How do I make my GitHub profile attractive to recruiters?

Fix the top of the profile and three repositories properly, and ignore everything else. A recruiter or hiring engineer spends a minute or two at most, and they look at: your pinned repos, whether those repos have a readable README, and whether the code looks like a professional wrote it. The graveyard behind that barely matters — nobody is scrolling to repo number seventeen. The specific fixes, in priority order: 1. **Pin your three or four best repositories.** GitHub lets you choose. This is the entire first impression and it's a two-minute change most people never make. 2. **Write a real README for each pinned repo.** This is the single highest-impact thing on this list. It should contain: one sentence on what it does and why, a screenshot or GIF of it running, a live demo link, the tech used, and setup instructions. Many reviewers never look at code — they read the README and click the demo. A great project with no README reads as an abandoned one. 3. **Deploy them.** A live URL converts far better than a repo. 'Here it is, click it' beats 'clone this and run npm install' by an enormous margin. 4. **Add a profile README** (create a repo named after your username). A short intro: what you do, what you're learning, what you've built, how to contact you. It appears at the top of your profile and very few juniors have one, so it stands out. 5. **Clean the visible surface.** Add a one-line description and topics to each pinned repo. Archive or make private the genuinely dead experiments — not to hide that you learn, but because 'tutorial-project-3' with two commits pinned next to your real work dilutes it. What matters in the code itself, when someone does look: clear file structure, consistent formatting, sensible names, and no committed secrets or `node_modules`. They're not reading for algorithmic brilliance — they're checking whether you'd be a liability in a codebase. What's overrated: the contribution graph. Green squares from daily trivial commits impress nobody who's hiring engineers, and gaming it is transparent. Substance over streak. What's genuinely underrated: a few merged pull requests to projects other people use. It demonstrates you can work in someone else's codebase, follow conventions and handle review — which is closer to the actual job than any solo project, and it's rare enough among juniors to be a real differentiator. The half-finished repos aren't a problem, by the way. Everyone has them. Just don't pin them, and make sure the four things a recruiter actually sees are polished.