Kevin Wang

Founder, Mentors in Tech

Kevin Wang is the founder of Mentors in Tech, a program that helps overlooked tech students at smaller, less well known, accessible and affordable colleges navigate and launch their careers through structured industry mentorships, integrated open source capstone projects, and tailored recruitment.

Mentors in Tech’s work has been recognized as one of the 20 Promising Practices to Advance Quality, Equity, and Success in Community College Baccalaureate Degree Programs by the Community College Baccalaureate Association. MinT has also been featured on the Clayton Christensen Institute blog as well as Microsoft Alumni News. MinT is the recipient of the 2023 GeekWire Geeks Give Back Award and MinT’s work with partner community colleges was published at 2024 ACM SIGCSE.

Prior to MinT, Kevin founded the Microsoft TEALS Program that has helped over 1,000 high schools in the US, Canada, and Mexico build diverse, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable CS programs. Kevin’s work in TEALS has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, Geekwire, and Univision. The founding and growth of TEALS is the subject of a Yale School of Management case study.

Kevin has a BS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, and a graduate degree in education from Harvard.

3:15 PM (PDT) - 3:55 PM (PDT)

Poker Stage

Beyond the Resume: Identifying AI-Ready Candidates Before the Interview

University recruiters are drowning in applications, and AI slop resumes have made the signal-to-noise problem significantly worse. Every candidate claims similar skills, lists similar projects, and uses the same language. The cost of a bad early-stage decision: wasted interview slots and new-grad hires who struggle to contribute in an AI-ready world where the baseline expectation has shifted dramatically.
This panel will discuss frameworks for predicting new-grad success in an AI-integrated workplace. Drawing on a peer-reviewed study of dozens of tech hiring managers, we'll walk through the 7 traits they most consistently associate with high-performing new graduates, and what separates AI-ready ""company hires"" (someone talented, coachable, and positioned to grow) from a candidate who will plateau quickly.
Panelists will share how companies have retrained their screening process to surface these traits before a single interview is scheduled.
Attendees will leave with specific, practical tools:
Which resume signals reliably indicate genuine project experience versus AI-assisted padding.
Screening call questions that reveal coachability and problem-solving capabilities.
How to spot the 7 hiring manager traits in a resume/conversation, and how project-based work, open source contributions, and event participation can serve as stronger proxies for potential than GPA or coursework alone.