What objective criteria can be used in staffing a project with engineers? Being a project manager what objective criteria do you use when recruiting new technical engineers to your project? Typically their resumes are full of magic buzz words. How to select the right person, objectively?

Give them a sample problem or set of problems to solve.

These should be generated by senior members of the team they'll be working with and they should relate to the type of projects they'll be working on.