The Zomato CEO is tapping into an amalgam of youth aspiration and desperation

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

In addition, they would get a job at the top of the managerial ladder, right at the beginning of their career. On the other hand, a normal corporate career would take them a decade to get there.

If they had been fired after a year, I asked.

“Never mind,” said one of them. “I would have learned enough to start my own business and market it the way Zomato and Blinkit were able to market themselves.”

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

What Mr Goyal is offering is a one in eighteen thousand chance of getting a Zomato MBA, landing a top job and then earning good money after ‘graduation’.

Mr. Goyal realized that the job posting had generated a lot of bad press for him. So he spun it the next day, saying that the 20 lei “fee” was “just a filter, to find people who had the power to appreciate the opportunity for a quick career, without getting bogged down by the constraints ahead. of them.”

As it turns out now, Zomato won’t ask for money and “pays the right person anyway”.

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

It’s a shame that young people have to consider such options, where only the extremely privileged – no bank gives you a 20 lei ‘education loan’ to work at Zomato – can ride the elevator all the way to the top, in while everyone else has an eternally long ladder to climb.

This stunt is just the beginning. Prepare for many such carrot/stick combos to be dangled by potential youth employers where they 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 those of the author. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)