Because engineers and designers can post their work for all to see, more
and more companies are realizing they can see what people can actually
do, not just say they can do.
In the red-hot market for skilled software engineers, companies
looking to make great hires are discovering that relying on traditional
services that showcase candidates' work histories -- but not their
actual work -- is a great way to miss out on the best available talent.
These days, there's a new game in town -- GitHub, a place where hiring
managers and recruiters alike are increasingly turning to find not just
the potential employees who look best on paper, but the ones that
actively (and publicly) demonstrate their capabilities.
Last month, Andreessen Horowitz, one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, put $100 million -- its largest-ever investment -- into GitHub,
a company built to facilitate the organization of open-source projects,
and that makes money by selling licenses to commercial and corporate
users.
Asked why his VC firm ponied up the nine figures, partner Ben Horowitz
cited GitHub's dominance these days in being a central repository for
open-source code. But he also touted the company's growing role as a
place to find top-tier tech talent -- and, more to the point, a
preferable alternative to LinkedIn.
"I was talking to my friend [who] runs a tech screening process
for looking at engineers," Horowitz told CNET. "I said, 'What do you use
for recruiting?' He said GitHub. I said why not LinkedIn? He said, 'why
would I look at their resume when I can look at a body of work?' And
since he said that to me, I ask everybody [what they use] for engineer
recruiting, and everybody uses GitHub. That's a big deal. It means if
you're an engineer and you don't use GitHub, you don't exist."
Every engineer and all the code
In Horowitz's view, GitHub has become a place where the hottest
engineers are coming together to share their code, and as a result, the
service is home to the most important project and collaboration tolls,
as well as application life cycle management systems in the business.
"They've got the ultimate advantage," Horowitz said, "because they have
every engineer and all the code."
This assessment is shared widely throughout the tech industry. From
small startups to established, household name powerhouses, GitHub is now
seen as the go-to place to spot quality talent. To be sure,
there are still engineers who will get Silicon Valley jobs without
putting up a GitHub profile, and for whom LinkedIn is still an
employment lifeline, and every company's mileage may vary, but a common
view is that a developer who has a profile there has an advantage over
those who don't.
At many companies, the feeling is that engineers who take the time to
develop a GitHub profile and put in the energy to participate actively
in the community can be better evaluated in advance than others.
"It's an excellent opportunity to see what they are passionate
about, their coding style -- good or bad -- and fun side projects," said
Will Young, director of Zappos Labs. "We love when developers see a
need and just go ahead and code a solution to share with the community.
We are looking for some amazing problem solvers on our team. This is
hard to get from an interview or resume. But sometimes, we see someone's
GitHub library and think, 'Wow, that is really cool and handy.'"
GitHub itself has been looking to its own service's community for
talent, sometimes hiring people that may not present the most stellar
picture on paper, but who show off stellar programming skills in real
life. "Previously, where you went to college was the be all and end
all," said Zach Holman, who evangelizes for GitHub. "The fact that
that's not true anymore is fascinating."
Holman also said that internally, GitHub is seeing more and more signs
that outside companies are using the service as an initial indicator of
whether a potential hire is good or not. "Whether or not somebody has
contributed to open source is a good indicator of whether they're a good
engineer," he said.
Distinguish themselves
What's particularly attractive to the people who work at GitHub, Holman
added, is that the service has become such a great way for developers to
distinguish themselves, even as it got its start more as a place where
people were sharing their work for no reason other than to do so.
But that sense of selflessly participating in open-source projects is
something that is increasingly attractive to hiring companies. "I've
heard some of our portfolio companies mention the number of [GitHub]
contributions people make and how active they area, and connecting that
with their credibility in the community," said Craig Driscoll,
recruiting partner at Highland Capital Partners. "There's just the
signaling that someone using those types of communities is a general
type of qualifier...[especially the] frequency and quality of the
contributions."
Indeed, some tech companies are turning to GitHub to identify potential
new hires who aren't even actively looking for a new job, and who may
not have a resume online. Of course, almost anyone getting hired is
still going to have their resume checked out and their education
scrutinized, and recruiters are still combing LinkedIn's millions of
active users, but their GitHub presence may be the single-most important
factor. "We're always looking for people who have forked a lot of
[open-source] projects and contributed back into those projects," said
Tim Milliron, director of engineering at Twilio,
a developer of cloud-based communications apps. "We like people
contributing into open source...That carries a lot of [weight with] us."
Milliron said that Twilio has been looking at GitHub as a recruiting
platform for more than a year, but that the pace of doing so has
accelerated significantly in the last six months. "If we look at 20
people and five have GitHub profiles," he said, "and one has
[contributed a lot], then that person tends to bounce to the top of the
list."
To be sure, GitHub is hardly the only open-source community that is
being looked at by companies searching for technical talent. But in
talking to people throughout the technology industry, it appears that
GitHub is getting the lion's share of the attention. As Barney Pell, CEO
of QuickPay, and the founder of Powerset, whose technology became the
basis of Microsoft's Bing, put it, "Online open-source communities like
GitHub bring large numbers of...developers together and are thus a
natural place for recruiting."
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-57495099-235/forget-linkedin-companies-turn-to-github-to-find-tech-talent/
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