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Deepinder Goyal hires 2 people for chief of staff roles, reveals whether they ‘paid anything’
Deepinder Goyal has provided an update on his chief of staff vacancy at Zomato, saying 18 people have already joined the company in high-impact roles.
Deepinder Goyal has provided an update on his chief of staff vacancy at Zomato, saying 18 people have already joined the company in high-impact roles. Another 12 have been offered jobs at Zomato and group companies like Blinkit, he announced.
In an X post this morning, Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal said all the people who joined the group in high-impact roles are being “handsomely compensated” for the value they bring, and none of them have had to pay Zomato anything.
This clarification comes after his controversial job posting in November 2024 where Goyal said he was looking for a chief of staff who would not be paid a salary for one year. Instead, the selected candidate would have to donate ₹20 lakh to Zomato, the CEO of Zomato said before backtracking on this announcement.
Zomato CEO’s hiring update
This morning, Deepinder Goyal took to social media to provide a “Hiring update on the Chief of Staff.” He said the job opening received over 18,000 applications and he interviewed more than 150 talented candidates.
Although his initial job posting made it look like only one candidate would be selected for the role, Goyal this morning said that 30 people have received offers from Zomato, out of which 18 have already joined the company.
Four of these 18 new employees are working directly under Goyal, with two of them in chief of staff roles.
The 42-year-old CEO said that this spree of hiring is a long-term investment in the company’s future. “With 18,000+ applications, we’re still carefully sifting through this amazing talent pool. This isn’t just a one-time hiring sprint—it’s a long-term investment in the people who will build the future with us. We’ll keep reaching out to the right folks, slowly but surely,” he said.
The new Zomato employees
In his hiring post back in November, Deepinder Goyal had said that he was looking for “Someone who is hungry, has a lot of common sense, empathy, and not a lot of experience (and therefore no conditioning/baggage). Is down to earth, and has zero entitlement. Wants to do the right thing, even if it comes at the cost of displeasing others. Has Grade A communication skills and most importantly, has a learning mindset.”
(Also read: Deepinder Goyal seeks Zomato chief of staff: Forget salary, pay ₹20 lakh for the privilege)
Now, he has shared more details on the kind of employees he hired that fit this criteria.
Goyal said that the 30 people who have been offered jobs by Zomato are “Founders who bootstrapped startups from their dorm rooms, engineers who rewrote entire tech stacks over a weekend, operators who turned chaos into scale, and a handful of brilliant young minds fresh out of college—people we believe will lead us into the future.”
What sets these people apart is their “long-term mindset” - they are not “optimizing for short-term outcomes but for compounding impact,” he said.
