Read the code, not the CV
A CV lists claims; a repository shows the work. What public code tells you about an engineer, what it doesn't, and how we match on it.
A CV is a list of claims: titles, years, a stack written as keywords. For engineers, most of the evidence of what they can actually do sits somewhere else, in the code they have published.
What a CV can't tell you
"Senior backend engineer, 6 years, Go, Kubernetes" fits thousands of profiles. It tells you where someone sat, not what they built. Two engineers with that exact line can have spent those years on very different things: one on a billing service, the other on a distributed queue that has to hold under load. If your role needs the second, the keyword match is noise.
What the code tells you
A public repository is a different kind of document. It shows:
- What they build when nobody asks: the topics of their projects, the problems they keep coming back to.
- How they build it: languages, dependencies, how the code is structured and tested.
- How they work with others: pull requests, code reviews, issues answered on projects they don't own.
- Whether it's current: a commit last week says more than a skill listed in 2019.
None of this is self-reported. That's the point.
Matching on the work
When you open a role, you usually know the kind of system the person will build. So instead of searching for a title, we start from the role and look for developers who have already built something close: matching repository topics, languages and dependencies, and contributions that show depth rather than a weekend fork.
Every candidate in an Azerit shortlist comes with the projects and contributions behind their score, so you can check the reasoning yourself in a minute instead of taking a number on trust.
What it doesn't do
Not every great engineer codes in public. Many spend their best years on private codebases, and plenty have neither the time nor the wish for side projects. A quiet GitHub profile is not a negative signal, and we don't treat it as one.
Public code is a way to find people you would otherwise miss, and to start the conversation on something real. It doesn't replace your interviews.
Why it changes the first message
The biggest win isn't the search. Once you know what someone built, you finally have something worth saying to them. More on that in how to write a first email an engineer will answer.
