What a hiring manager sees in your GitHub on AyHire

AyHire helps founders and recruiters decide who to talk to for an engineering role, from public GitHub work. If you write code in public, someone hiring may see your work through it. This post says exactly what AyHire reads, what it never counts, and what would change what they see.

You can also look for yourself: enter your username at ayhire.com/engineer. It is free with an AyHire account.

What it reads

For each person, AyHire reads:

• Your public profile and your public repos, with their descriptions, stars, forks and languages.
• The READMEs of your five most-starred repos that are your own. A fork's README is the original project's writing, so it is skipped. Each README is read up to its first 3,000 characters.
• Your recent commits and your public activity from the last 90 days: pushes, pull requests and issues.
• A year of your work on other people's projects, from your public contribution graph: commits and pull requests by repo.
• Your public organisations.

What it never reads, and never counts

• Private repos and full source code. It can't see them, and only a short summary of each profile is kept.
• Where you live. The model that scores your work is never sent your location or your company. A test checks that the same person in two places gets exactly the same request.
• Having a job. Most strong engineers are employed. Being employed changes the order a little, never the call.
• What it can't see. When something can't be read, AyHire says unknown rather than counting it as zero. Most good work happens in private company repos, and an unknown costs you nothing.

Every claim AyHire makes about you has to point at something it read: a repo, a README, a commit, a pull request. A claim without a source is dropped before anyone sees it.

The four scores, and what moves them

AyHire scores public work on four general counts, from 0 to 10 each. None of them is judged against a particular role. A team hiring also writes its own criteria for the role, and AyHire judges your work against those separately, with a link behind each judgement.

Technical depth

How substantial your work is and how widely it is used, on your own projects and on other people's. A core contributor to an important project counts fully, even with few repos of their own.

What moves it: a maintained project that other people use says more than many small experiments. So does sustained work on a project others depend on.

Shipping

How often and how recently you push, anywhere.

What moves it: pushing to public repos on more weeks than not.

Communication

Whether your READMEs say what a repo does and how to run it, whether your commit messages say what changed, and your pull requests and issues.

What moves it: a README on your top repos with what it is and how to run it. Commit messages like "fix: null check in the parser" instead of "fix" or "wip". Merge commits and one-word messages are never shown as proof.

Hidden gem

Strong work with little public attention. A low score here only means people already know your work, so a hiring manager's page shows it only when it is high.

What a hiring manager actually gets

The scores are one click back. What a hiring manager reads first is plain words: what you have built, whether you actually ship, and whether you can be hired, each answered from your public work with the links behind it. When they add you to a role, AyHire also checks whether you look open to work, and every answer says where it came from and how sure it is.

AyHire never contacts anyone. The hiring team decides who to reach out to.

See yours

Enter your GitHub username at ayhire.com/engineer. You will see the same view a hiring manager sees, the scores behind it, and what would move each one. It is free with an account: three new checks a day, and a profile checked in the last 30 days opens at once.