Reading candidates’ GitHub profilers

time to read 3 min | 418 words

We are hiring again (this time for Junior C# Dev positions in Israel). That means that I go through CVs (quite a few, actually).  I like going over the resumes directly, to get a feel for not just a particular candidate but what is, for lack of a better term, the state of the market.

This time, I noticed a much higher percentage of resumes with a GitHub repository link. Anytime that I see such a link, I go and look at what they have there. That is often really interesting. Then again, you run into things like this:

image

On the one hand, this is non production code, it is obviously a teaching project, which is awesome. On the other hand, I find such code painful to look at.

In the past, I would rate highly anyone that would show a GitHub account in the CV, since I could expect to see some of their projects there, usually unique ones. This time? I’m seeing a lot of basically homework assignments, and those aren’t really that interesting to review or look at. Especially since a lot of the candidates apparently had the same courses, so I saw the same 5 projects repeated over and over again.

In other words, just a GitHub account with some repositories are no longer that interesting or meaningful.

Another thing that I noticed was that a lot of those candidates had profiles with profile pictures like:

image

A small tip, if you expect people to visit your profile (and I assume you do, since you provided the link in the resume), it is worth it to put a (professional) picture of yourself there. The profiler readme on GitHub is also surprising attractive when looking at a candidate.

Another tip, if you see a position for a C# Junior Developer, it is acceptable to apply if you don’t have all the requirements, or if you exceed them. But if you are trying to find a new job as a lawyer specializing in family law, maybe don’t try to apply to a tech company.

And yes, I’m using this post as a want to vent while going over so many CVs.

Most CVs are dry, but one candidate just got bumped to the next stage based solely on the fact that in they had a “Making awesome pancakes” in the CV, which made me laugh.