How Goldman Sachs persuades top tech talent to work there instead of at Google (GS)

YouTube/Goldman Sachs

For aspiring investment bankers, Goldman Sachs is a dream place to work.

But the firm wants to become an equally coveted workplace for the world's best computer scientists, programmers, and engineers.

Goldman Sachs' technology division makes up a huge part of it firm — about 11,000 people, or 36% of the workforce. The division's head, Marty Chavez, has his own public-relations team and just hired a big-name chief of staff.

Even CEO Lloyd Blankfein likes to refer to Goldman Sachs as a "tech company."

So it's important for the firm to recruit top tech talent. And that's a challenge when the bank is competing for programmers and data scientists with companies like Google and Facebook.

On a podcast posted on the firm's website, technology cohead Don Duet spoke about how the bank tries to persuade young tech talent to join.

The pitch involves convincing new hires that technology is a big part of the way Goldman Sachs does business, instead of being another "back-office job," that supports superstars in trading or investment banking.

"We are a big part of the firm and I think that's a great selling point for anyone that's an aspiring technologist," he said. "It's at the core of the firm, it's a core competency across really all parts of the organization, not just the technology division," Duet said.

He also described the challenging, and rewarding, type of problems Goldman's tech team works on. But no mention of free snacks or ping-pong tables. Here's more from Duet:

The challenges in front of us are nontrivial, the complexity of our products, and our solutions and the markets we operate within are enormously challenging. As we mentioned before, we've been investing in technology for over two decades. And it creates a great opportunity therefore for great technologists to come and join us and actually work on both very hard and technically complex challenges, but work on that in the context of a changing business, which is really kind of unique, and it's kind of fun.

Last fall, the firm announced plans to use new technological platforms to lighten the workload of some bankers — and ultimately to enhance efficiency.

One such platform helps analysts put together initial public offering timelines and fee runs. Each of those tasks used to take bankers about six hours; the new tools can do them in about 30 minutes. Another will help bankers with the work surrounding mergers-and-acquisitions deals.

"We're building a technological solution around a deal life cycle," Luke Sarsfield, COO of Goldman's investment-banking division, said at the time.

Listen to the full podcast here »

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