I'd expect more like a deep LinkedIn integration to facilitate recruiters...as much as the thought makes me cringe.

To be honest, if a tool could run a scan over all my github contributions, and then use that to find a really well matching job, that might be potentially very interesting. Finding a job which is a good match for your skills and interests is hard. If most of your contributions are public then making use of them would be potentially beneficial so long as it wasn't super creepy.

How long do you think such a mechanism would exist before it became overrun by (semi-) automated attempts to game it?

The problem with that is the same as every other time anybody is trying to exchange something for something else: sturgeons law. The greatest developers are not on the market and the companies worth working for don't need recruiters.

Ads can be great in a (very) few areas: nobody is going to talk about a new great tampon or condom. Heck most people haven't even heard about the menstural cup, but other than things humans feel really embarrassed talking about, exceptional products don't need ads, and neither do exceptional programmers or companies.

> The greatest developers are not on the market and the companies worth working for don't need recruiters.

Not sure about that part...at this point most companies that are growing at a significant rate use recruiters. They may be internal recruiters (but even then they often use a minimal amount of external recruiters too). All of the companies we all know (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, whatever) use recruiters, most VC startups do, and a portion of small to medium size companies also do.

The other thing here is, of course, that these "companies we all know" are not the be all and end all for software development. There are hundreds of thousands of smaller companies the world over doing development in every field you could imagine. I know nothing about them, but some of them are very likely to be doing things I would find fascinating. There's very little to connect me with them except by chance. Even if I'm aware of the main companies in the specific field I work in, there are still far more that I'm unaware of. That's a lot of missed opportunities.

The current process is inefficient and suboptimal for all concerned. Recruiters have trouble identifying good candidates. And on the other side we have trouble identifying good companies/projects. On both sides we dumb down the skills provided/needed to bullet points of technologies and tools, often completely ignoring the actual problem domains. While I don't think the suggestion here about gleaning insights from git repositories is a solution by any means, it might make a small improvement by providing some deeper insight into real demonstrated skills and experience. As someone else mentioned, of course this could lead to gaming the system, but I suspect most fraudulent stuff could be filtered out--there would be clear differences between real projects contributed to over the course of years and "resumé fodder".

Combine github data with linkedin data to get connection of developers to companies, and use that? Not that I'm suggesting them to do it... :)

The main challenge would be the information asymmetry between both sides (as is already the case). It's one thing for the recruiter to be able to scan all your contributions. Would you as a potential recruit be able to do the same, and see what skills and techniques were /actually/ in use by the company. A tool which could generate an anonymised summary for both parties and compare them for mutual compatibility might be very nice.

I can picture this...

Anonymous description of a company/profile for the recruiter Anonymous profile of candidates looking for a job...

Swipe left...or swipe right...if both swipe connect them...

F. Why did I post this. Its such a good idea I could make money out of it.

Sounds like an opportunity for a third party 'market maker'

But some of the recent changes in the GitHub profile like code contrib vs commit would already be enough to match against profiles for hire.

That’s not a problem if you don‘t have a LinkedIn account. I recommend it.

"I see you're building an app with a shopping cart. Why not just sell your wares on Shopify!"