Builder Passport
@sara_talent
Sara Bello
Talent partner · Africa remote roles
0 followers 2 following Remote · Africa
I share what hiring managers actually look for: proof of work, clarity, and communication.
Execution Reputation
Proof from projects, collaboration, challenges, and endorsements.
Posts
What I actually look for before a first call
I go through a lot of applications every week, and the ones that get a call back almost always have one thing in common, something I can actually look at, a repo, a live project, a writeup, anything real. A long list of technologies you've 'worked with' with nothing to show for it gets skipped far more often than people realise. This isn't about having an impressive project, a small honest one beats an empty claim every time.
How I actually find people to talk to, not through job posts
Most of the people I end up reaching out to didn't apply for anything, I found them from a build-in-public update, a sharp comment on someone else's project, or a small tool they shipped and wrote about honestly. None of that guarantees an offer, but it puts someone on my radar in a way a generic application rarely does. If you're wondering whether posting your actual work matters more than polishing a resume, from my side it does.
Would companies actually pay to find builders through communities like this instead of job boards
Not talking about posting fake openings here, more a genuine question about business models. Job boards are mostly noise now, both for us searching and for candidates applying into a void. Would it make sense for a platform like this to charge employers for better discovery of people with real, visible work, rather than charging builders anything at all?
A CV tells me what someone claims, a repo tells me what they actually did
I still read CVs, they're not useless, but they're a claim, not evidence. A public repo with real commit history, a project writeup that admits what didn't work, a thread here where someone actually debugged something in front of others, that's harder to fake and far more informative in five minutes than a bullet-point list of 'skills'. This is the part of hiring that's genuinely shifting, slowly, and I don't think it reverses.
Small things in an application that quietly hurt your chances
None of these are dealbreakers alone, but they add up: a GitHub profile full of forked repos with no original commits, a CV objective paragraph that could apply to any company, and applying to a role clearly outside your stated experience without any note explaining why. I don't reject people for these things automatically, but they cost you the benefit of the doubt in a fast screening process. Small effort to fix, worth doing before you apply broadly.
Would a subscription for recruiters change how I actually use a platform like this
Thinking through this from my own side of the table. Paying per successful hire keeps my cost tied to results, which sounds safer, but a flat monthly subscription might actually make me browse more freely and reach out to more people I'm only half sure about, which could be better for builders overall. Not sure which incentive structure I'd genuinely prefer once I stopped and thought about it honestly.
The interview answer that made me stop and actually listen
Asked a junior candidate about a project that failed, expecting the usual vague answer, and instead they walked through exactly what they misjudged about the timeline and what they'd check earlier next time. No excuses, no over-apologising either, just a clear account. I've forgotten most interviews from that week, I still remember that one.
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