How to Make Your GitHub Profile Stand Out to Recruiters
Making your GitHub profile stand out is a critical step for developers, especially for recent boot camp graduates entering a competitive job market. With the right approach, your GitHub can become a powerful tool to demonstrate your skills and secure a great job. This article will guide you through optimizing your GitHub profile to catch the eye of recruiters and hiring managers.
Why is a GitHub Profile Important?
Many, if not most, companies use GitHub for source control and as their CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) platform. As such, it's essential for you to know how to use the platform and to demonstrate that you have the skills and know-how in the technologies you're claiming to know.
GitHub is an excellent way to showcase what you've been learning. It's free and provides a great environment to experiment with repositories by forking them, creating your own, making commits, pushing changes, and handling merge requests. This activity demonstrates your practical ability to use the platform.
In this era, a strong online presence is essential to your success as a developer. Using GitHub effectively serves as a digital portfolio. It's a great way to show a snapshot of your skills and acts as an elevator pitch that demonstrates what you know, what you can do, and who you are as a developer.
As a career changer, it's important to highlight not only the skills and technologies you can use but also how to talk about them. GitHub is the perfect place to host and show off your new and improved tech skills and projects. A great GitHub profile can also lead to interesting conversations with people that could possibly get you a job. You can speak to open-source maintainers and enthusiasts about what they're working on, thereby making an immediate connection with someone who could potentially provide you with a job opportunity. Open source is an amazing way to get your first job as well.
What Makes a Good GitHub Profile?
A good GitHub profile starts with a clear photo that showcases your face and a bio that explains what you can do and what you offer.
Monica's GitHub profile is a fantastic example because it's clean, crisp, and clearly communicates who she is while showing a bit of her personality. From her profile, we can see that she is a React developer in the JavaScript community, lives in New York, and can be found on Twitter and her personal blog. She has a brief snippet about herself and over 5+ pinned projects. If you click into each of those projects, you'll see that she has deployed links, clear titles, completed READMEs, and has added topics or tags to each repository, making her more discoverable in search results.
A good profile truly shows your skills and projects and features repositories that are complete. If you're going to pin a repository on your GitHub profile, it needs to have working deployed links with no errors in the console. Hiring managers often right-click, inspect, and check the console for error messages. You also want to have clear titles, a description of the project, and a complete README so that anyone who visits your project knows exactly how to use it if they want to pull it down locally.
The Truth About the Contribution Graph
A good GitHub profile often has a contribution graph that shows consistent progress, but it's important not to over-index on this. The contribution graph is definitely not the most important part of your profile. The most important part is the section that tells your story. You are more than green squares.
Having a profile filled with green squares doesn't tell a hiring manager or a recruiter anything about what you can do as a developer. In fact, commit streaks and green squares can be faked using automated scripts written in Python or JavaScript that you can run in your terminal. Seeing a profile with a lot of green squares doesn't mean the person is coding every day. To get a green square, you just need to push a commit. Someone could type the letter "A" every day, and that would count. It says nothing about their abilities.
Always remember that quality is greater than quantity when it comes to pushing code to GitHub. Focus on your story and how you can convey it to others. Knowing how to talk about your projects, your tech stack, and why you decided to change careers is far more important than worrying about green squares.
What Hiring Managers Really Look For
A hiring manager at GitHub shared this insight: "I look at the resume more than the profile. You don't need a lot of green squares. I mostly look at the projects and what they do." It's most important to have projects that are fully laid out and explained with completed READMEs.
Another hiring manager advised that it's more important to see meaningful activity on your profile. This means if you have a project pinned, they expect to see a README and a link to the deployed project. They may also ask you to perform a pull request (PR) during an interview to demonstrate your understanding of the Git flow.
In conclusion, you are more than green squares. Knowing how to communicate your skills and value is much more important.
Examples of Standout Profiles
Here are a few examples of great profiles:
- Monica's Profile: As mentioned, it's a great model for how to frame your own READMEs, links, and tags.
- Faye Braga's Profile: This profile shows her personality. She uses a function-like structure to describe herself:
pronouns: she/her languages: [JavaScript, HTML, CSS] tools: [React, Node.js, Git] architecture: [REST APIs, Microservices] communities: [Community A, Community B]It also shows what she's currently learning (React and TypeScript) and provides clear links to her Twitter and LinkedIn. - Willan Walker's Profile: He has a very good, clean bio with links to everything. This is a great model for a professional and straightforward profile.
For those in the job market, the goal is to make the information you're communicating to recruiters clear and easy to find.
How to Create a Profile README
A profile README is a great way to add personality to your profile. Here’s how to create one.
Step 1: Create the Special Repository
Create a new repository with a name that exactly matches your GitHub username. GitHub will show you a message indicating that this is a special repository. Make sure to make it public and initialize it with a README file.
