I'm not directly involved in hiring decisions, but I do field resumes and then participate in interviews and rate candidates afterward. There really is no one thing I'm looking for on a resume.

Honestly 95% of all resumes look the same to me regardless of the past experience of the candidate, especially if they've been groomed and polished by an outside recruiter or consulting agency... You get the usual 7 - 15 year track record of past employers along with a tag cloud of about 20 different technologies that they all claim to have used.

I actually think that a well written and concise resume makes a better impression on me than one the typical me-to know-it-all resumes that consume 10 printed pages. If someone mentions their primary responsibilities and a brief description of major project(s) for a postition, then that tells me more than simply listing a big name company and a dozen skills.

Of course university degree(s) or certification(s) is one way to objectively differentiate candidates, but I'm not sure how reliable an indicator that is for predicting the performance of one candidate over another. I personally don't have a four year degree (so I'm biased on the side of not seeing it as a requirement), but I do have an (old) certification and am working on a new one. I've never reccomended a candidate based on their certification, but they would tend to do better during the interview, because I ask certification type questions, so they would benefit indirectly in that way. By the time we get around to interviewing a candidate, I've already forgotton wether they have a certification, and my impression based solely on what's said during the interview.

During the interview, I'll say: "Tell me about the project you're currently working on.". I'll listen to their narrative closely, and I expect them to go into detail. I'll then ask maybe a half dozen followup questions like: "Really, how much record volume do you injest on a typical day?" and "Wow, merging 100 million records in a single run is a lot of data, so how do you monitor the performance, and what design considerations did you take into consideration to optimize performance of these loads?". I may go back and forth like this for 15 or 20 minutes. It's at that point I'll know wether the guy is a real ETL developer or just some schmuck with a padded resume a list of memorized SQL Server interview answers.