How important is a GitHub presence when hiring?

Any  Github presence is a strong signal that someone is willing to put  themselves out there. It shows a willingness to invite others into their  code-bases (warts and all), and hopefully be receptive to feedback.

Having a public git repo is a sign of bravery, and that is nice to have on the team – Me

THIS  IS HUGE, especially when hiring more senior roles. I can walk through  public issues and see how they interact with questions, healthy  criticism, and outright flame-wars.

I  strongly encourage everyone on my team to have a professional, updated  profile on LinkedIn and some kind of presence in Github or personal  website.

When making job requisitions I am VERY specific about my STRONG preference for candidates with public Git Repos -- even if they are old.

I  want to see that repo where you started learning RxJava and abandoned  it. That is an excellent talking point for my mobile team.

No one is perfect, and I don't expect that you are, either

I publish my own repos, an there is lots of room for improvement. There are mistakes and gaps in my knowledge. My hope is that upon finding a gap or error it is brought to my attention via an open issue. Better yet, fix with a pull request. :-)