GitHub or LinkedIn: where to find the engineers you want to hire

When a team opens an engineering role, the search almost always starts on LinkedIn. It's where the profiles are, where the recruiter tools are, and where everyone else is searching too. GitHub is the other place engineers spend time, and it holds a very different kind of information. Neither is better in general. They answer different questions, and knowing which one you are asking saves days.

Two different documents

A LinkedIn profile is a career summary written by its owner. Titles, companies, dates, a list of skills, sometimes a paragraph about what they're proud of. It's maintained mostly when people are looking for a job, and it's optimized to be found: the skills section is written for keyword searches.

A GitHub profile is a record of work. Repositories, commits, pull requests, code reviews, issues. Nobody writes it as a pitch; it accumulates as people build things in public. It's often incomplete, because most professional code is private, but what's there is the work itself.

So the first question is simple: do you need to know where someone has been, or what they can build?

Who you find where

LinkedIn has almost everyone. Nearly every engineer with a few years of experience has a profile, including those who never write public code. For roles where public code is rare, such as engineering management, most embedded and enterprise work, or anything under strict confidentiality, it's often the only practical source.

GitHub has a smaller, very different population. Open source maintainers and contributors, engineers who build tools on the side, people in fields where the main libraries are open (infrastructure, developer tools, machine learning, web frameworks, data engineering). Many of them barely maintain a LinkedIn profile, and some don't have one at all. They are invisible to a keyword search on LinkedIn, which also means they receive fewer generic recruiter messages.

What each signal is worth

On LinkedIn, the strongest signals are the companies and the trajectory: where someone worked, how long, how fast they took on responsibility. The weakest is the skills list: anyone can add "Kubernetes", and many do.

On GitHub, the strongest signals are contributions to projects someone doesn't own: a merged pull request means another maintainer read the code and accepted it. Code reviews, careful issues and tests come next. The weakest are the vanity numbers: stars, followers, and the density of the contribution graph, all of which can be inflated.

In short: LinkedIn tells you about context, GitHub about competence. A strong hire usually needs both, which is why the best searches use the two together.

Reaching out

Engineers with a good profile get recruiter messages every week, and most of them are interchangeable: a title, a company, a salary range, "let's chat". On LinkedIn, your message lands in the same inbox as all the others.

What makes an engineer answer is a message that shows you looked at their work. GitHub gives you exactly that: a project, a pull request, a design choice to mention in the first line. We go into detail in the first email engineers answer.

One caution: GitHub is not a contact directory. Use the email the person published on their profile or site, or a professional address, write to people one at a time, and read GitHub's Acceptable Use Policies, which forbid using information from the site for spam.

The cost

LinkedIn's recruiting tools are paid seats, and the price grows with the number of recruiters and the features you need. Searching GitHub is free, but the time isn't: reading profiles and code by hand takes 15 to 30 minutes per good candidate. We describe the full method in how to source software engineers on GitHub.

When to use which

Start on LinkedIn when:

• the role is about managing people or a function more than writing code;
• the work is mostly private by nature (banking cores, defense, most enterprise software);
• you need a specific employer background, such as someone who has scaled a team in a regulated company.

Start on GitHub when:

• the stack relies on open source libraries, and contributors to those libraries would be ideal hires;
• the role is hands-on and you care more about what someone can build than where they did it;
• you keep hearing the same twenty names on LinkedIn and need people nobody else is messaging.

Using both on one role

The combination we recommend:

1. Find on GitHub. Start from the projects close to what the person will build, and list the people who did real work on them.
2. Check on LinkedIn. For each name, look at the career context: current company, seniority, location, whether a move makes sense now.
3. Write about the work. Open the message with what you saw on GitHub, not with the job description.

This finds people a LinkedIn search misses, and it gives you a better reason to write to them than anyone else has.

It's also exactly the work Azerit does for you: it reads GitHub for the engineers who have already built what you're hiring for, shows the projects behind each score, finds a professional email and drafts a first message about their own code. Try it on one of your roles.