Goldman Sachs' HR chief is leaving to join a tech startup. Here's the interview question he'll ask every job candidate to test their creativity - and the type of answer he's looking for.

• Interview questions about solving tough problems can reveal a candidate's creativity.
• That's according to Dane Holmes, Goldman Sachs' HR chief. Holmes is leaving at the end of the year to join the HR tech startup Eskalera.
• Holmes will test Eskalera job candidates for creativity, and specifically the ability to connect seemingly disparate ideas.

After 18 years at Goldman Sachs, HR chief Dane Holmes is leaving to become CEO of the brand-new tech startup Eskalera.

Holmes has built his entire career on Wall Street. He spent the last few years leading Goldman's HR division, where he prioritized diversity in recruiting. Now he's leading Eskalera's efforts to help tech and finance organizations improve their performance by building diverse, inclusive workplaces.

When Holmes starts hiring at Eskalera (right now there are 13 employees listed on the company website), he'll look for the same traits he sought in Goldman job candidates: curiosity, drive, and humility.

Beyond that, Holmes told Business Insider, he wants to know that every new hire is "immensely creative." Eskalera aims to "do things that haven't been done before, or haven't been done that way before," Holmes added. Unconventional ideas are a must.

To that end, Holmes said, he'll share with job candidates a difficult problem that Eskalera might face and ask how they'd approach it. While there's no single right answer, Holmes will be listening for evidence that the person draws from a broad set of resources to solve a problem.

Holmes said he's hiring for creativity at Eskalera because the startup is still very much in the "build" and "expand" stages. He doesn't yet know what the company can become.

But many executives before Holmes have drawn a link between creative thinking and professional success, regardless of your specific organization or industry. And there's reason to believe that creativity will become even more important. A 2018 World Economic Forum report projects that, as technical tasks are increasingly automated in the next four years, people who are excited about solving any problem creatively will shine.

If you want to stay employable, you'll need to think about what you can do better than a robot.

Holmes wants people who can 'draw a wide circle' when solving problems

Eskalera is part of super{set}, a startup studio founded by Tom Chavez and Vivek Vaiyda, who previously sold companies to Salesforce and Microsoft. The company creates technology to help medium- and large-sized businesses develop more inclusive hiring and overall HR practices.

One product, Eskalera Engage, uses artificial intelligence to measure an organization's D&I practices and how employees are feeling generally. Organizations can see that analysis displayed on a dashboard, and use the data to inform key business decisions.

Once he takes the reins at Eskalera, Holmes will be searching specifically for people who can "draw a wide circle." Here's what that might look like:

Say a job candidate is prompted to consider an issue with a car. In order to find a solution, that candidate could draw from the way scientists had solved a biological problem.

"You didn't look at how everybody in the auto industry tried to deal with it," Holmes said. "You tried to break the problem down to what the issues are and then figure out if there were lessons to be learned from other things that might seem tangential."

Connecting seemingly different ideas is a key to professional success

With this hypothetical example, Holmes is really describing evidence of convergent thinking.

An article on Frontiers for Young Minds (a scientific journal written for kids by adult scientists) says convergent thinking happens when "you combine multiple, sometimes very different, pieces of information and find one solution/thing that links them." The article shares an example of a way to measure convergent thinking skills: Can you think of a word that links the words "blue," "cake," and "cottage?" ("Cheese" is one good answer.)

Steve Jobs had his own definition of convergent thinking. "Creativity is just connecting things," Jobs is often quoted as saying. "When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while."

That's what happened to the team behind "Frozen," Disney's 2013 mega-hit. (The sequel debuted this month.) As journalist Charles Duhigg describes in his book "Smarter Faster Better," the team took two tropes that had succeeded with Disney's audience before - princesses and relationships between sisters - and combined them in a single film in which the princess sisters (spoiler alert) rescue each other. Duhigg calls it "seeing old ideas in new ways."

Holmes said he'll sometimes look for evidence of creativity on a candidate's résumé, specifically how they describe nontraditional approaches to work. Someone who can articulate the unifying theme behind their different jobs in, say, sales and engineering might also be able to generate new strategies for building a software tool.

Being able to solve problems creatively has helped bolster Holmes' career at Goldman. "I was always excited about those opportunities" to revitalize a part of the organization, he said, "and that dynamic was more valuable to me than the subject matter."