What IT managers look for that never makes it into a job ad

Ask an IT manager what the ad said and they will paraphrase it. Ask what made them hire the person they hired and you get something quite different.

Escalation instinct comes up almost every time: knowing the point at which continuing to work the problem alone is the wrong call. It is rarely taught and almost never advertised.

Documentation is the second. A team that has been burned by an undocumented system will screen for whether you write things down before they screen for a tool.

Third is calm under an incident. Not heroics, but the opposite. The candidate who describes a Sev-1 in flat, sequential detail is describing competence.