There have certainly been plenty of people given job offers thanks to open source work, hacking and similar things. That however feels like an automated recruitment (if that is not a form based thing then they need someone that speaks something close to native English next time, though the sticking senior in there sounds like a trick someone would try that knows the language). I had not seen that before but I am behind on my sleazy tactics right now, though it is the logical extension of keyword searching and I am sure we have all seen jobs that measure performance in lines of code written in a given period, despite that being a pretty awful metric. Similarly I have a report on my desk now a client gave me that someone wrote on their website; if you didn't know it would look like a really fancy report but to me it looks like someone did a battery of automated SEO tests (including whether a UK company was on foursquare so you know how useless that is) and printed it out with some rendered shots of the site and on a nice template and printed it all and put it in a fancy ring binder.
Now I am going to have to think about how I would make an automated code analyser recruitment tool. Obviously I would never employ a coder without an interview but I reckon I could get a fair sense of them from open source work (number of lines might factor, could I compile it, do they have an automated test I can run against it, number of times certain segments changed, what libraries they call ranked by how fancy they are, if they were down with the kernel then where it slotted in).
By and large I am not a fan of recruiters (that is what we call and understatement) but you might at least get a laugh out of following that up.
