For technical roles, hiring managers look for prior experience using directly related technologies. For recent college grads with no prior work experience you c

For technical roles, hiring managers look for prior experience using directly related technologies. For recent college grads with no prior work experience you can still look through actual job postings in your field of interest, pay special attention to the tools and technologies listed in the required experience section, then go try build something with those same tools, and put that project on your resume. It's perfectly valid to list side projects on your resume, it still counts as hands-on experience. Technical hiring managers will want to talk about the project, how did you think of it, how well did it work, etc, they're not going to care as much that no one was paying you to do it, in fact more power to you for showing the creativity and ambition for building it yourself without being instructed to do so. Algorithms only come up in job interviews just to check basic understanding of computer science, but most of the discussion should be on what tools, protocols, and services are you hands-on experienced with, and it doesn't matter if you were paid for it.