Ask HN: What do recruiters look for in a GitHub profile?

I would hazard a guess that most pure recruiters aren't looking at your GitHub profile other than ensuring that you've provided one. The hiring manager or interview team, however, might be interested in it.

Here are some things that I check for in a GitHub profile, as a hiring manager and as a recruiter (hooray startup roles!):

1. Repos that aren't just forks. I've seen plenty of profiles where the majority or entirety of repos are forks. Unless there's some annotation that talks about contribution to those projects, I assume that those forks don't contain any actual development.

2. Code past the boilerplate. A lot of projects start with enormous boilerplate, checked-in node_modules, and large-app scaffolding. The README should have a pointer that says "actual code is in src/app/site" or something, otherwise I click around for where the commit message is something other than "initial commit".

3. A real README.md. Bonus points for README.md in the subdirectories.

4. A "real" photo of you. LinkedIn profile pictures tend to be very professional and buttoned-up (sometimes literally). Most GH profile photos in my experience are a closer of the real person though. You're more likely to see a casual photo, a hobby, someone's dog, a photo of their art, etc. When that person is working with you, they're going to act more like their GitHub profile photo than their LinkedIn profile photo. Conversely, when I don't see a profile photo, that's concerning.

5. Nothing too boring, or too creative, in the name. The era of screen-name judging is not over, and you will get judged based on your GitHub handle. John35082192 makes me think that John reluctantly created a GitHub account and loathes using it. XxCodeMurdererGoatSlayerJohnnyXx makes me think that John is a bit of a weirdo, and his code reviews may be... uncomfortable.

6. Stars. If your real repos have real stars (or even forks), that means that not only have you creating something cool, but you've created something useful, and marketed it at least somewhat well. NB: repo stars are not expected for professional-profile style repos, only if you're creating something for an actual OSS community.

7. A real github.io page/repo. Maybe this is the basis of your professional profile, maybe there's a link to a personal website in your profile, but I am interested in seeing how you present yourself beyond which repos you show first.

My GitHub/GitLab profiles are full of hacky, ugly games written at game jams in 48 hours, often just by me or me plus some artist, with just one end-goal: to be able to present it at the end of the event. A README file is the last thing needed there :P

When interviewing devs, I always check GH profile. If its empty it's usually a read flag (meaning that I will have to do more work during the interview). Coding samples, contributions graph, personal projects can push a candidate forward very fast.

Worth to note: GitHub itself does NOT matter, the contents your profile and you contributions do. Prefer GitLab? awesome! Just don't forget to put it in your resume.

What’s wrong with not having a profile photo?

FWIW, as a woman, I leave my photo off github to avoid the assumptions people make when they know someone’s gender. In fact, there’s research to back that up: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/data-...

And some of us are contributing to private repos hosted on bitbucket or gitlab. Just saying.