Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal Shares Update On ’Pay ₹20 Lakh’ Chief Of Staff Job Offer

Hyderabad: Zomato Founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal on Wednesday shared an update on the company’s high-profile Chief of Staff hiring initiative.

“We started with 18,000+ applications and have had the privilege of meeting over 150 incredibly talented individuals. From this, 30 exceptional people received offers, and 18 have already joined Zomato (and other group companies like Blinkit) in high-impact roles. They’re being handsomely compensated for the value they bring, and nobody paid anything to work with us,” he clarified.

“4 of the 18 people who have already joined us, work directly with me, and 2 of them are in Chief of Staff roles,” he added.

The development has come months after the online food delivery giant released an advertisement asking candidates to pay Rs 20 lakh for the role. The fee was meant to act as a “filter” to identify those genuinely passionate about the role.

Goyal further stated that what distinguished these candidates was their strategic and long-term outlook. “They weren’t optimizing for short-term outcomes but for compounding impact—the most misunderstood mathematical miracle. Finding people who truly get this is rare, and I’m grateful we did,” he wrote on X. 

He identified those 30 individuals as “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.”

They will lead the company into the future, he said.

He informed that the company is still reviewing the remaining applications, highlighting that this initiative is a long-term investment rather than a one-off recruitment drive. “And we’re not done. 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 added.

Check his post here: