[stmchn]

I think you hit the nail on the head here and probably why so many engineering jobs are gained through personal referrals instead of cold resumes. I know that's how I got hired at most of the companies I've worked at.

The company I work at building a way to capture those recommendations and that concept of trust through peer-to-peer reviews: https://www.roikoi.com/

The site asks you to play a anonymously game comparing your most relevant coworkers to one another and a users' score is generated by their aggregate results from their coworkers playing the game. It essentially crowdsources gauging those qualities that can't be gathered from a resume.

[Terr_]

Sounds like it'd be hard to get statistical relevance in most companies...

[victortrac]

The nice thing about ROIKOI (disclaimer: I also work there) is that we don't need all signals to be from your current company. We get signals from previous companies, people you've gone to school with, and people you may know in your city.

All of the leaderboards for the companies that I worked for are all top notch folks I would hire in a heartbeat, so so far our output has been fantastic.