As a caveat, I’ll say that evaluating a person by resume alone is fundamentally not possible. I’m not trying to evaluate a person, I’m trying to evaluate “should I spend 90 minutes of eng resources giving a first interview to this person”.

So I don’t take the resume at face value, I trust our experience interviews and reference checks to get a truer measure of these features.

That being said, social trust shows up as being repeatedly given informal leadership roles. Including being trusted to design a system, orchestrate implementation, contribute to roadmapping, or work with non-eng people within the company or customers directly. There are other examples, these just came to mind.

Basically I’m looking for symptoms that their coworkers and managers trust them to do their job independently and with high quality. The theory is that you usually (but not always! which is why you actually interview people) earn this trust by being good at this job.

(Note: my views, not my employers’. I actually don’t make these decisions at my company.)