As a tech company recruiter, what are the first few things that you try to look for in a resume of a computer science student?

Every company recruits differently and has a different recruiting bar. This is not a one size fits all approach to resume screening, but might help you get at least one perspective. Here are a few things I go through, in that order... Intern Roles: 1. Calibre of school and GPA along with transcripts     NOTE: I see if you did Computer Science or EECS, a BA or a BS, Computer Engineering or Information Systems (not CS per se, so then I have to look at transcripts to see if you did the CS foundational course work) 2. High School accomplishments if you are a rising freshman or rising sophomore     E.g. Were you the robotic team's lead programmer or perhaps you participated in math competitions, were a top coder or you won the Intel STS etc 2. Companies you have intern'ed for     Note: I look for the role you took on and projects you worked on. I also try to see if you got an offer to come back as an intern 4. Your projects, accomplishments, activities (do you head up the ACM chapter of your school? etc) Full Time roles: Similar stuff as above Entrepreneurial spirit - did you work for a startup in the past etc.? perhaps founded one? (yes, even when I worked at Google) Reasons for career changes and length of stay Career progression at one company Some of this screening process reveals drive, persistence, passion, initiative and leadership skills, technical depth and personality, i.e. the culture fit. The most intangible part of this process is the gut feeling and only when I look at the resume, I can know if this will be a candidacy I want to invest an engineer's time in. I am quick to get a second opinion from the hiring manager as a few seconds of their time is better than 45 minutes of an engineer's time to screen! Helpful?

For tech companies, recruiters spend on an average 10-15 sec to scan a resume. I have seen a couple of recruiters skimming resume and highlighting the main keywords of their interest. Below are the few things: Technologies that you have worked on which are aligned to the vacancy Previous company where you worked at or interned at Open source contributions or any side projects For students: your school, major, current GPA

School and GPA.  Much has been made of school and GPA not mattering in the long term, but fresh out of school, I've found that they have a good correlation to ability. Experience: particularly coding skills/languages, projects, internships, and code samples.  One point I'll make is that if you've only got class projects, it'll be difficult to compete with others that have more.  Internships give us a way to calibrate you to others and check references.  Sometimes a seemingly unrelated skill may be of interest to the company (e.g. door-to-door sales or cold calling). Attitude.  A resume is fundamentally a self-assessment.  If your assessment of yourself falls short of what the company's representatives think of you, you won't get an offer.  The most common issue is weak claims about "proficiency," "mastery," or "expert level" at some topic or skill, often programming languages.

3 simple things: Internships School GPA There are 100 other things that I could look at but that basically tells me immediately if I need to spend more than the 5-7 second pass at a resume.  If I go deeper I'll look for other things like open source contributions, if you had a GitHub page with code that an engineer on my team can review, etc.

1. Your most recent work experience and technologies used 2. For the past 6 months - 2 years, what technologies have been used 3. Length of stay at a given company 4. School/Major/GPA