Using your GitHub profile to enhance your resume

How can my GitHub profile enhance my resume?

When you include a link to your GitHub profile in your resume, you showcase your skills and experience to potential employers. In this article, you'll find practical tips for preparing your GitHub profile for a job search.

After you complete these steps, you can be confident that hiring managers will have a good sense of your technical skills when they are reviewing your GitHub profile.

Step 1: Create a professional bio

Your bio is a sentence or two that appears under your profile picture. Use your bio to give potential employers a high-level overview of who you are and what kind of work you're looking for.

Navigate to your profile settings to update your bio. Keep this description short and concise. Consider something like, "Hello! My name is Mona and I'm looking for work as a front end developer."

Step 2: Create a profile README

Compared to your bio, your profile README is flexible and allows for more creativity. You can write more in your profile README to showcase your skills and interests.

Things you may want to add to your profile README include:

• An introduction: Write a brief introduction of yourself and your professional background.
• Skills and experience: List your technical skills, including any programming languages, frameworks, and tools you are proficient in.
• Your professional experience: Describe where you've worked before and what sort of professional skills you've built. These can even be non-technical skills, such as communication and empathy.
• Some of your best projects: Describe some projects you're proud of. You'll also pin these repositories later, but your README gives you a chance to provide more commentary.
• Achievements or awards: Show off any of your achievements, including certifications or awards you've received for your work.

For instructions for creating a profile README, see Gestion de votre README de profil.

Step 3: Choose projects to showcase

Pick your favorite 3-5 projects to highlight for your job application. For the best chances at an interview, pick projects that show your diverse skills and are relevant to your specific job search.

These can be projects you created or projects that you contributed to:

• Projects you own are fully under your control, so you can prepare the project using the rest of the steps below.
• Open source projects highlight your ability to collaborate with others.

To take advantage of both, pin some of each to your profile.

Repositories you pin will be prominently displayed on your profile, allowing you to direct hiring managers' attention to the projects you're most proud of.

To get started, click Customize your pins in the "Popular repositories" section of your profile.

Step 4: Prepare the projects you want to showcase

Hiring managers usually consider many applicants for each role. Expect that they will only look at your projects for a couple minutes. To give the best impression during this brief time, you should make your projects easy to understand and explore.

Below, you'll find some practical suggestions for preparing your showcase projects, as well as some tips on using Copilot to help.

Update the repository details

On the main page of the repository, to the right of "About," click . Here, you can provide information that helps hiring managers quickly understand the project:

• A brief description of your project
• A website where you can see the project in action
• Topic tags that categorize your project

Write a helpful README

The README for your project's repository is a perfect space to give a concise project overview. Helpful project README details include:

• A list of key features of the project
• Details on how to set up and run the project
• An example or demo of the project
• Instructions on testing your code

You can use Copilot Chat to help write your README. Use a prompt like this:

Write a README for my lottery-number-generator repository.

Make the code easy to understand

To give the best impression, you'll want to make sure that hiring managers can understand your project quickly. In general, a few best practices can help give any readers an understanding of your project and how you work with code:

• Maintain a consistent coding style with descriptive file and directory names throughout the project
• Use helpful comments and documentation for any complex or important snippets
• Refine your code according to popular style guides
• Simplify complex functions, break down large classes, and remove redundant code
• Provide tests to validate that your code is working as expected

You can use Copilot-enabled Visual Studio Code extension to interact with Copilot in VS Code. Here, Copilot can help answer more specific questions about your project, make edits across multiple files, provide suggestions for simplifying your code, and write tests. For more information, see Écrire des tests avec GitHub Copilot.

Update your project's dependencies

To showcase your understanding of security best practices, ensure your project is using the latest versions of any dependencies. You can use Dependabot alerts and security updates to view alerts about dependencies with known security vulnerabilities. For more information, see À propos des alertes Dependabot.

Looking forward: Maintaining your projects

Your profile is now ready to be included on your resume! The changes you made today will have a big impact on your job search and will make your GitHub profile stand out to hiring managers.

If you want to improve your profile even more, incorporate these practices into your coding routines:

• Maintain a clean commit history. To make your project history understandable, use descriptive commit messages and work in smaller batches.
• Use issues, pull requests, and Projects. Showcase your task management and project planning skills by tracking bugs and feature requests with issues and using Projects to organize them.
• Keep dependencies updated. Use Dependabot version updates to automatically update your project's dependencies with the latest security features and bug fixes.
• Contribute to open source. Open source contributions showcase your collaboration skills and prove that you can work in complex code bases. For more information, see Trouver des moyens de contribuer à l’open source sur GitHub.