I went through GitHub's recruiter screen twice in about 18 months, once when I was still employed and once after my layoff. Different recruiters both times, but the format was pretty similar.
First screen was about 30 minutes. The recruiter opened with a standard intro, then asked me to walk through my background. Not in a perfunctory way, she was clearly mapping my experience to the role as I talked.
Actual questions that came up: Walk me through your most recent role and what you worked on. Why are you interested in GitHub specifically? Are you open to remote, or do you have location preferences? (GitHub is very remote-friendly, but they do have an office in San Francisco and some teams cluster there.) What's your current timeline for making a move? Do you have competing offers or other processes you're in? (They ask this more candidly than most recruiters I've talked to.) General comp expectations. They ask early, which I actually appreciated.
The "why GitHub" question is worth preparing a real answer for. I've talked to people who fumbled it with something generic. The company is genuinely interesting from a product standpoint (Copilot, Actions, Codespaces, the developer data moat) and any semi-thoughtful answer that shows you've actually used the product lands better than "I like open source."
Second time around I asked the recruiter directly what the process looks like end to end. She walked me through it without hesitation: recruiter screen, technical phone screen, then a 4-5 round virtual onsite. No hidden stages.
One thing both screenings had in common: they were efficient. No filler, no hard sell. If you've done corporate tech recruiting you'll notice the difference.
Turnaround time from application to recruiter screen was about 10 days the first time, 6 days the second. Both times I had applied directly on the GitHub careers page.