Clickbait to class divide | Zomato CEO’s hiring hype has unintended fallout

“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing,” economist Thomas Sewell once noted. 

I am reminded of this quote amidst Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal’s recent ‘Chief-of-Staff’ exercise. That’s because you’ll never understand founders unless you watch how they raise money. There are similarities here. By the time you have finished reading this, it’s likely that Zomato will have embarked on (or even completed) raising Rs 8,500 crore more from the markets. 

All of which just makes it more important to understand Goyal’s ‘recruitment’ exercise. Here’s the deal: Goyal casually drops an ad for a ‘Chief of Staff’ role, but with a twist — candidates need to pony up Rs 20 lakh for the ‘privilege’ of working directly under him, minus any paycheck for a year. Cue the Internet outrage, the trolling, and the memes (the few who supported Goyal’s move were roundly trashed) and accusations of class bias from now-discredited liberal dovecotes. 

Sure, everyone’s got something to say about this new ad, but let’s zero in on what matters here (since that is one of my areas of expertise) and what this whole stunt does for the image of Zomato (an important Indian unicorn) and the image of its markets straddling exuberant founder. 

Clearly, at Zomato, the founder decides things for himself. Certainly, in his personal office, as of course, he must. But, if one needs it, this is also evidence that he’s more than capable of riding roughshod over any advice that any HR department may have proffered. Does Zomato come through as a company that is willing to take full image advantage from such risks? Or is it attempting to build even faster on the image of its founder, who is post-IPO interested in many more things than what the company he founded focuses on? 

So, can either Goyal or Zomato really cash in on this woke image that he is being cast in, as a font of wisdom, a kindness-filled leader of great understanding with unmatched insight, and possessing superior training skills to die for? Short answer: not really.

This litany of cutesy virtues doesn’t quite matter to the company or its investors and employees. Perhaps it, then, must do more with the person’s desire and the founder’s personal brand than Zomato’s bottom line. It seems more like the founder’s flex than any real corporate necessity. 

The idea of expecting a candidate to treat their first working year as their training scheme because they are actually saving on a vastly more expensive MBA in the process is hardly a groundbreaking concept.

But opting to not pay a salary and dressing it up as a charity, where does that fit in? To give a get-out-of-jail card to itself by triggering the charity click-bait option is quite a bold and rather cheeky twist. While Zomato has been tossing around the idea of harnessing food waste from its cancelled orders into some grand charity initiative, let’s be real — it doesn’t quite qualify. It’s a stretch to think that a few rejected biryanis are going to solve the nation’s hidden but hurtful hunger problem. 

So, once you brush past the whole charity spin, an incipient MBA and the whole salary-free chief of staff thing, what is the real vibe here that lingers? It’s of a company that thinks it’s taking big risks — but really, it’s all flash and not much substance. It isn’t betting on anything really big. For a company that has long looked founder-dependent, this feels like Goyal’s clever way of saying, ‘Hey, I’ve got a whole bunch of big plans!’ without ruffling too many shareholder feathers. No, we need to wait for the heartwarming story of that candidate who came in from the cold and made it to the top.

With more than 18,000 eager applicants flooding Goyal’s inbox, one thing is clear: this ad wasn’t about attempting to find the next ‘Chief of Staff’ — it was a big old hairy chest-thump. If Goyal was aiming for some quirky commentary on the currently prevalent practices of rewarding young new entrants into the work-world, it hasn’t quite sent that message either, to even a seasoned message analyst, like me. That message may also have got lost in translation.

Sadly, this stunt has diminished the images beyond just Zomato. Now, any innovative hiring move by this company, and in fact by those even vaguely similar, will tend to be sceptically and microscopically vetted by those whom they are targeting. It may also have just thrown a wrench into the plans of other well-meaning founders trying (and needing) to attract top-level talent to work with them.

In a careless aside, that currently may not seem to matter, it has also managed to raise the spectre of a new socio-economic class divide among those eligible to apply to unicorn c-suite jobs, and those unable to even attempt to get anything beyond the gig jobs they create.

It’s tricky as the savage unemployed numbers batter families everywhere and gig-worker rights become a political issue. This is among the unfortunate aspects of this enthusiastic recruitment exercise that Goyal embarked on. This will raise stakes all around, and go well beyond the Zomato ecosystem — but not in the way he probably intended.

(Dilip Cherian, founding partner of Perfect Relations, is a public affairs consultant and branding strategist. Twitter: @DILIPtheCHERIAN)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.