Step 2: Use a Template
To get started quickly, you can use a template. Here is a simple and effective template you can copy and paste into your new README.md file.
<div align="center">
<a href="[YOUR-WEBSITE-LINK]">
<img src="[YOUR-BANNER-IMAGE-URL]" alt="Banner">
</a>
</div>
<h1 align="center">Hi there, I'm [Your Name] 👋</h1>
### About Me
I'm a passionate [Your Title] from [Your Location]. I love [Your Passion] and [Another Passion].
- 🔭 I’m currently working on [Your Project Name]
- 🌱 I’m currently learning [Technology/Skill]
- 👯 I’m looking to collaborate on [Project Type]
- 🤔 I’m looking for help with [A Challenge You Have]
- 💬 Ask me about [Topics You Know Well]
- 📫 How to reach me: [Your Email/Social Link]
- 😄 Pronouns: [Your Pronouns]
- ⚡ Fun fact: [A Fun Fact About You]
### My Skills
<!-- Add more skill badges here -->
### Featured Projects
<table>
<tr>
<td width="50%">
<h3 align="center">Project Mona Cat</h3>
<div align="center">
<a href="[PROJECT-DEPLOYED-LINK]" target="_blank"><img src="[PROJECT-IMAGE-URL]" width="400" alt="Project Mona Cat"></a>
<p>
<a href="[PROJECT-REPO-LINK]" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Repository-181717?style=for-the-badge&logo=github&logoColor=white">
</a>
<a href="[PROJECT-DEPLOYED-LINK]" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Live-00BFFF?style=for-the-badge&logo=vercel&logoColor=white">
</a>
</p>
<p>Project Mona Cat is a web app that makes it easy for cats to drink water. Built with JavaScript, this project demonstrates my ability to build a full backend using Node.js and implement CRUD functionality.</p>
</div>
</td>
<td width="50%">
<h3 align="center">Copy Pasta</h3>
<div align="center">
<a href="[PROJECT-DEPLOYED-LINK]" target="_blank"><img src="[PROJECT-IMAGE-URL]" width="400" alt="Copy Pasta"></a>
<p>
<a href="[PROJECT-REPO-LINK]" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Repository-181717?style=for-the-badge&logo=github&logoColor=white">
</a>
<a href="[PROJECT-DEPLOYED-LINK]" target="_blank">
<img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Live-00BFFF?style=for-the-badge&logo=vercel&logoColor=white">
</a>
</p>
<p>Copy Pasta is a Chrome extension that allows you to paste on sites that block the default pasting events. This was built to solve a personal annoyance and showcases problem-solving skills.</p>
</div>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
### Connect with Me
<p align="center">
<a href="[YOUR-LINKEDIN-URL]"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/LinkedIn-0077B5?style=for-the-badge&logo=linkedin&logoColor=white" alt="LinkedIn"></a>
<a href="[YOUR-TWITTER-URL]"><img src="https://img.shields.io/badge/Twitter-1DA1F2?style=for-the-badge&logo=twitter&logoColor=white" alt="Twitter"></a>
</p>
Step 3: Customize Your README
You can edit the README directly in the browser using GitHub CodeSpaces, which provides a VS Code-like experience.
- Assets: To add images like a banner, you need a URL.
- Pro Tip: A quick way to get a URL for an image is to drag and drop it into any comment box on GitHub. It will generate a markdown link with a URL that you can copy. You can store these links in a GitHub Gist for easy access.
- Skills: For the skill badges, you can use shields.io or browse this awesome badges for readme repository to copy and paste the badges you need.
- Featured Projects: Add two or three of your best projects. For each project, include:
- A title and a screenshot.
- Links to the live deployed application and the GitHub repository.
- A brief description of what the project does.
- The technologies you used.
- What the project demonstrates about your abilities (e.g., "demonstrates my ability to build a full backend using Node.js").
- Socials: Add links to your blog or relevant social media profiles like LinkedIn and Twitter.
Once you're done, commit your changes with a descriptive message (e.g., "feat: create initial profile README").
Final Touches and Best Practices
- Pin Repositories: Pin your most up-to-date projects (2 or 3 is ideal). Ensure they have a complete README, a working deployed link, and relevant tags (topics) to make them more discoverable.
- Complete Your Profile: Fill out your name, location, and links to your website or social profiles in the main profile section.
- Keep Building: It's great to have at least one project you are actively working on. It doesn't mean your other projects are "old" or irrelevant. If you're proud of the work, pin it! But being able to talk about a current project shows that you are consistently learning and growing.
Helpful Resources
If you want a more interactive way to build your profile, check out a profile README generator. These tools let you input your information and select options, and they generate the markdown for you.
For more inspiration, explore other GitHub READMEs to get ideas for what you'd like your profile to look like. With these tips, you can create a compelling GitHub profile that effectively showcases your skills to the world.
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