I'm walking to interview people for internship from renowned technical institute here in India. What are the approaches I should take in interviewing to identify their hacker quotient?
To clarify, the internship will be into technical -- identification and implementation of user behavior analysis, statistics and pattern algorithms.
These are done at home before the interview - I don't think we need to worry about anyone getting outside help to get a perfect answer. With the amount of bad/mediocre answers the onesI'm looking for tend to really stand out. And issues can be verified at the interview.
The trick is to invite people to go as far as they want instead of giving strict boundaries. And lots of time. If it should take an hour to complete, give out a couple of days before the interview anyway. If the answer is really good, the interviewed person will be able to talk for hours about the details.
I'd avoid a maximal test as a basis for your decision. It's fine to test to make sure a potential intern has the technical knowledge to succeed, but studies have shown that given a familiarity with the subject, real world ability is largely not correlated with being able to do really well on a test of how fast/smart they are on a test. What seems to be a good predictor is something called grit... Basically how well a person deals with setbacks, keeps moving, perseveres etc. You should ask about setbacks and challenges they have faced and how they dealt with them.
I recall that there are grit assessment tools like questionnaires; I know West Point recently began to use one for it's cadet applicants. There may be one available online.
Remember that good hackers may be introverted, shy, or lack social skills. People have inherent biases against such people, tending to think of them as less intelligent and capable. Also remember that people have a bias and will rate more attractive people as smarter, more competent etc. Try to be aware of these inherent biases. so you pick the best candidate on their ability and merits.
Hope that is helpful.
You could explicitly ask for open source projects they have contributed too (or that they are following).