Methodology

How StarHunt finds the
engineers others miss.

Most sourcing tools search profiles and hope for the best. StarHunt starts from the repositories that define each technology ecosystem, then works backwards to the people building them.

The problem

Why GitHub search isn't enough

GitHub's built-in search finds users by keywords in their bio or profile. A developer who contributes to a major open-source project every week but writes "software engineer" in their bio is invisible to a keyword search for that technology.

LinkedIn has the same problem, it surfaces people who claim to know a technology, not people who actually build with it.

StarHunt's answer: start from the repositories, not the profiles. If a developer is in the top contributors of a canonical open-source project, they know the technology. That is a stronger signal than anything in their bio.
The pipeline

Five steps from repositories to ranked candidates

1

Repository discovery

For each technology StarHunt covers, a curated list of reference repositories has been hand-picked. These are the projects that define the ecosystem, not the most starred repos, but the ones where active practitioners contribute. Each technology maps to dozens of canonical repositories spanning frameworks, libraries, tooling, and infrastructure.

2

Contributor extraction

StarHunt fetches the contributors of each reference repository via the GitHub API. Contributors are people who have merged commits, not stargazers, not followers, not people who opened an issue once. This pool is then merged with results from targeted GitHub Search queries using location:, language:, and topic: filters.

3

Profile enrichment

Each candidate's full GitHub profile is fetched: name, bio, location, company, follower count, public repository count, email, and website. No private data is ever accessed, everything comes from GitHub's public API.

4

Location filtering

The location field is cross-checked against the recruiter's target location across three fields: location, bio, and company. StarHunt expands each location with variants, "France" matches "Paris", "Lyon", "FR", "French", "Bordeaux", and 10 more city-level variants automatically.

5

Signal-based scoring and ranking

Every profile is scored against multiple independent signals. Only profiles above a relevance threshold are shown. Results are ranked by score and streamed to the recruiter in real time.

The score

Signal-based scoring, not keyword matching

Every profile receives a score from 0 to 100. Only profiles above a relevance threshold are surfaced, so you see engineers who actually fit the search, not everyone who has ever mentioned a technology online.

The score weighs several independent signals: how prominently the technology appears in the developer's profile, their presence in the open-source ecosystem, their public activity on GitHub, and the availability of contact information. Recruiters can also add custom keywords that boost the score of profiles matching their specific requirements.

The score is deterministic and consistent, not a black box. The same profile will always receive the same score for the same search. What changes between searches is which signals you weight most through your keyword choices.
Coverage

Technologies covered

StarHunt covers a broad range of technologies across frontend, backend, infrastructure, and AI. Each technology maps to a curated set of reference repositories that define the ecosystem, maintained and updated regularly.

Node.js Python React Vue Angular TypeScript Java Go Rust Ruby C++ .NET PHP Swift Kotlin Flutter Kubernetes PyTorch TensorFlow Scala GraphQL
The repository lists are what separate StarHunt from a generic GitHub search. A standard search returns whoever has a technology name in their bio. StarHunt finds people who have actually contributed to the canonical projects that define that ecosystem.
Privacy

Only public data, always

StarHunt exclusively uses GitHub's public API. Every piece of information shown in results, name, bio, location, email, follower count, repository count, is already publicly visible on github.com. No private repositories, no private activity, no emails that developers haven't chosen to display.

Developers who want their profile removed from StarHunt's index can contact lucas.l@foundinghires.tech.

See it in action

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