Goldman Sachs Sucks at Recruiting Engineers Until They See the Salary
The recruiting funnel from the Ivy League to Goldman Sachs has been short on engineers ever since Silicon Valley decided to exploit Wall Street's moral failings to fill their tech campuses. But according to Dealbook, the vampiric cephalopod is biting back with a "new, hipper website" and a bunch of buzzwords.
At the Columbia event, the screen at the front of the room had a word cloud showing the cool fields — at least for computer scientists — that Goldman engineers work in, among them "machine learning," "data mining" and "cloud computing."
Part of the investment bank's problem may be that it's fighting stereotypes of startups from the last tech boom:
The Goldman employees knew they had an uphill battle. They were fighting against perceptions of Wall Street as boring and regulation-bound and Silicon Valley as the promised land of flip-flops, beanbag chairs and million-dollar stock options.
The perks of Startupland have gotten much more alluring than bean-filled chairs. To counter the industry's "change the world" selling point, Goldman argues you can make a bigger impact in finance:
"Whereas in other opportunities you might be considering, it is working one type of data or one type of application, we deal in hundreds of products in hundreds of markets, with thousands or tens of thousands of clients, every day, millions of times of day worldwide," Afsheen Afshar, a managing director at Goldman Sachs, told the students [at Columbia].
Of course the opportunity to make a global impact may not be as convincing coming from the engineers of the financial contagion. So that's when R. Martin Chavez, Goldman's chief information officer, steps in with Wall Street's foolproof recruiting tactic, says Dealbook:
If nothing else, Mr. Chavez said, candidates' concerns are usually assuaged when they see the generous compensation that Goldman offers.
"As soon as we start talking to the candidates about what our starting packages look like, the lifestyle questions about flip-flops and beanbags really start to go away," he said.
Just don't spend it all on beanbags, kids.
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