Goldman Sachs, which has traditionally sent scores of recruiters to campus each year to interview students for summer analyst positions, will no longer conduct on-campus interviews at Yale or at other colleges, in an attempt to draw talent from beyond just elite universities.
Starting this fall, the bank is transitioning to a video-based interview platform that increases access for students from all colleges but hastens the application process to almost a year before the job’s start date.
The move, announced in June, marks a shift in how students move from college to the finance sector, an industry that recruits heavily on elite campuses like Yale’s. For the past two years, Goldman has been among the top eight employers of Yale students after graduation. But Goldman officials said the change would not weaken the firm’s relationship with Yale.
“Goldman Sachs continues to have a strong relationship with Yale,” Leslie Shribman, vice president for media relations at Goldman, said. “Given our expanded on-campus presence and relationships built at Yale, we would not envision our new interviewing platform to have a material impact on the number of hires we make.”
Shribman said the new interviewing policy allows the firm to broaden its search for candidates while increasing efficiency for both Goldman and prospective hires. Apart from interviews, Goldman will still actively recruit on campus this fall, with 11 different events scheduled for later this semester.
Jeanine Dames, the director of the Office of Career Strategy, said video interviewing could actually result in a greater number of students taking jobs at Goldman, since the online system allows the company to recruit for other internal departments, like compliance or human relations, that did not have on-campus interviews.
The new system also changes the timeline for finance recruiting, giving students the opportunity to submit applications as early as July 1.
Goldman’s announcement is part of a larger trend of investment banks beginning their recruitment processes earlier and earlier, Dames said, which limits students’ opportunities to explore other career options.
To push back on earlier deadlines for summer internship applications, OCS instituted a new policy that asks companies to allow students to respond as late as April 1 if they are also considering jobs in public service. Goldman has been known in the past to extend offers as early as September, according to Chadd Cosse ’17, who has worked at the firm for the past two summers.
As of August, 79 percent of employers posting jobs with OCS said they would grant the extension if a student requested one, Dames said. Goldman is among those firms that have agreed to honor the exemption.
To compete with investment banks giving job offers increasingly sooner, OCS has also pushed its networking events for other industries to dates earlier in the academic year.
“We want students to make smart decisions,” Dames said. “If you know you want to explore these other industries, I think it’s really important that you be able to do that.”
But Cosse, a campus ambassador for Goldman, said the earlier timeline for the application process would reduce stress for people who were set on working in finance during the summer.
The video interview requirement will also ensure that students applying are serious about eventually working at Goldman, Cosse said.
“At Yale, it’s a given that you can get a first-round interview pretty much if you have a resume to submit,” he said. “Yale is in a fortunate situation in that it’s a target school and we have a lot of alumni that come recruit.”
No other investment banks that recruit at Yale have yet decided to abolish on-campus interviewing, Dames said.