Not so much "more likely to get them the job", more... I felt like my projects weren't actually suitable to take the place of coding interviews, largely because I couldn't actually drop in and work on them in the way that coding interviews show me actually doing work.
If I see a repo of rcfiles I know they care about working efficiently. If I see abandoned stuff with more than 1 commit that's OK, that's something that was cared about at one point. These are just two super generic examples. Almost everything is a positive.
The only thing I don't like to see is repos with 1 commit, and nothing other than a README with the repo title in it. Not really negative, more of a 'cmon gimme more.'