Since graduating from college in 2016, Chris Hsiao dreamed of working as a product manager.
He started his career as a consultant and set about securing a product manager role. Hsiao was excited about learning how to take a product from ideation to execution and says landing the Microsoft gig in 2021 was a “huge win.”
“I just really wanted to get this product manager role one day, and when I finally did, for the first six months, it just felt unreal to me,” Hsiao, who is based in San Francisco, told Business Insider.
He previously worked as a project manager at Facebook, but said joining Microsoft felt like a “completely new stint.”
Hsiao was part of the team that worked on Microsoft Designer, a tool that helps creators generate graphics.
He left Microsoft to become an entrepreneur after two and a half years and said his career progression has been helped by prioritizing growth as a core value.
“I attribute many of my successes so far to having the courage to grow and be different from my past self,” Hsiao said. “Be different if you want different results. In that way, landing a new job role or starting a new business ends up just becoming a side effect of who you are.”
Here’s the résumé he used to land a job at Microsoft:
Chris Hsiao
Preparing for interviews at Microsoft
Hsiao believes that having Facebook on his résumé helped him be considered for roles at other Big Tech companies such as Microsoft.
He said hiring managers look for prospective product managers who can talk to customers, understand what they’re looking for in a product, and then execute.
“I thought I was missing real-world experience with building a product from scratch and getting it into the hands of consumers, so I started an e-commerce business with my girlfriend in the pandemic called Made Space,” he said.
Hsiao spoke about the startup, which designed and sold merchandise online, during his interviews with Microsoft.
The hiring process at Facebook and Microsoft both involved multiple interview rounds that contained both behavioral and situational questions.
The kinds of questions that came up included: “If a peer on your team is not performing well, what would you do?” Another was: “Can you describe a time where you overcame a challenge and, if you had three teams and stakeholders wanting different things, how do you complete your objective?”
“They were testing me on how I would work with a team, my thinking in how I would overcome challenges and it seemed like they wanted to know how I would handle hypothetical scenarios,” Hsiao said.
Three priorities
For every interview, he would practice questions he thought would come up after creating a list. He also found an online test question repository that gives users practice questions and answers.
“It was like reps — I did that over and over again,” he said. “I think your chance of being successful and landing a job will go up drastically if you hit these three priority areas: showing you are structured in your logic, that you can take in information and provide an insightful answer.”
Got a story to share about your personal résumé journey? Email this reporter at jmann@businessinsider.com
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