Obvious answer: You probably can't identify the good ones without actually testing them. I worked at an oil services company where I fairly regularly interview

Obvious answer: You probably can't identify the good ones without actually testing them. I worked at an oil services company where I fairly regularly interviewed candidates. I was 180 degrees wrong on every interview I did. The bad ones turned out good, and the good ones turned out bad. I would not, knowing what I know now, bother with anything else except a chat with some managers, and a some pseudo-code testing of the kinds of problems I'd expect a computer science grad to be able to solve. This opinion is backed up by a basic training course for some new hires I gave recently, where my ranking basically flipped around from my first impressions, and the guys with actual real ability didn't really float to the top until after about 10 or 12 hours of training / evaluation. However, this could be shortened easily into an interview format. There's a lot of people who hide their light under a bushel, and a lot of people who talk a good game, but are basically just warm bodies.