Top 5 Ways to Use Github as a Technical Recruiter
Background: GitHub was launched in April 2008 and has rapidly become both the largest social network of developers and the most common place to host and collaborate on software development projects. They raised $100 million from Andreeson Horowitz earlier this month.

1. Almost 2 Million Users are on GitHub
Let’s get the obvious bit out of the way. If you’re a fisherman, you go where the fish are. If you’re a hiring manager or recruiter, you go where the talent is. If you’re looking for technical talent, you go to GitHub. With almost 2 million users, GitHub is THE BEST PLACE to find great developers.
2. Learn About Prospects’ Work & Hobbies
GitHub takes its project hosting component and goes one step further. It lets developers share what they’re working on. You’ll know exactly what projects a prospect has contributed to, what projects they’ve started on their own, and perhaps even find out what their hobbies are or what they think is important in the meantime.
For example, a friend of mine open sourced an Arduino project that sends him a tweet when the pH levels change in his saltwater aquarium. If you found him on GitHub, you would know just from this one project that he is an Arduino enthusiast and that he is a SERIOUS saltwater aquarium hobbyist.

Bring up either one in a phone call and I guarantee you won’t get hung up on. You might even have a hard time getting him to hang up. More importantly, you’ll have established a meaningful connection by taking the time to show that you actually cared enough to learn about his interests and past projects.
3. Find Out How Well Regarded They Are In The Open Source Community
You can get a general sense of how well someone is regarded among developers with a few useful metrics provided by GitHub. These include number of followers and “watched” repositories (“repos”). If the numbers look like this guy’s, you’re probably going to have a hard time hiring him, but the more you become familiar with what the averages are, the more you’ll gain a sense of what are meaningful numbers.

You can also dig a little deeper and get inside their repositories to see how popular the different projects they’ve worked on are by how many times they’ve been “watched” or “forked.”
You cannot discount a developer because he appears to be unpopular, but, on the other hand, someone that has been watched by a number of developers and someone that has repositories that have been forked likely produces valuable code.
4. Learn How Developers Work
GitHub is based on Git, a version control system that helps developers track changes to a project and control what makes it into production.
A developer makes a “pull” request to work on a piece of code locally and a “push” request to send the changes back to the repository on Github so that the changes can eventually make their way into production.
A good way to get a bird’s eye view of what this process looks like is to go to the Github Timeline, sit back and watch the show. It’s weirdly addicting. If you want to swoop in for a more detailed view, all you have to do is click on any repository and check out what’s happening in as much detail as you like. This goes for any repository, not just the ones that fly by in the timeline.
5. Keep on Top of the Trends
GitHub provides a couple of very easy ways to to stay on top of important trends that will give you a big picture of the market to aid you on your way to finding great prospects.
GitHub’s “Explore” feature includes a Languages tab that provides a nice breakdown of how much each programming language is used in the GitHub community. If you click on any of the languages shown, you’ll find that you can quickly see what projects and developers are using that langauge in a way that’s getting noticed.
Finally, GitHub’s Repositories tab will let you see “interesting” and ‘popular” repositories by number of forks and watches. Now, next time you go to a candidate’s profile, you’ll be able to notice a new popular language or framework they’re using because it was trending on GitHub.
Jump in and start using GitHub and you’ll be more prepared to strike up meaningful conversations with prospects about their work in no time!
from BostInno http://bostinno.com/channels/top-5-ways-to-use-github-as-a-technical-recruiter/