If you are applying to US companies from Europe, your GitHub is often the first real thing a hiring manager sees, before any call and sometimes before they finish your CV. Most engineers worry about the wrong part of it. The green contribution graph, the star counts, the number of repositories: none of that is what an experienced reviewer is looking at. They open two or three things, read for about ninety seconds, and form an opinion. Here is what is actually under the cursor.
They are not counting your green squares
A full contribution graph tells a reviewer almost nothing, because it is trivially gamed and often just reflects work-in-public habits rather than skill. A sparse graph is not a red flag either, since most serious work lives in private company repositories that will never show. Experienced hiring managers know this and ignore the graph. If you have been polishing your streak instead of your best repository, you have been optimizing the one metric they do not read.
What they actually click first
They click your pinned repositories, and inside the most relevant one they go straight to the commit history and the code, not the description. They are reading for a few specific things: are the commits small and coherent with messages that explain intent, or is it one giant “final version” dump. Is the code organized so a stranger could find their way around. Are tests present where they should be. Did you handle the boring cases, the errors and the edges, or only the happy path. Ninety seconds of that tells a senior reviewer more than an hour of interview small talk.
The README is the interview before the interview
On your best project, the README is doing more work than you think. A strong one states what the project does in two sentences, why you built it, the key decisions you made and what you traded off, and how to run it. That short document signals the exact thing US teams hire remote engineers for: the ability to explain your own work in writing to someone who is not in the room. A project with good code and no README reads as someone who can build but cannot communicate, and remote teams cannot afford that combination.
What to fix this weekend
You do not need twenty repositories. You need one or two that you would be glad to walk through line by line. Pick your strongest, write it a real README, clean up the commit history going forward so messages say why and not just what, add tests to the part that matters most, and pin it to the top of your profile. Hide or unpin the abandoned experiments and the tutorials-followed-along repos. A focused profile that says “here is my best work, clearly explained” beats a crowded one every time.
If your code is strong and your CV is not getting you US interviews, that is usually a presentation problem, not a skill problem. We work with a small number of senior engineers and help them fix exactly this. Submit your profile or see what we look for.