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Social networking tools now allow professionals to post and share their work in online spaces. These professionals build reputation within a community of practice, often with the goal of finding a job. But how are the visible traces of their actions and interactions in online workspaces used in the hiring process? We conducted interviews with members of the GitHub "social coding" community to understand how profiles on the site are used to assess people during recruitment and hiring for software development positions. Both employers and job seekers pointed to specific cues provided on profiles that led them to make inferences (or form impressions) about a candidate's technical skills, motivations, and values. These cues were seen as more reliable indicators of technical abilities and motivation than information provided on a resume, because of the transparency of work actions on GitHub and relative difficulty of manipulating behavior traces. The use of online workspaces like GitHub has implications for the type of information sought by employers as well as the activity traces job hunters might seek to leave.
Marlow et al. (Fri,) studied this question.