As recruiters, what do you want to see on a GitHub profile readme ?

As a hiring manager I go to someone's Github profile to see which projects they've contributed to, what role they played, and the scope and quality of their work.

• Do the projects correlate in any way to the work they'd be doing at my company? Are they solving similar problems as they would run into working for me?
• Are they fixing bugs or implementing whole features?
• Are they contributing in other ways to projects, e.g. coordinating tasks or answering support tickets?

Of course beyond the profile I look into the quality of code commits and documentation, etc.

It's probably too new for there to be actual trends, but I'd say treat it like any other portfolio

I can see Github profiles going two ways:

1. A way to describe your open source contributions and what you're learning ("these are my goals")
2. A way to describe your skills and what you've done that shows what you can contribute ("these are my accomplishments")

Either way, that fits the use case of a portfolio. Showing your value to a company vs showing your value to the open-source community isn't inherently different. Mine's full of gifs either way :)

I mostly hire Frontend Developer so I would like to see:

1. Links to demos, codepens, etc...
2. Description of the work done in the projects
3. Tools used
4. Community involvement

I think its their open source activity and projects.