Christ to SRCC: Zomato bets on top undergrad colleges for right talent

India’s first online food guide Zomato, which is planning to go global, is on a massive recruitment drive. The restaurant listings start-up has already made 115 offers this year and prefers freshers from top undergrad colleges for young,aggressivetalent to shore up its overseas expansion plan. It will however also make offers to IIMs and Bschools as well.

According to a report in The Economic Time _s_, Zomato’s 115 offers this year haveprimarilybeen made to non-engineering, non-MBA undergraduate colleges, mostly from streams of arts, social sciences, commerce and economics. The company is targetting at least another 30 people more and plans on visiting 15 more colleges by February-end.

[caption id=“attachment_1216415” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Deepinder Goyal of Zomato[/caption]

Some of the top colleges where Zomato made offers this yearincludeSt 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.

The undergrad hirings are mostly for the current job profiles that the company is offering. 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.”

Nath also added that for more experience jobs and those that requires leadership experience they will definitely be looking at IIMs and other top business schools. She said, “Someone who has better geographical experience, has worked at a startup in the past, yes for those people we will go to IIMs. We are startup that is expanding and we need such people. We’ve also initiated conversations at Columbia business schools and Wharton business school as well and have made offers.”

Started in 2008 by IIT Delhi college-mates Deepinder Goyal, 30 and Pankaj Chaddah, 27, Zomato is a restaurant guide providing in-depth information for over 160,000 restaurants in 35 cities across 11 countries.

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 .