Personal Slack Notifications
How Kit sends you a direct Slack message when something needs your action — and how to pause, resume, or control these DMs.
Why It Matters
Channel notifications are easy to scroll past. When a candidate is waiting on your decision, or a vulnerability report lands during your on-call shift, a message in a busy channel isn’t enough. Personal Slack notifications send you a direct message — only when something needs your action, never for general updates. Every DM deep-links to the exact screen where you can act: the decision form, the review, the report.
What Triggers a DM
Hiring stages
| Event | Who Gets the DM |
|---|---|
| Decision required on a candidate | Stage leads (plus a daily reminder while the decision is overdue) |
| Review assigned | The stage’s reviewers |
| Code assignment submitted | The stage’s reviewers |
| Offer accepted or declined | Account admins and hiring managers |
Each hiring DM explains why you received it (“Why you: you’re the stage lead for Technical Interview”) and includes a View in Kit button that takes you straight to the relevant page.
CSiRT on-call
If you’re the on-call person for a vulnerability disclosure program, you receive DMs for:
- New report submitted
- Critical severity escalation
- SLA at risk and SLA breached
- Appeal received
- Shift started / shift ended — every transition: scheduled rotation, manual start/end, or PagerDuty sync
These alerts go to whoever is currently on call — they follow the schedule, not a subscription.
Shift DMs carry stats: the shift ended message recaps what happened on your watch (new reports, status changes, researcher messages, bounties awarded, SLA breaches, and what you handed off), and the shift started message briefs you on the queue you’re inheriting (open reports, awaiting triage, SLA at risk).
Prerequisites
Personal DMs work when three things are true:
- Slack is connected — An account admin has connected a workspace via Integrations > Slack
- The connection allows DMs — The connection’s permission level is Collaboration or Full
- Your email matches — The email on your Kit account matches a member of the Slack workspace
If your account already uses candidate channels, no reinstall or extra Slack permissions are needed — candidate channels require Full, so personal DMs work with the same connection. Connections set to Notifications only can’t send DMs; an admin needs to upgrade the level first.
Auto-Enrollment and Consent
You don’t need to opt in before anything happens. The first time an eligible event occurs, Kit sends you the DM — and includes a one-time footer asking whether you want more:
- Keep them coming — Confirms you want these notifications
- Pause — Stops them immediately
After that first message, the footer disappears. Later hiring DMs instead carry a small Pause these DMs button, so opting out is always one click away.
Pausing and Resuming
You can pause hiring-stage DMs at any time:
- Click Pause these DMs on any hiring DM, or
- Turn off the toggle on your Slack notifications settings page
Resuming works from the same settings page — re-enabling from the web counts as consent, so DMs start again right away.
Note
On-call DMs can’t be paused. They follow the on-call schedule: if you’re on call, you get the alerts. Instead of a pause button, on-call DMs include Hand off and Enable holiday mode links. Hand off your shift to stop the alerts, or enable Holiday Mode — which automatically advances the rotation to the next person.
Holiday Mode also pauses your hiring-stage DMs, the same way it suspends your email notifications.
Your Settings Page
Go to Account Settings > Slack Notifications (in the Personal section of the sidebar, or directly at /account/slack_notifications). The page shows:
- Slack direct messages — The master switch for all personal DMs
- Hiring stage updates — Toggle for hiring DMs (decisions, reviews, code assignments, offers)
- CSiRT on-call alerts — Shown for information only, marked “Follows your schedule”
If Kit couldn’t find your email in the connected workspace, the page shows a warning with the email it looked for — make sure your Slack account uses the same address as your Kit account.
Admin Control
Account admins can disable personal DMs for the entire account: go to Integrations > Slack and turn off the Personal notifications feature toggle. It’s on by default. When disabled, no member receives personal DMs regardless of their individual settings.
If every connection is set to Notifications only, the toggle is disabled and shows an explanation that no connection’s permission level supports personal DMs.
Quick Checklist
- Connect your Slack workspace in Integrations (admin)
- Verify your Kit email matches your Slack email
- When your first DM arrives, click Keep them coming to confirm
- Review your toggles at Account Settings > Slack Notifications
- Going away? Enable Holiday Mode — it pauses hiring DMs and hands off your on-call shift