The fate of one’s employment mostly depends on how that candidate manages to impress the executives in the Human Resource department and senior management at a company. It is rare that the organisation’s customers have a say in such matters. But, this happened to a student who was working as an intern with restaurant aggregator platform Zomato last month.
Recently, the food delivery company made its most unconventional offer to the intern to join their social media team on multiple requests by Instagram users.
Earlier this week, Zomato took to LinkedIn to share the unique story of this intern who is now the co-admin of its Instagram handle.
What the Gurugram-based company thought was “the lamest idea ever’ helped the ex-intern land the job of his dreams.
“The best part for us was learning that ideas are worthless until you get them out. They’ll be eventful at worst, but game changers at best,” the statement read.
With puns galore, the former intern planned a short social media campaign that showed food items with their names on December 8. From sev (save) puri and delete puri to word play on bay leaf’s desi name tej (speed) patta, the audience could relate to the post, and the initiative was a hit with the Insta followers.
Looking at the attention the social media post was receiving, Zomato added a little challenge. “50k likes on this post and we offer him a full time role,” the pinned comment to the post read.
Supportive and encouraging messages for the intern poured in in the comments section, and the post got 50K likes within three hours.
The intern was offered a job the next day. Since then, the post has over 98K likes.
The content of the letter read:
Dear Intern,
On public demand, we are forced to offer you a full-time position as co-admin of our social media handles.
Your daily responsibilities include:
1. Not bragging about getting 50K likes on the post
2. That’s it.
Your annual compensation would still be ‘exposure’.
P.S.: Please note that in case any of your future posts get less than 20K likes, you would be demoted to an intern again.
In its note on LinkedIn, Zomato joked that the worst part is that their ex-intern hasn’t stopped talking about his 50K achievement.
Zomato has a little less than 600k followers on Instagram, 1.5 million followers on Twitter and over 737K followers on LinkedIn.
