I want team players with drive, who takes initiative, who are willing to learn as they go and who will speak up and tell me when I’m wrong. People with integrity and principles.
I’m looking out for warning signals. People who will say “that’s not my job”. Small things. People who are too sure of themselves or small things such if they bring their coffe cup with them out of the interview or not.
I don’t want people who pretend that they know answers to questions they do not. I’d like them to say I don’t know at least once during the interview.
On the technical side I look for people who can tell me about real problems they have faced in real projects. How they handled that situation. How they approach troubleshooting and debugging in general. I want to hear how they talk about software in general. I want them to not be fundamentalists in any direction. I want people who can see both the positive and the negative aspects of concepts like OOP, functional programming, unit testing or whatever it might be. I want them to be able to argue both for and against different ways of solving problems.
And that’s just the start of it. Hope it helps.