Do Australian tech employers want your GitHub link?

You've spent a weekend tidying your GitHub profile because someone told you that's what gets you shortlisted. Pinned repositories, a clean README, commit history going back years. Then the advertisement you actually apply to doesn't mention GitHub, doesn't mention a portfolio, and asks instead for years on a specific stack and whether you're eligible for a clearance. You wonder if you built the wrong thing.

You probably didn't waste the weekend, and a current profile still does no harm sitting quietly in your header. What you built wasn't what the advertisement was screening for, and the gap between the folklore and the actual ad is worth closing before your next application.

We read 14 individual Australian technology advertisements one at a time, across 12 job families, and coded exactly what each one requested. Zero of the 14 requested or invited a GitHub link, a portfolio, a personal website, a Stack Overflow profile or a LinkedIn profile (we went back and recounted, since the number seemed too clean to be right). Not rare. Not a small minority. None.

Every GitHub mention in the sample was something else entirely: the platform named as a tool inside a requirements list, the same way an ad might name Jira or Terraform. "Experience with GitHub Actions." "GitHub, CI/CD pipelines." The word showed up as infrastructure knowledge, never as an instruction to go and look at your repositories.

So why does everyone say to build a portfolio?

Because for a specific slice of roles, it's correct advice, and the advice-givers generalise from that slice. Where a genuine portfolio request turns up in the Australian market, it lands on design-titled roles: UX, UI, product design, the work where a hiring manager needs to see the actual visual output before a resume can prove anything. That's a real and sensible request for that job family. Applying the same rule to a backend engineer or a data analyst mistakes one job family's convention for the whole industry's.

What should carry the weight instead?

What the advertisements actually asked for: what you built, what it carried, and what changed because of it. A stack list tells a screener what you've touched. It says nothing about what you shipped, how much traffic it held, or what broke before you fixed it. Evidence with a number attached, users served, latency cut, incidents closed, does the job a link was never going to do on its own.

Is two pages really the length limit for a senior engineer?

For private-sector roles, yes, and nothing we read argued otherwise. Zero of the 14 ads stated a resume length limit, private or public. The only stated ceilings belonged to government applications, and one of those named a three to five page CV, which is a different document type built for an entirely different reading process. Hays Australia's own IT resume guidance is direct about the private-sector norm: a resume "should be no longer than two pages", with no carve-out for seniority. A principal engineer with fifteen years of history still edits down to two pages; more history just means a harder edit.

How should you handle a security clearance line?

Carefully, and only when it's real. 4 of the 14 advertisements named a formal security clearance by name: Baseline, AFP Negative Vetting 1, AGSVA Baseline Vetting. Every one of the four sat inside government, a defence contractor, or a government-adjacent consultancy. A further 5 named citizenship or work rights without naming a clearance level at all, which is a lighter, more common screen than the clearance question and worth answering plainly either way.

One thing worth knowing before you write "willing to obtain a clearance" on your resume: an AGSVA clearance requires Australian citizenship and an entity willing to sponsor it. No individual can obtain one alone, outside an employer or agency putting you forward. "Willing to obtain" is a sentence with nothing behind it until an employer starts the process, so state your citizenship and any clearance you already hold, and leave the aspiration out.

Do you need a cover letter for a tech role?

Rarely, in the private sector. 1 of the 14 tech ads we read asked for one, rarer even than the 4 of 14 in healthcare. Where the government and defence cluster wants a second document, it's usually a page-limited or character-limited pitch written against stated selection criteria: a different writing task, with its own structure and its own word count to hit exactly.

• 0 of 14 coded Australian technology advertisements requested or invited a GitHub link, portfolio, personal website, Stack Overflow or LinkedIn profile.
• Every GitHub mention found was a tool named in a requirements list, never an instruction to review a candidate's repositories.
• 4 of 14 named a formal security clearance (Baseline, AFP Negative Vetting 1, AGSVA Baseline Vetting), all government, defence contractor or government-adjacent.
• 5 more named citizenship or work rights without naming a clearance level.
• 1 of 14 required a cover letter; the government and defence cluster asks for a pitch against selection criteria instead.
• 0 of 14 private-sector advertisements stated a resume length limit; the Australian convention, confirmed by Hays Australia's own guidance, is two pages regardless of seniority.

The profile can stay right where it is, quiet in the header. The evidence is what has to do the work the folklore assumed a link would.

The short version

• We read 14 Australian technology job ads. Not one asked for a GitHub link, a portfolio or a profile.
• Every GitHub mention named it as a tool inside a requirements list, not an invitation to send your repositories.
• A link earns its place when it is current and you want it read. A stale one does more harm than no link.
• Four of the 14 named a formal security clearance. State the level you hold and never the detail.
• Two pages is the private-sector convention, and the only stated page limits came from government applications.

Send the link if it is good. The ad is not asking for it, and your resume still has to do the work.

We'd like to help with this

Honestly, this is the part we enjoy. Send your resume and the ad through the free review and a writer will tell you what a technology screener would miss in it today, for nothing.

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Source: 14 individual Australian technology job advertisements across 12 job families, read by us in 2026. Length guidance cross-checked against Hays Australia's IT resume advice at hays.com.au.