[ITriedThis]

This one has left me with a particularly bad impression since they specifically say they take referrals from HN very seriously.

I don't recall being asked if I found out about them from Hacker News (I did), but they did ask me to provide links to LinkedIn, Twitter, StackOverflow, and GitLab/GitHub profiles.

Here's the grand sum of response so far, I think I've waited as long as is reasonable to share. It's been well over a month. No other contact.

  Thanks for your interest in Kaggle. This is
  an automated message from Kaggle's applicant
  tracking system to confirm that we have
  received your application and will review
  it in the next seven days.

Don't promise anything about 'seven days' if you aren't going to at least respond with an automated email saying you threw the application out after a quick glance.

[antgoldbloom]

I'm sorry you had a bad experience. Would you mind emailing me at [e-mail]? I'd like to look up your profile to see what happened. I'm in charge of recruiting so it's my fault if your application slipped through the net.

ps. The way we have historically known that the postings came from HN is by using a custom URL: http://kaggle.applytojob.com/apply/GjSjOi/FullStack-Engineer....

I just noticed that the URL was missing from this month's link and last month's link. (This month I just copied last month's post.) Again, Glad that this was pointed out.

[ITriedThis]

Thank you for the nice response.

I may have used too harsh a tone in my earlier message, so I apologize if you felt attacked.

If you are tracking HN referrals with a special URL, you wouldn't have known I came from HN. I found your site and the Careers link from a Hacker News post that was not a hiring advertisement. Maybe you could allow people to self-identify their affiliation instead.

Unfortunately, I see no benefit I might gain by reaching out to you directly. I have posted a negative review of your company's hiring process in a public forum. If I was interested in applying for your current or future openings, that probably wouldn't help my case.

I'm happy to have helped identify any issues with your process, and again apologize for the tone in my previous post.

[antgoldbloom]

You're right: we will miss people with this way of tracking referral source. I'm actually less concerned about this issue than when I first posted on HN. We now only post on HN, Stack Exchange and Github and we've found that the quality of the candidate pool is much higher than when we posted more broadly. I view HN, Stack Exchange and Github as equally credibly sources, so distiguishing HN from other sources is less important for us now than it was a few months ago.

Re harsh feedback, I understand the perspective, but think it's actually not such a big issue for us for two reasons: 1. as a culture, we strive to give each other direct feedback, so your comments are in keeping with a culture that we aspire to 2. on a more light-hearted note, FAR more harsh things have been said to us on the Kaggle forums. Helps us develop a tough skin :).

[eganist]

This interaction seems to have gone well on both sides, leaving me feeling particularly warm. As a member of the peanut gallery with no stake in the outcome of this interaction, I'm nonetheless glad this was sorted out!