Sourcing Developers On GitHub In A Certain Location

Was GitHub made to be an easy-to-use sourcing tool for non-tech-savvy recruiters?

Certainly not ⛔️

But… Can recruiters use GitHub to source software developers?

Yes, of course ✅

You can find on GitHub developers who don’t even have any LinkedIn profile.

GitHub doesn’t make it easy though. For example, the location is a plain text field. Anyone can type anything. Say, a city, a country, a combination of both, a country code, … it gets quite messy!

This is what works for me when I’m sourcing developers. I compose a shortlist of:

• The major cities

• Country name in local language and in English

• ISO country code

Then, I type “location:” in front of each of them. See on this slide…

Next, I copy-paste this to the search bar…

And I get in results all developers who live in those locations. Next, I need to split results into smaller chunks based on the number of developers’ repositories and followers.

To make this easier, I’ve created a spreadsheet that takes a few parameters and composes a URL that you can open in your browser.

You can copy this sample spreadsheet on Google Drive. This is what it looks like…