Often when I see candidates' github accounts they are mostly forked repos with no changes and projects with rails scaffolding. There might be something there but it's really hard to dig through and find. I would suggest candidates build their own projects using documented pull requests and point the hiring manager to the closed PR page of their project. Or even better, point them to a substantial PR they completed on someone else's open source project.
Are you just looking at the master branch on their forks? If you want to send a PR to another repo, you _must_ fork that repo.
I have 43 repos, but 21 of them are forks. I've never committed anything on master on any of the forks, but I've created my own branches in order to open PRs on 18 of them.
The easiest thing to do is use the "Sources" option from the drop down on their repos page (shows only _their_ repos) and use something like https://showmyprs.com/ to see their external contributions.
