I've been told in the past that I'm smart, have a lot of potential, and work hard. After years of being screwed over and passed over by the company, I no longer work hard. On paper I have the right credentials. I present myself well in interviews. I usually ace the behavioral portion because I know what they want hear and my past experiences provide ample scenarios to choose from. But that doesn't change the fact that I've been conditioned not to trust my employer and that my hard work will be unrewarded. So I probably won't try hard at my next job either.
- situational thinking / problem analysis (what do you assume, why do you assume it, how do you clarify extremely vague questions)
- culture fit (are you going to get along with everyone else on the team)
- curiosity / willingness to learn / change tracks as the group/company's needs change through time
Everything else is tertiary at best
Side projects outside their "lane" are far more interesting to me (eg you're a Rust developer and on the side breed cornish game hens, for example) - demonstrating that you're "an and"[0] shows you can draw from multiple fields to find solutions
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Checking for "senior" skills doesn't make sense however, everyone learns different things from their experience, if you gatekeep based on things you learned as a senior then you will miss out on a lot of experience in things you didn't experience yourself, it is much better to just test for good core attributes and value their years of experience based on those, as other than that there is no way to properly evaluate high level senior level skills unless they have the exact same skills as you.