions, go one level deeper: how could you have done better back then, and what really made you do it in the first place?

Step 3: Pivot

Once you understand the company, the role, and yourself, the next step is to find the gap between where you are now and where you want to be, then make a plan to learn what’s missing.

The first two steps already make it much clearer how to pivot. A quick word on the term first. A pivot is the central point or axis something turns on, and the axis really is the most important part of the idea. When you want to change your career or your life, think of it as a pivot: one foot stays planted as the axis while the other steps into a new field. The foundation and experience you built in your original field then give you an advantage when you pivot into the new one. (Jumping with both feet at once ignores the advantages your past experience gives you.)

There are three common kinds of pivot:

• A change in what you do
• A change in where you work (for example, moving from Taiwan to the US)
• A change in industry (for example, I started out in consulting and later moved to tech)

Once people know about these three pivots, they often see a single pivot as doable or fairly easy. If I want to change location but keep the same function and industry, for example, that may be easier. Two pivots at once can be very challenging, so you need to prepare early and deal with as many of the likely obstacles as you can in advance. Pulling off all three at once is seriously impressive: you change what you do, switch industries, and move to a new location in one go.

My own switch is an example: I made all three pivots, moving from Taipei to Beijing and from consulting to tech as an account manager. In consulting I was a risk advisory consultant, and at Google I’m an account manager, so the titles and the work are very different. Even so, I leaned heavily on my consulting experience when I made the switch, including pitches and presentations and solving client problems, to show I had already built the business skills an account manager needs.

To sum up, try not to throw away your past skills entirely. Learn a new skill that amplifies the ones you have. Once you understand how a pivot works, you can see the challenges coming and tackle them one by one.

Step 4: Execute with purpose

With the first three steps in place, the last one is to do everything with purpose. Two years before my switch, at an online talk, I said in front of everyone: “I want to work as a consultant at Deloitte for a while, then move into tech.”

Early on, I knew which skills I needed to build there to have a chance at moving into tech, so I could focus on learning them and get the most out of that job.

At work, we need to keep updating ourselves so we stay “in demand.” Imagine an iPhone whose price keeps rising while its features never change. Would you buy it? Once you know what you’re passionate about, you have to build the skills the market needs. Think of yourself as a product and of yourself as its product manager. The product needs constant updates, and you need to find what makes it unique and where its strengths are!

You can also play the interviewer yourself. After reading your resume or hearing your answer, would the interviewer ask, “So what?”

If you complete the three steps above, find the gaps between you and what the company needs, close them one by one, and then act with purpose, you have a very good chance of landing your dream job or reaching your goal.

I hope you found this useful. If you’re interested in growing efficiently, you can subscribe on YouTube. I plan to post a new video every week!