Amor: Filtering the Top 1% of Engineers on GitHub with Commit Activity Analytics
The hunt for elite engineering talent is one of the biggest challenges facing startup founders and engineering managers today. Traditional recruitment methods—relying on static résumés or generic LinkedIn profiles—fail to capture the true coding proficiency, work ethic, and collaboration skills hidden within a developer’s daily activity. The effort to find the top 1% of engineers often requires endless hours of writing custom scripts or manually sifting through thousands of GitHub profiles.
Amor, a specialized recruitment tech platform based in San Francisco, was founded to eliminate this time sink. Amor makes it simple to answer complex questions like “which front-end engineers committed to nextjs/astro/remix/react repos, commits regularly, and lives in NYC?”. By automating the deep analysis of Git activity, Amor provides recruiters and sourcers with the data-driven insights they need to locate the perfect candidate effortlessly.
The Founder’s Insight: Code is the True Résumé
The genesis of Amor was driven by the recognition that a developer’s GitHub profile is their main, publicly available portfolio, but recruiters lack the tools to query it effectively. The founder understood that the key to finding elite talent lies not in raw commit volume, but in the pattern and context of their contributions—metrics that reveal genuine impact.
The unique angle of Amor is its ability to filter and rank talent using metrics that signify dedication and expertise:
- Commit Activity: Tracking the frequency of their commits, moving beyond trivial raw numbers which can be easily gamed.
- Weekend Commit Activity: Identifying work ethic and enthusiasm that extends beyond standard working hours.
- Project Contributions: Filtering by developers who contribute to popular libraries, frameworks, or tools (like Next.js or React).
- Cleaned Up Locations: Standardizing self-reported location data, a critical step for roles tied to specific geographic locations like NYC.
Actionable Strategy: Querying the GitHub Network
Amor’s value proposition is centered on speed and precision, providing a competitive edge for hiring teams:
- Customized Talent Search: Instead of generic keyword searches, users can formulate highly specific, complex queries based on technical stacks and geographical location. This laser-focused targeting is crucial for Engineering Managers seeking niche expertise.
- Time-Saving Automation: The platform automates the process of analyzing commit history, pull requests, and issue discussions, saving hours of time writing custom scripts.
- Data-Driven Vetting: Amor provides quantitative data points to assess a developer’s productivity. For instance, the median software developer contributes 1.73 commits per working day, and the 99th percentile contributes over 4,716 commits per year. By filtering for such high thresholds, Amor quickly surfaces the top 1% who demonstrate a deep commitment to their craft.
The Future of Developer Sourcing
Amor is fundamentally transforming how companies source technical talent by providing a powerful, data-driven window into the world’s largest developer community. By converting raw GitHub activity into meaningful, actionable insights about coding proficiency and work ethic, the platform empowers recruiters and sourcers to bypass the noise and target elite engineers directly. Amor ensures that the search for talent is as intelligent and efficient as the developers it seeks to find.
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