Show HN: GitHired – Find Your Next 10x Engineer

[raghavbansal11]

Hey HN - today I’m launching GitHired. A hiring platform that ranks developers based on what they actually build — not what they claim on a PDF. It’s called GitHired, and here’s the core idea: GitHub > Resumes

Instead of trusting “proficient in React” bullet points, we analyze a candidate’s actual GitHub: their real tech stack

their most complex projects

how active they are

what kinds of contributions they make

which skills match your job description

and yes, we detect fake “green square farming.”

Why we built this

Because engineering hiring is broken. Resumes are inflated. Activity charts are gamed. ATS filters reward keywords, not skill. And companies end up spending weeks interviewing the wrong people. Developers deserve a fairer signal. Recruiters deserve to know who can actually build things. And teams deserve better than guessing.

We’re live today If you’re hiring engineers - or you are an engineer and want to see your “real” GitHub profile - try it. (No waitlist. No paywall surprise. Just launched.)

I’d love to hear what you think — feature requests, brutal feedback, edge cases, all of it.

Let’s fix dev hiring.

[gregjor]

My first reaction: This tool looks at the wrong metrics, or a small subset of possibly relevant metrics. Nothing about git activity correlates to "who can code" (as opposed to who can produce code), much less all of the skills not apparent in git repository that make a developer valuable -- 10X or "cracked" as you put it.

You call tech hiring "broken." Have you considered that trying to reduce programmer skill and value to a simple formula or metric contributes to that? Perhaps the swipe left or right mentality of "tech recruiting," adapted from the also broken dating domain has something to do with it. Recruiters and hiring managers unqualified to talk to and evaluate candidates hiding behind CYA tools -- broken.

Tech hiring does indeed look broken for people who only have their git history to sell themselves.

No employer or customer I have ever worked for would give access to their private repos for data collection. A candidate who did give such access likely broke their NDA and maybe the law. I have no public git repos, consistent with many of the professional programmers and freelancers I know. I only work in private repos owned by a company that has the resources to enforce their IP. Curious how you can assert in comments that your tool analyzes private repos.

[raghavbansal11]

Activity is just a small part of how we assess their skills. Its more about the projects you've built- how complex they are, their architecture, frameworks etc.

Also we only look at your personal private repos, not organizations. A company would always store their codebase in an organization, which we don't access. And even in the case of personal repos, none of the code is stored or used in any way except to analyze complexity and get other metadata like languages, tech stack etc.

The whole point is that candidates often tailor their resumes to fit keywords from job descriptions, and we cut through all the bs to show what they've actually done, not what they say they can.

[gregjor]

> Activity is just a small part of how we assess their skills.

Nothing on your web site or in your HN post refers to anything other than analyzing git activity. Crunching commits -- artifacts of the software development process rather than the process itself -- seems the core of GitHired.

< Its more about the projects you've built- how complex they are, their architecture, frameworks etc.

While that may have some value it doesn't work for programmers who have all of their work unavailable in company-owned private repositories. 100% of my work, for example, and a large percentage for every professional programmer I know. Even hiring managers and recruiters understand that public repos and personal private repos mainly represent hobby projects and side hustles.

> The whole point is that candidates often tailor their resumes to fit keywords from job descriptions...

True enough, but that happens because of recruiting/screening tooling -- an arms race. Sending out applications, tailored or not, into the automated and so-called "AI" screening/ranking systems describes the least effective way to get a job. Recommendations and reputation work much better, for a reason: a good hiring manager will trust their own experience and instincts, and the opinions of people they trust, more than a dashboard of code commit metrics. Sadly good hiring managers seem even harder to come by than good programmers.

> ...we cut through all the bs to show what they've actually done, not what they say they can.

So a programmer fresh out of boot camp who knows one language and framework will score higher than a more experienced programmer with broader experience? A person who used PostgreSQL for a year gets ranked higher than the programmer with two decades of Oracle and SQL Server?

Programmers don't succeed or fail because of mastery (or lack of mastery) of specific languages and frameworks. Projects and teams succeed, or fail, mainly because of team dynamics, conceptual integrity (as Brooks called it), and management consistency and support. Learning a language or a framework amounts to a necessary but hardly sufficient part of software development, and not even a key part of the process. Domain expertise counts for much more: I would rather hire someone with years of experience in (for example) enterprise logistics and let them learn a programming language rather than the other way around. You can't infer that kind of expertise, or how a person works in a team, or if they can reliably implement requirements, from git repo activity.

I don't blame you for the degradation and frustration of the tech recruiting and job hunting process. Most of the blame falls on the class of managers and executives who don't know anything about managing people or projects, and nothing about software development. Falling back on some sciency-looking numbers at least lets them continue blaming their shortcomings on something else.

[raghavbansal11]

Firstly, to give you some more insight about our algorithm, commits are actually bonus points- they're not even a part of actual scoring. I'll make some changes to our landing page to communicate this better, thanks for your feedback!

Secondly, we’re currently focusing on startups looking to hire cracked coders, like college students or recent grads. The situations you mentioned are for senior engineers- people who have worked at companies for a while now. Not something we're too focused on right now, since senior devs would require different metrics and be more experience-based.

[8organicbits]

I've only really put my personal projects on GitHub, companies I've worked for have almost exclusively used non-public source control. I'm an expert in back-end systems, but I dabble in front-end stuff as a hobby, so my GitHub looks like a novice front-end developer. Do you have any thoughts on how to handle those situations?

My frequent comment on startup web pages is to support preferes-reduced-motion (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...). It's very difficult for me to read the text with so much screen flashing.

[raghavbansal11]

We’re currently focusing on startups looking to hire cracked coders, like college students or recent grads. In your case, if you've worked with some companies for a while, you might be considered a senior engineer. Not focused too much on senior devs right now, that would require different metrics and be based more on experience. That said, we do have some ideas that we're working on to go about it. Also, thanks for the note on the flashing- implementing it now

[nis0s]

Sounds great, how do you screen against someone who just hires someone to populate a repo for them?

The answer is you can’t. Repo activity isn’t a real way to measure anything about a person’s ability. The only reasonable thing is to hire and do 3-month probation period.

[mgulati]

What If I as a company CEO want to hire and I have a database that I got from Linkedin with candidates github. How does the platform help me with that ?

[raghavbansal11]

You can import all of your existing applicants and have them ranked on our dashboard!

[aryashd]

you guys should do a granola like summary for every engineer

[the_ai_guy]

This is pretty cool! A no brainer for technical recruiters!

[raghavbansal11]

thanks:)

[krishnaoza]

Wait, do you analyze private repos as well?

[raghavbansal11]

Yes!

[krishnaoza]

That's interesting. Wait, what roles can I hire for using this tool?