Application for Deepi Goyal's chief of staff role

I know you are no longer accepting applications, but what the heck! Let me give it a shot. But I must level with you first.

- Dear Deepi,

Several nice people told me not to apply for your chief of staff position. They believe it is not fair to ask the successful candidate to pay up in the first year.

There is this friend of mine who sold his startup and became a social media influencer on a sensitive subject. He went from zero to 1 million followers on Insta in 17 months. He swears that one gets more attention (read: more followers) by "pulling stunts." This has apparently gone too far, with several chief executive officers (CEOs) spending more of their time devising stunts to pull, instead of trying to solve problems.

My friend, however, concedes that your job posting sounded like a good idea. For ₹20 lakh—we are talking possibilities—you can learn like crazy and get the kind of experience no B-school can match.

Let's take a sec to look at what is rolling out of our schools and colleges. Recruiters shake their heads at the quality and use a myriad of terms to describe this crowd, of which "unemployable" is the only one that can be reproduced in a family newspaper such as this.

Some are good, but that number is not very large. The venerable Economic Survey for 2023-24 makes this point forcefully: One in two graduates are not yet readily employable straight out of college. As Raghuram Rajan pointed out in an interview with Vir Sanghvi, you've got something like 19 million applying for 60,000 railway jobs... PhDs applying for jobs as peons.