As promised, I wanted to give some details about my specific situation without polluting the main post. I am currently looking for a permanent position in the d

As promised, I wanted to give some details about my specific situation without polluting the main post. I am currently looking for a permanent position in the data science / data analysis area. I have specific expertise in time series analysis and by way of interest and skillsets cluster with the so called "type A" data scientists (https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data-scientist-at-twitter-f0c13298aee6#.ulm7qgdcb https://medium.com/@rchang/my-two-year-journey-as-a-data-sci...). My search also represents an effort to transition out of academia (short postdoc after PhD) and into industry. There are a handful of companies that I am very excited about (some of them with employees lurking here on HN). I have had a few rejections at the resume screening stage from companies advertising positions for which I had imagined there would be a strong fit. Of course, it is easy for me to imagine things that might be hard to HR staff to see in a resume. So it occurred to me that if I could establish some kind of basic social rapport with someone at one of the companies I am interested, that could potentially lead to the right set of eyes being cast on my resume in particular, but also, incidentally and perhaps more importantly my contributions to the companies project. Finally as a side note, I feel compelled to say that I don't have an especially active or extensive github profile (as I mentioned before I am mostly a type A data scientist, and spend much more time doing exploratory data analysis and the like then writing code), but I don;t think this would be a negative signal for most of the companies I am interested in. A suggestions about how to attack this problem in my specific case would be greatly appreciated.