Zomato goes to Undergraduate Colleges for Hiring

India's first online food guide Zomato, which is planning to go global, is on a massive recruitment drive. Zomato is an online restaurant discovery guide providing information on home delivery, dine-out, cafés and nightlife in cities of India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.

Zomato made 115 undergraduate offers at top university colleges in 2013-14, with one-and-a-half months of hiring still to go. The company will visit 15 more colleges by February-end and targets to hire at least 30 people more. 

The 115 offers made this year include eight IIT hires, while the remaining offers were made at the non-engineering, non-MBA undergraduate colleges, mostly from streams of arts, social sciences, commerce and economics.

Some of the top colleges where Zomato made offers this year include St Stephen's, Miranda House, Lady Sri Ram College, SRCC, St Joseph's, Christ University, Symbiosis Institutes, St Xavier's College, Kolkata and Mumbai, RA Podar College and HR College of Commerce in Mumbai.

Zomato head of recruitment Upsana Nath told Firstpost, "It's not that we are not going to IIMs and Bschools. It's just that with the current profiles we are offering which are primarily sales managers and content associates we are looking for some younger talent. For a role, which requires freshers, we would obviously go to the the ungdergrad colleges only given that it is placement season there."

The website Foodiebay.com was started by Deepinder Goyal, a post-graduate from IIT Delhi. The journey to the present-day Zomato started as a small exercise to help his colleagues negotiate huge stacks of menu cards with ease. It was in 2008 when he was working with Bain and Company, a management consulting firm, when he put all menu cards in his office on the internet. 

Deepinder’s juniors from college, Pankaj Chaddah and Gunjan Patidar (who are now Chief Operating Officer and Chief Technology Officer respectively), joined him in building the database. Foodiebay officially started in July 2008 with a list of 1,200 restaurants in the Delhi NCR region. This database expanded to 2,000 restaurants by end 2008. Within the next six months, Kolkata and Mumbai were included on the website.

Zomato wants to scale up its presence globally and is planning to double the countries it is present in to 22 over the next two years across the Americas, Europe, South East Asia, and Australia. 

It recently raised Rs 227 crore from Sequoia Capital and InfoEdge in one of the largest funding rounds for a consumer internet company in India and plans on using these funds to set up up offices in the 22 countries, hiring people and teams, etc. Zomato’s total funding now stands at over $53 million (about Rs 328.6 cr), and values the company at over Rs 900 crore.

Source : Firstpost