Engineers can now ‘demo’ work with Zomato

People join a company for the brand, and stay for the culture. Our Trial Week gives potential Zomans the chance to experience both the brand, and the culture – up close.

Over 3500 applications, 50 participants and 19 offers rolled out. This season of Trial Week has already begun on a fantastic note for us.

It’s been 7 weeks since we kickstarted our first Trial Week – Season 2019. Engineers from all over the country registered to work with Zomato for a week and go through an extended two sided evaluation of mutual fit.

When it comes to engineers, how well can both parties really evaluate each other through a 2 or 3 round interview process? It surely helps us comprehend skill set, basic culture fit, and a surface level understanding of who they really are. But is it the best way to actually recruit, or for them to choose a place to work at? Maybe not.

It’s a long, monotonous (sometimes) and exhausting process for both sides involved.

We believe the entire point of a hiring process is to ensure we are confident enough to decide to take the plunge of spending a lot of time working with someone – on an everyday basis. And this is what Trial Week does for us. It gives us an opportunity to spend enough time with talent, work on real world problems with them – make some friends, and eventually if both parties decide so, choose to work with each other as part of the same time.

Looking at the Trial Week from an engineer’s lens, they get –

• A chance to work on real problems that affect millions of users daily
• A taste of our culture and an understanding of what a typical day at Zomato looks like

Trial Week is now an ongoing program

After witnessing the quality of experience and outcome during Trial Week, we have decided to adopt this as an on-going program at Zomato. This also gives us an opportunity to open up additional slots and provide a chance to more people to participate in the program.

For a candidate, it’s always hard to picture their life at an organisation when they’ve only attended a couple of formal interviews at their workplace. We want candidates to live the life of an engineer at Zomato for a week, in its truest form possible.

To ensure this, we provide every candidate with:

• A mentor – to guide them through their week at Zomato
• A challenge – that is specifically designed, based on their skill set
• Travel and stay arrangements – in case they’re coming in from another city
• Meals – all three of them, which will be provided at the Zomato cafeteria
• Assets – to help them execute all their tasks in the most efficient manner

Whether a candidate makes it as a full-time Zoman or not, our basic aim through the process is to ensure that they have fun and are given tasks that are challenging enough to instil some amount of learning, that can guide them wherever they plan to go after.

What did our participants have to say?

Mayur Bhangale, joined us as a Software Development Engineer earlier this month and described Trial Week as a recruitment process, where one is purely evaluated as who they are and not as how they pretend to be.

“This process has no typical CLRS tests, no whiteboards, and includes no sit-down interviews. The challenge at hand is a real-world problem and you are evaluated on the approach, execution, and quality of work.

I was surrounded by extremely hard working Zomans, which set a huge bar for me and managed to complete my challenge in 3 days, after which I was immediately offered a job.”

Another participant, Prakhar Shrivastava took us over his week at the Zomato headquarters.

“I realized that one week is enough to see a visible change in one’s knowledge and concepts. Working with my mentor was an absolute pleasure – his thinking and ideas to optimize the application, in order for it to scale well was something that helped me a lot.

Brainstorming ideas and discussing different approaches to completing the challenge were the most insightful parts of the week.”

We have a plethora of engineering problem statements that are ready to be solved for at Zomato and thus are on the lookout for passionate engineers who can contribute to this in their own unique ways.

If you have an immense passion for code and trust your ability to solve problems under high-pressure situations, we would love for you to be a part of this program and ‘demo’ working for with us at Zomato.

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