Craft a Job-Ready GitHub Profile to Land Your Next Interview

In this article, I'm going to be sharing some tips with you that will allow you to make your GitHub profile ready for job applications. We're going to make it look all nice and smooth, so when you're applying for those jobs, you're going to increase your chances of getting an interview.

We all know that when we're applying for jobs, we need to have a banging CV. After interviewing a lot of people recently, one mistake that a lot of developers make is not trying to make themselves stand out from the crowd. We all put links to our GitHub; however, it's very common that when you actually click on those links, those profiles don't stand out. What I'm going to do in the next few minutes is show you how to set up your GitHub profile for success.

Optimizing Your Profile Homepage

Let's walk through the profile home page first, as that's probably key.

First, let's start with the mundane and boring stuff; however, this is really key. On the left-hand side of your profile, you have all your profile information.

• Profile Image: You can see a big image. This image should be a business-professional image. This shouldn't be you trying to show off your six-pack abs or a picture of you on a beach. This should be a profile image that you would use at your place of business. Simple.
• Name: You also want to use your own name. The name that you're applying for the job with should be your name. It shouldn't be a handle like "g-dog" or "schnizzel-mizzle." This should be your actual name because you want to look professional.
• Bio: We also need some blurb. What I suggest you do is get the first line of your CV, copy and paste it, and put it in there. Job done—a professional-looking blurb.
• Links & Location: You can also put a link to your website if you've got one, and hopefully, you do. You should also put your location, so your future employer knows where you live, because that's also very important.

Key Sections for Employers

Back on the profile overview, we've got several main sections, and I think these are the ones that a lot of your employers will look at.

Contributions in the Last Year

I think this one's really important. If I want to hire someone, I don't want to hire someone who's just going to do a 9-to-5, then swan off and not really care about what they do. I want to work with people who really care about what they do. I think one way that you can show an employer that you care about programming and you genuinely enjoy it is to do some coding in your own time. If you can show that you're making regular contributions to your own GitHub, to me, this means that you actually like what you do, and you've got a bigger chance of making it to an interview.

Pinned Favorite Projects

The next thing we've got are our pinned favorite projects. These are several of your favorite projects that you want to show off to your employer. Obviously, to do this, you just need to click on the "Customize your pins" button right at the top. Just pick the projects you think are the coolest.

Now, obviously, you might be sitting there going, "I haven't got a profile, I've got no code, what should I show people?" What I suggest you do is find some project tutorials online. You can search for "JavaScript projects" or "C# projects," whatever you're doing. You can find tutorials to build a clock, Candy Crush, and most of these tutorials will take you about an hour. Go through there, find some interesting ones or ones that you're really interested in—it might be AI, game development, or C#—whatever it is. Go through numerous tutorials, put those within your repository, and you're going to have several things to show off.

The Profile Intro Blurb

The final thing in this overview page is this intro blurb. This is a fairly new feature in GitHub. Creating this is probably not as intuitive as you think. To create your own, you want to get your GitHub profile name. Then, you want to create a new repository. The name of your repository should mirror your profile name.

Inside that repository, you just need a readme.md file. In here, you can go in, write some markdown, and add in your profile information or your welcome text. This will then automatically show in your overview as soon as you commit and push that branch into master.

With about five minutes' worth of effort, we now have a very professional-looking GitHub overview profile page.

Structuring Your Repositories

The next thing you need to do is put that same level of detail into your repositories. Let's go through and have a look at how we can do that.

Clicking on the repositories tab, you might see over 100 repos. The more repos you have, probably the more you're going to show off to the employer that you care about what you do. One thing you might notice when scrolling through repositories is that for each one, there's a name using a consistent naming convention, a description, and tags.

The way that you can add in all this extra information about your repositories is to click on it, go to the "About" section at the top right, and click on the little settings icon. This should give you a repository details editing page.

• Website: I suggest you always have a website for each one of your repos so people can actually see the working thing. If you don't know how to do this, look at Netlify, because this will be super simple for you JavaScript users out there.
• Topics: You can add topics. Tag in any programming language that you're using, so "javascript," "css," and then just put a simple description.

I suggest that you go through and do this for every single repository so you have that nice, uniform look where everything looks very similar.

The Importance of a Good README

One thing which is also key is giving people more information about your project. I use a standard template that I created myself to do this. If you look at any of my repositories, you can see that my readmes are structured very similarly.

For each and every repository within your profile, you want to create yourself this readme.md file. In here, you should include:

• A name for the project.
• A detailed description.
• Ideally, a link to where someone can view it. If you can't have a working demo that you can link to, maybe you can include some screenshots or a GIF. That'll be really good.
• Setup instructions.
• Information on how people can use it.
• If you've made any funky or really good design decisions, you should add those in there.
• An overview of all the different technologies that the project uses, just so someone can go in and have a good understanding of what your project is all about.

This, to me, just screams "attention to detail," and that's really important. It shows quality, that you care about what you do, and that you're a good craftsman or craftswoman. You're actually going to go in and have this level of detail, and for me, this level of detail is the thing which will make you stand out from everyone else.

Diversify Your Projects

As you can see, I've got some games in here that I've created, like Flappy Bird and Pac-Man. I've also got some job interview questions. For example, one project has a README with a specification from an actual job interview question I had to complete a few years ago. It includes the requirements, screenshots, and expected solutions. When people are going to look at you, they can go through and see some of the more intricate code that you've written.

Obviously, you want to have that flair and passion, so you want to have your own projects. Also, it's good to have a mix of a few job interview projects that you can show people what you're all about. This could be things like sorting algorithms, async operations, or whatever it is, but something which actually shows more in-depth things about the technology or framework that you are working with.

Based on these three things, you're actually now nailing the repositories: 1. An "About" section for each repository. 2. A README for each repository. 3. A standardized README template.

Final Thoughts

I am very confident that if you follow these steps outlined in this article, by the end of the process, you're going to have a great-looking GitHub profile page that's also going to dramatically increase the chances that you're going to be asked to attend an interview.

If you're wanting to get your dream job and you have 100 people applying for it, you have got to be willing to put in the extra effort and work harder than those other people in order to get to the interview stages. You need to be confident that you're doing everything that you physically can to get that interview, and making sure that you have a great GitHub profile page is one way of doing that.

Again, if you're struggling for project ideas, go research some stuff and start creating projects. This is going to get you well on your way to getting that dream job.