Zomato CEO is Tapping Into an Amalgam of the Youth's Aspiration and Desperation

Today's youth is staring into an abyss of a shrinking white-collar job market and dismally low salaries.

I had expected a much smaller proportion to agree with Deepinder Goyal that he was giving young people a great opportunity. Clearly, Zomato’s top boss understands the current generation much better than I do.

(Photo: X/@deepigoyal)

Just when GenZ is getting antsy about jobs, Deepinder Goyal, celebrity founder of Zomato, has given hiring a whole new spin.

In a post that went viral – mostly for the wrong reasons – Mr Goyal invited applications for the post of Chief of Staff at Zomato. The twist was that instead of getting a salary, the winning candidate would have to pay a 20-lakh-rupee fee in the first year.

“100% of this “fee,” Mr Goyal wrote, “will be paid in the form of a donation directly to Feeding India… At our end, we want to demonstrate that we are not trying to save money here – we will contribute Rs 50 lakh to a charity of your choice.”

The job promises to pay “definitely more than 50 lakh,” from the second year. But even that would only be discussed “at the start of year 2.”

I asked undergrad students at the B-School where I teach, whether they would apply for such a job. Around 40 percent said yes, while the rest railed against such a ‘demeaning’ offer.

I must admit that I was surprised.

I had expected a much smaller proportion to agree with Deepinder Goyal that he was giving young people a great opportunity. Clearly, Zomato’s top boss understands the current generation much better than I do.

That is why he is a billionaire and I am writing this column.

What he understands is the curious amalgam of aspiration and desperation that characterises jobseekers right now. They want to have the same level of consumption that they have in their parental home, but are staring into an abyss of a shrinking white-collar job market and dismally low salaries. They are preparing for an end of work-life balance.

To escape this rut, GenZ is increasingly orienting itself towards becoming ‘gig entrepreneurs’ – finding multiple modes of self-employed income. And they are willing to pay big bucks to self-help gurus to learn the dark arts and secret potions of this trade.

Deepinder Goyal is tapping into this very aspiration/desperation.

Many B-schools today promise ‘industry immersion’ and lectures by industry experts to attract students. Some charge more than Rs 25-30 lakh for that privilege. And after that, they place their students at an annual package of Rs 30-35 lakh.

Mr Goyal is offering a deeply immersive learning experience for less. That too, at one of India’s fastest-growing, and most successful companies.

He is also offering access to be a celebrity, something that young people today are desperate to learn. It is a perfect combination of learning how to be an entrepreneur and an influencer at the same time.

These are the two most important money-making skills in the world today. One doesn’t work without the other. As Elon Musk has shown to the world, being a personal brand is as important, if not more, as having a successful product.

In fact, Deepinder Goyal himself has emerged as a public figure pretty late in his career as an entrepreneur. It is only recently that he has started appearing on podcasts, and TV shows like Shark Tank India. Clearly, he felt the need to go public after his company went public.

Let’s go back to those 40 percent of my students who said they would happily take the Chief of Staff job at Zomato. What did they think they would gain?

Some of them thought of it as an investment in a stock. Pay Rs 20 lakh today, and get Rs 50 lakh back next year. “That’s a 150 percent return on investment,” they said. When I pointed out that they would have to work in exchange for the money, they reworked the calculation.

An average MBA would cost Rs 25 lakh and one would have to remain a student for two years. After that, the most likely salary would be about Rs 24-30 lakh in the third year. At Zomato, they would pay Rs 20 lakh in the first year, and earn at least one crore rupees over the next two years (remember, Deepinder Goyal has promised more than Rs 50 lakh as salary).

So, a regular MBA would, at best, give them a net return of Rs 5 lakh over three years. At Zomato, they would get Rs 80 lakh, net of the original ‘fee’.

On top of that, they would get a job at the top of the managerial scale, right at the start of their career. A normal corporate career path, on the other hand, would take them a decade to reach there.

What if they were sacked after one year, I asked.

“Doesn’t matter,” one of them said. “I would have learnt enough to start my own business, and market it in the way Zomato and Blinkit have managed to market themselves.”

“I would use my stint at Zomato to become famous,” said another student. “If Deepinder Goyal selects me out of thousands of applicants, millions of people would get to know my name. I would do daily video posts of what I learnt at Zomato, and tweet about it. That would be enough for me to launch a career as an influencer, and earn much more than I would from a regular job.”

Later in the evening, I learnt from Mr Goyal’s posts that more than 18,000 people had applied for the job. I assume a significant number would be freshers, or people with just a couple of years of work experience, because the job post said that it wanted applicants without a “lot of experience (and therefore no conditioning/baggage).”

What Mr Goyal is offering is a one-in-an-eighteen thousand chance to earn a Zomato MBA, get a top post, and then earn good money after ‘graduating.’

Mr Goyal realised that the job posting had generated a lot of bad press for him. So, he spun it the next day, saying that the Rs 20 lakh ‘fee’ was “merely a filter, to find people who had the power to appreciate the opportunity of a fast track career, without getting bogged down by the constraints in front of them.”

As it turns out now, Zomato will not ask for the money, and “pay the right person anyway.”

“I really hope that “pay the company to get a job” doesn’t become a norm in this world,” Goyal wrote, “that’s not cool.”

What is actually not cool, though, is the situation where an influential corporate figure can get away with such a job post, and even be appreciated for it. It is not his fault. He has just sensed the opportunity.

It is a shame that young people have to consider such options, where only the extremely privileged – no bank is giving you a Rs 20 lakh ‘education loan’ for working at Zomato – can get on the elevator to the top, while everyone else has an eternally long ladder to climb.

This stunt is just the beginning. Get ready for many such carrot/stick combos that will be dangled by potential employers for the young, where they will become willing parties to their own exploitation. 

(The author was Senior Managing Editor, NDTV India & NDTV Profit. He tweets @Aunindyo2023. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)