A team of 12 students from ISB Hyderabad and Mohali visited Zomato’s sprawling headquarters in Gurgaon. We were introduced by Swati (the HR) to Paras Arora, Product Manager, content (who was a part of ISB's class of 2012) and Gaurav Gupta (IIM Calcutta class of 2005 and who had earlier worked at AT Kearney). The duo was spearheading the company’s global growth.
The two of them took us through Zomato’s internal divisions that included search and discovery, B2B (ads and restaurant point of sale), table reservations and online orders.
The company has grown exponentially across the borders through acquisitions of smaller firms. While they built the online content from scratch for the restaurants in India, the case was different in other countries, where content was readily available online.
Bullish outlooks
The firm is bullish on the following:
~ Their PoS : This will be a platform on which a restaurant can manage tables and food orders (dining in as well as take aways or home delivery). They intend to install it in restaurants. In fact, their vision is to even have food delivery apps use the same POS.
~ Global growth : The firm has expanded its operations to 23 countries. However, it needs to rapidly increase its presence in more places and the depth of its operations in the countries they are already in.
It can be seen that with 1,200 employees (of which 700 are in sales and 120 are in tech), the business is very sales-driven. This is to generate revenues from restaurant marketing and operations. The company is also really fast when it comes to rolling out new products (concept to launch has been achieved in six weeks).
From a recruitment standpoint, they consider anyone who can add value to their business. It looks though that they may look at recruiting for global growth.