Wide interview net recruits best

Following the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs decided to replace its hiring playbook with emerging best practices.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs faced a challenge that was, frankly, relatively new to our now 150-year-old firm. For decades investment banking had been one of the most sought-after, exciting and fast-growing industries in the world.

However, the crash took some of the sheen off our industry. And simultaneously, the battle for talent intensified within and outside our industry. Many of the candidates we were pursuing were heading off to Silicon Valley, private equity or start-ups. Furthermore, we were no longer principally looking for a specialised cadre of accounting, finance and economics majors: new skills, especially coding, were in huge demand.

Not long ago the firm relied on a narrower set of factors for identifying “the best” students, such as school, grade point average, major, leadership roles and relevant experience — the classic resume topics. No longer. We decided to replace our hiring playbook with emerging best practices. This involved two additions to our campus recruiting strategy: video interviews and structured interviewing.

VIDEO INTERVIEWS Traditionally we had flown recruiters and business professionals to universities for first-round interviews. The schools would give us a set date and number of timeslots to meet students. It restricted us to a smaller number of campuses and only as many students as we could squeeze into a limited schedule. It also meant we tended to focus on top-ranked schools. How many qualified candidates were at a school became more important than who were the most talented students regardless of their school. However, we knew that our leadership ranks were already rich with people from many different schools. What’s more, as we’ve built offices in new cities and elsewhere, we’ve needed to recruit at more schools in those areas. Video interviews allow us to do that.

We decided to use “asynchronous” video interviews — in which candidates record their answers to interview questions. Our recruiters record standardised questions and send them to students, who have three days to return videos of their answers. Our recruiters and business professionals review the videos to narrow the pool, then invite the selected applicants for final-round, in-person interviews.

This approach has had a meaningful impact in two ways. First, with limited effort, we can spend more time getting to know the people who apply for jobs at Goldman Sachs. In 2015, the year before we rolled out this platform, we interviewed fewer than 20 per cent of all our campus applicants; last year almost 40 per cent of the students who applied to the firm participated in a first-round interview. Second, we now encounter talent from places we previously didn’t get to. In 2015 we interviewed students from 798 schools around the world, compared with 1268 for our most recent incoming class

STRUCTURED QUESTIONING AND ASSESSMENTS

Research shows that structured interviews are effective at assessing candidates and helping predict job performance. So we ask candidates about specific experiences they’ve had that are similar to situations they might face at Goldman Sachs and pose scenarios they might encounter in the future. Essentially, we focus less on past achievements and more on understanding whether a candidate has qualities that will positively affect our firm and our culture.

Harvard Business Review

Dane E. Holmes is global head of human capital management at Goldman Sachs.