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Nine years into his education career, Keith Anderson was fed up with his job as an adjunct teacher.
“It was low pay, no insurance, and no sense of community,” Anderson told Business Insider.
He dreamed of leaving his $27,000 salary behind and working at a Big Tech company like Google. His friends and family told him that someone whose career experience was almost solely in education would never get an interview at a Magnificent 7 company.
Anderson ignored them and applied to every role he could find at Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Netflix. He also applied to many tech startups. His initial efforts ended in disappointment.
“I applied to about 100 jobs but didn’t hear a word back. I was devastated,” he said.
Anderson hired a career coach to help him understand what he was doing wrong
The coach was equally discouraging. He said Anderson lacked the traditional background of Big Tech hires and recommended he pivot to another education role, which shook Anderson’s confidence.
He tried again by hiring a résumé writer who created a polished, ATS-friendly, keyword-heavy résumé. After blasting it out to even more Magnificent 7 job postings, he still heard crickets.
Anderson tried using LinkedIn to cold message more than 50 Google employees. Most ignored him, and when someone did respond, he struggled to keep the conversation going.
Next, he looked for community
Many of his teacher friends were also dissatisfied and exploring new career paths. A small group began meeting monthly to support and review each other’s résumés.
Anderson also started attending tech networking events and connecting with people transitioning from other industries, such as nonprofits. “I was genuinely curious about their journeys, so I often asked to see their résumés to better understand how they framed their experience and told their story,” Anderson said.
He noticed that while all of the résumés were polished and loaded with impact-driven metrics, none of them adequately expressed that there was a unique person behind the accolades.
This realization led Anderson to try these four résumé strategies, ultimately landing him a Google job.
1. Adding a quirky ‘Interests’ section and placing it at the top
Anderson realized that no one would likely open a door for him unless they first felt comfortable with him. He reworked his résumé to reflect his authentic personality. He added an ‘Interests’ section and placed it at the top.
“This made sense to me because when I’d first meet someone, I’d share some unique tidbits about myself to build a warm first impression,” Anderson said.
He also went beyond listing generic interests and strove to highlight specific details that couldn’t be associated with anyone else.
“Instead of saying things like ‘I enjoy cooking,’ I shared that I entered a pie contest and came in 3rd place,” Anderson said. “That small, quirky detail made me stick out and made me human.”
2. Including tech phrases and terminology
Anderson realized he needed to be able to speak the industry lingo he used in his résumé confidently. While the writer he’d hired had filled his résumé with all the right buzzwords for the tech industry, it created a new problem.
“I didn’t know how to actually talk about my experience in the language of the tech world during phone screens,” Anderson said. “This caused me to stall in the interview process because I sounded disconnected from the résumé I’d submitted.”
He started listening to talks, interviews, and meetings with influential people in the tech industry. He wrote down key phrases and terminology that he’d hear repeatedly and rewrote his résumé using those exact terms.
“I wanted the language to feel natural so that when I spoke during interviews, it would align with how the hiring managers were already talking,” he said.
3. Crafting a unique selling point
Anderson needed to create a unique selling point that helped showcase his educational background as an asset, not a liability.
“I realized that the combination of my creative background — education, writing, and linguistics — and the analytical, technical side I was building made me a more valuable candidate,” he said.
Anderson chose the phrase “Creative + Code” to communicate his brand. He made it a big part of the messaging on his LinkedIn and portfolio and included it in his résumé’s summary section in bold.
“Creative” represented his ability to teach, communicate, solve problems, and bring a fresh perspective. “Code” represented his technical and analytical skills, which he developed through coursework and self-study in front-end development coding.
4. Writing for the right audience
Anderson realized he needed to craft his résumé with a clear audience rather than targeting it more generally.
Since he was applying to roles at Google Hardware, he studied the types of problems those teams were facing and adjusted his résumé to show how his skills could solve those specific pain points.
“I gravitate toward new technology, so I became really excited about the team and project at Google when it opened.”
Once he began focusing on the audience and the specific challenges they were hiring to solve, he finally started gaining traction. He adjusted his résumé to tailor it for each role he applied to.
These tweaks landed him a job at Google
After one recruiter screening, six rounds of interviews, and a project, Google offered Anderson a job as a web developer in 2015.
He stayed at Google for two years before joining Meta, Uber, DoorDash, and the telehealth startup Calibrate. In 2022, Anderson left Big Tech to start his own career coaching company, Career Alchemy.
Anderson said his Google manager told him he was hired because of his perspective, not because of his experience, and he offered a unique combination of skills they didn’t realize they needed until he showed them.
“Landing a job at Google wasn’t about being the most qualified,” Anderson said. “It was about clearly positioning myself as the solution to a problem they didn’t even know they had.”
Do you have a story to share about breaking into Big Tech? Contact this editor at [email protected].
