smarter even than they were, but they also wanted recruits who shared their values. The relatively low wages paid during employees’ early years, partners thought, fostered an appropriately long-term perspective.20 To this end, sometimes twenty or more employees, including several partners, often interviewed successful candidates. Whitehead told me that during his time, a potential candidate also had to be interviewed and approved by at least one secretarial assistant, because how one treated assistants was considered important. It showed one’s values. Sometimes the interview process itself weeded out candidates better suited to a firm where “individual performance was applauded and assimilation was less important.”21 Author Charles Ellis notes that “extensive interviewing was becoming a firm tradition … It gave the firm multiple opportunities to assess a recruit’s capabilities, interests, and personal fit with the firm … ‘You could say that our commitment to interviewing was carried through to a fault.’”22
Whitehead was clear that, as a service business, Goldman needed to select the best people if it was to be the best firm: “Recruiting is the most important thing we can ever do. And if we ever stop recruiting very well, within just five years, we will be on that slippery down slope, doomed to mediocrity.”23 Active participation by the most senior partners underscored Goldman’s emphasis on hiring the best people.24
Goldman also made sure that the future leaders devoted a “material” amount of time to recruiting. Rob Kaplan—who joined Goldman in 1983, went on to run investment banking, and retired as a vice chairman—credits Goldman’s recruiting process with helping build a “powerhouse operation.” He describes his impressions of the process: “I grew up [at Goldman]. We identified attracting, retaining, and developing superb talent as a critical priority. As a junior person, I was enormously impressed that the very senior leaders of the firm were willing to interview candidates and attend recruiting events on a regular basis. I learned from their example that there wasn’t anything more important than recruiting and developing talent.”25
As evidence of his commitment to recruiting, Whitehead personally conducted on-campus interviews. The qualities he looked for in potential recruits were “brains, leadership potential, and ambition in roughly equal parts.”26
During a meeting I challenged him, saying that every firm claims to look for these qualities. “What about values?” I said.
Whitehead told me that he had overlooked the word values because it should have been obvious that Goldman would hire only people who exhibited values like the firm’s. To him, it was the first prerequisite for employment—and the firm dedicated senior people to the task. Most importantly, he wanted people who shared the Goldman values and were willing to act in concert with its ethical principles both within the firm and in interactions with clients. For example, the boasting and displays of ego common on Wall Street were not welcome at Goldman; offenders were quickly reminded that their accomplishments were possible only because of everyone’s hard work and contributions. Whitehead once admonished an associate for saying “I” rather than “we.”27 When I interviewed him, Whitehead himself used “we” instead of “I.” To this day, my wife and non-Goldman friends tease me for the same subconscious substitution—it is that ingrained.
Goldman’s practice was to hire directly from top business schools rather than from other firms because recent MBAs were more malleable; the “plasticity” of a young MBA’s character made it easier to inculcate the Goldman ethos.28 The firm’s recruiting focused on merit rather than pedigree.29 A privileged background was often a strike against a candidate: it was thought that perhaps he or she might not work as hard or be as careful with money as someone who had not come from wealth.
My own experience in interviewing for my job at Goldman in 1992 told me, in no uncertain terms, exactly what Goldman valued in an employee. A partner who interviewed me explained that I would regularly have to work one hundred hours a week—until two or three o’clock in the morning, Saturdays and Sundays included, and most holidays.30 I was then asked what I had done that demonstrated my ability to maintain that pace and still excel, so I explained that I had done well academically while playing two sports in college and performing community service.
Playing team sports in college, serving in the military, performing public service, or being involved with the Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts were seen as big advantages at Goldman, because they demonstrated teamwork, discipline, and a sense of community and obligation to society. Teamwork is codified in Goldman’s principle 8 (“We stress teamwork in everything we do”), and discipline is implicit in principle 9 (regarding the “dedication of our people to the firm and the intense effort they give their jobs”). Interestingly, a sense of community and obligation to society is not written as a business principle, but it is so ingrained that almost every internal and external communication about the firm prominently describes and displays its “citizenship.” (For examples, see appendix E.)
At the close of the interview, the partner asked me whether I had any questions as he filled out a form for human resources. “If I work until two or three o’clock in the morning, how will I get home?” I asked. “Are the subways open at that hour?”
He chuckled. “There are always Lincoln Town Cars lined up outside the building. You can take one of them home.”
Coming from a middle-class Midwestern background, I had never heard of such a thing (I couldn’t contemplate someone else driving a car with me in the backseat), so I asked what I thought was a practical question: “So do I drive the car back when I come back in the morning?”
He burst out laughing. While having trouble to stop laughing, he then explained that I would be “chauffeured” and dropped off at home. There he sat, with his sleeves rolled up on his white shirt, top button undone and back of his shirt slightly untucked, Brooks Brothers striped tie loosened a little. It was the standard look in M&A. You looked as if you were working hard. He leaned over and said, “Let me read what I wrote on your review form: ‘Lunch pail kind of guy—knows nothing but will kill himself for us—and smart enough so we can teach him.’” That was me in a nutshell—and just the kind of person Goldman wanted.
I was surprised that other candidates and I were interviewed by the people they would work with, not human resources people.
After completing ten or fifteen interviews, I got an offer the next day.
Soon after I was hired, I was asked to review résumés from Midwestern schools for candidates to interview. When I was given hundreds of them bound in three-ring folders, I asked the vice president who had given me the assignment, “How should I go about choosing?”
He shrugged and told me to take anyone who didn’t have a certain grade point average and SAT score and throw them out, and then get back to him.
I did that, but I was still left with what still seemed like hundreds of résumés. So I asked, “Now what do I do?”
“Take out anyone who doesn’t play a varsity sport or do something really exceptional or substantive in public service,” he told me, waving me out of his office.
Once again I culled the folders, but still I had too many. So I went back again.
“Now throw out any that don’t have both sports and public service, and raise your grade and SAT requirements.”
After this round, I came up with the thirty people we would interview to select the one or two who would get an offer.
It seemed to me that a large percentage of people hired by Goldman in the United States had roots in the Midwest or in Judaism, and when I discussed this with Whitehead and others, they said that there was no conscious
