Do Not Just Talk, Show Me in Action: Investigating the Effect of OSSD Activities on Job Change of IT Professional

Abstract

With the advancement of information and communications technology, a means to recruit IT professional has fundamentally changed. Nowadays recruiters search for candidate information diffifrom the Web as well as traditional information sources such as résumés or interviews. Particularly, open-source software development (OSSD) platforms have become an opportunity for developers to demonstrate their IT capabilities, making it a way for recruiters to find the right candidates, whom they need. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the impact developers’ profiles in an OSSD platform on their finding a job. This study examined four antecedents of developer information that can accelerate their job search: job- seeking status, personal-information posting, learning activities and knowledge contribution activities. For the empirical analysis, we developed a Web crawler and gathered a dataset on 4,005 developers from GitHub, which is a well-known OSSD platform. Proportional hazards regression was used for data analysis because shorter job-seeking period implies more successful result of job change. Our results indicate that developers, who explicitly posted their job-seeking status, had shorter job-seeking periods than those who did not. The other antecedents (i.e., personal-information posting, learning, and knowledge contribution activities) also contributed in reducing the job-seeking period. These findings imply values of OSSD platforms for recruiters to find proper candidates and for developers to successfully find a job.