1) Work experience. 2) Educational pedigree.

There's also the idea you should hire a program lead who does have demonstrated experience, and let them do the technical interviews of their underlings...

At the companies I've worked for doing scientific programming work, during my interview I had to give a presentation to the engineering team over lunch concerning a technical problem and take questions. If a candidate was a fresh graduate we had a requirement they have 1) a Master's and 2) they would present on any research papers they had published, UNLESS 3) they had interned at our company and everyone liked them, then they could skip the Master's requirement.

I wonder how academic publishers feel about this growing trend to require not just a degree, but now peer-reviewed, published, research papers to get a job. The sentiment behind it is, of course, if you’re really smart, you would be published, so if we look for people who are published, we know they’re smart. The reality, though, is that once this catches on, journals are going to be flooded (even more than they already are) with desperate attempts to get something, anything, with somebody’s name on it since that’s another checkbox they have to tick before they can eat. Just like what happened with higher education.

Going into more detail isn't something that a non-technical manager type would be able to do.