I submitted an application online via the company website along with an internal endorsement from a Groupon employee. There's no good way to really handle that via the automated system.
Almost all contact is via email. Initial contact came via a recruiting coordinator to schedule a phone interview with the technical recruiter for the role. Interactions with the technical recruiter were excellent, as was the recruiting coordinator. Everything was prompt, professional, informative, enthusiastic, positive, etc. Some people clearly enjoy their jobs at Groupon.
Groupon has ambitious goals, and recruiting for product management roles was characterized as 'very urgent'. Still, it took time (days and weeks) to get through the various gates from coordinator to recruiter to hiring manager to space in people's calendars.
The phone interview with the hiring manager is where things went off the rails. The hiring manager seemed quite raw for the role (and to be managing such), having only been in product management for a short time and only at Groupon. I found it very difficult to communicate in sharing views about product management, how it works today at Groupon, philosophically how it should work at Groupon in the ideal, specifics of what function the open position is to fill, specifics of what software development teams and resources exist to deliver on projects, goals and points of evaluation in the short and medium terms for the open role, etc.
Predictably, the hiring manager chose to go forward with other candidates. To their credit, Groupon communicated this by (a short) phone call from their great technical recruiter.