3. Focus on Creativity and Diversity You should look for people with creative ideas, not just the ones who can do the coding quickly. They should be able to solve things when given something fuzzy or incomplete. One way to identify the creative talent is to enquire about their outside activities. You can also analyze it by looking at how they draw out their thoughts on a piece of paper on a given puzzle or a design question. Not only the extensive knowledge that is necessary for programmers, but they should possess the quality of diversity or in other words, they should be able to apply their knowledge from one field to another.