There's a lot of interesting research on "judging character". I particularly recall reading in "Thinking, Fast and Slow" (Kahneman) that subjective judgement was consistently worse than even relatively arbitrary objective judgements. I believe this study was conducted in army recruitment and so obviously may not be universal. Very thought-provoking notetheless.

EDIT: ... that's not to cast any aspersions on any particular people involved here, I'm just trying to make a general point that "intuition" or "judgment" may not actually be as good as we think they are.

I really liked her take on her judging interactions, especially during the technical conversations. I think having an outside (even slightly outside) perspective is incredibly useful

They have written books on the subject:

http://guykawasaki.com/you_have_to_lov/