In the last three-four months alone, new-age tech entrepreneurs including Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal; EaseMytrip and Optimo cofounder Prashant Pitti; Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas; Leverage CEO Akshay Chaturvedi and Mosaic Wellness CEO Revant Bhate have taken to platforms like LinkedIn and X to pitch job openings and watched their social media blow up.
For Goyal, who has 814,000-plus followers on LinkedIn and another 705,000-plus on X, a controversial chief of staff job post in late-November brought in 18,000 applications, of which 30 received offers and 18 have since joined Zomato and other group companies like Blinkit, according to his February 5 update.
Pitti’s founders’ office job postings for his fintech startup Optimo saw 4,300 resumes come in two days. Bhate’s post on Thursday inviting suggestions for people to join the CEO’s office saw over 1,000 applications in a day; for Chaturvedi it was 1,850-plus in a matter of 80-90 hours.
‘Best Recruiting Magnet’
Founders say going down this route opens up access to a far bigger and more diverse group, including candidates who may otherwise not be actively job searching. Most of them have ended up hiring more people than they originally planned; they’ve also got a pool of CVs for the future.
“Gone are the days of taking it all through your HR team, HR vendors, headhunters, etc.—disintermediation is the new norm at the founder’s office today,” said business and brand strategy expert Harish Bijoor, founder, Harish Bijoor Consults. “Today, the founder is seen to be the best recruiting magnet; in many ways, monetising his social media presence to advantage.”
‘Grabbing Eyeballs’
Unlike typical JDs, these posts are sometimes fun, sometimes quirky, sometimes controversial, but always with the founder’s persona shining through. So, while Leverage’s Chaturvedi said he’s ‘Hiring for an Akshay Chaturvedi +1’ who is even more obsessed about the company than he is, Goyal’s post courted controversy and eyeballs by claiming that people would have to pay Rs 20 lakh for the opportunity (he later said it was never part of the plan). Pitti, on his part, needed candidates to spell out clearly on the Google form about projects they’d done and whether extensive travel would work for them.“I was expecting maybe 50-100 people… instead of that I got 4,300 in two days, and then another 1,000 more,” said Pitti.
The quality is immeasurable compared to what a hiring agency would have got him, Pitti said. He’s spoken to many already across backgrounds: GenAI experts, bankers, marketers. “There are people among them who weren’t looking out; but now are excited to be a part of our mission.”
Chaturvedi said he posted his job requirements on LinkedIn at midnight after meeting a couple of candidates through recruiters who didn’t quite fit the bill. Having successfully hired four people this way once about a year ago, he said he is now confident it works well.
“This time, we’ve even got applications from US, UK, Latin America for the Delhi-based position,” he said.
While hiring generalists, in particular, routing it through social media network helps, said Bhate of Mosaic Wellness. “I want to see hunger, ambition, agency. That works better when people reach out directly to talk about how they can satisfy those requirements as compared to going via agencies/HR departments who have set patterns to evaluate them.”
“It’s a more holistic way to find great people,” he said.
Founders, including those in the US, Europe, Dubai and Singapore, have been doing this for a while, said Bijoor. Tesla CEO Elon Musk, for instance, took to X recently, inviting ‘hardcore software engineers’ to join him in creating an ‘everything app’.
Bijoor, who works with around 11 founders and seven VCs, said he recommends this strategy all the time. “It works.”