How to get a job at Goldman Sachs - the inside track

If you want to get a job at Goldman Sachs, good luck. Unfortunately, so do 315,000 other people – so if you’re going to go through the gauntlet of applying to work there, you need to know as much as possible first.

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Standing out from a crowd of people that could populate a minor city is tricky. However, Goldman accepts 2,500 or so graduates every year, so the “actual” crowd is more like 126 people vying for each job. Applications aren't even distributed: there is far more competition for front-office roles such as M&A or capital markets than, say, risk or compliance.

So – how do you stand out from that crowd?

The ideal Goldman CV/resume and cover letter

You start with a CV (also known as resume) and cover letter. Writing the ideal resume is both a work of art and a science, and there’s no need to repeat anything that you probably know already. The particular alchemy behind what a Goldman Sachs recruiter looks for in a resume/CV is something we’ve previously written about here.

In a nutshell: your resume should be very much tailored to your application, it should be tightly written (and, by extension, deeply relevant), and ideally it should contain bullet points. Goldman likes bullet points, apparently. 

Vicki Tung, Goldman’s global head of talent acquisition, told Business Insider a few years back that “resume padding” should be avoided. Candidates with multiple, minor (or short-timeframe) accomplishments can be seen as a red flag. A discerning Goldman recruiter could very possibly see these as activities undertaken for CV points instead of out of pure love of… Finance society volunteering, or whatever else. Quality over quantity, Tung said.

Cover letters are a more delicate art. A lot of tech companies are discarding them, but they’re still popular in banking – and what’s more, Goldman recruiters love them. They love cover letters so much that they even have their own, special format for them. The Goldman Sachs cover letter needs to be circa 300 words long, to explain your interest in the role, in the firm, your suitability, and take a few points from your CV to substantiate why exactly. This is also the best place to name-drop if you've done some/any networking.

Standing out with your CV/resume is as important as during your interview. Ex-Goldman banker Will McTighe says that applications to the firm are often “very generic”, on account of the impeccable academics and the similar finance-society template of every candidate. “Most people have quirks,” he says. You need to show yours.

“Demonstrate how interesting you are,” says McTighe. That means doing “something a bit crazy that people think is a bit nuts.” His own quirks include ultra-marathoning from Oxford to London, despite having never run a marathon before, as well as learning Mandarin, ski instruction, and various sports.

When we looked at some interesting students that Goldman had hired we noted, among others, authors, dating show contestants, and squash champions. It’s part of the “hook” that Goldman partner and co-head of investment grade capital markets and derivatives Eric Jordan told Business Insider about recently. Think of your CV as a tinder profile, suggests Andrew Osayemi, Morgan Stanley's former EMEA head of campus infrastructure & technology recruiting.

Being interesting might even overshadow your academic background – a former Goldman recruiter we spoke to a few years ago noted that an English Literature student wrote such a brilliant and “off the wall” cover letter that they brought him in for an interview. Why? Because he showed that he was imaginative, innovative, and interesting.

McTighe does specify, however, that not all quirks have to be physical, so feel free to consider birdwatching or basket weaving or burrowing. What is sure, however, is that you shouldn’t hide what differentiates you. It should be as much on your resume, as a point of pride, as your academic record is.

The ideal Goldman HireVue interview

Assuming you meet the very high academic requirements of an application, your next step in the application process is then a HireVue interview. It’s straightforward, and we spoke to HireVue ourselves to write a guide for you. Goldman’s isn’t especially different – but we do have a list of particular questions that the bank (and some others) uses here.

How to do a HireVue interview is a question that is hard to answer. Uninspiringly, you should try to answer the question as best you can – that is to answer as if you were sitting in front of the question-asker while answering it. Be professional (act like a banker, not a student) and prepare your answers well – you’ll only have around 30 seconds to “prepare” your answer to a question and 120 seconds to deliver it. If you have answers prepared (and if you’re serious about getting an investment banking job, you will have), then you’ll use those 30 seconds to glance at your notes.

Your answers will then be “scanned” by HireVue’s AI to see how good a fit you’ll be for the employer you’re interviewing with. The once-viral former nightmares of eyelash density counters and lactose intolerance probability nexuses are things of the past; your answer will be judged by the AI, and you’ll soon-ish receive a response from the bank as to whether you were successful.

If you pass the HireVue stage, you’ll be invited to a super day – a marathon of interviews, extending across several hours. You should get a response from the bank about your success within 48 hours, Tung says.

The ideal Goldman Sachs Superday interview

If you’ve gotten past the HireVues and received an offer for an interview, congratulations. Mostly people get filtered out before this stage, so the cards are already in your favor. You’ll now be invited to interview with Goldman in real life, likely at a superday.

Most questions at this interview will be situational-behavioral. "We will ask students how they handle various scenarios where integrity may be in question,” Tung says, “and depending on their answer, that's where we determine whether or not somebody's going to move forward in our process or not."

The airport test is still a rule of thumb in the industry, even if it manifests itself differently. As Jordan says: “You want the person that interviews you to walk away saying, I'd like this person on my team. I'd like to sit next to this person.”

Tung also suggests you “think in threes”. What that means is to, essentially, quantify yourself – you contributed X, got Y result, leading to Z. Not only that format, but that philosophy. Embed numerical changes in your thought processes, and think with the S.T.A.R. technique.

"A lot of the prep is around what does Goldman Sachs do, why is it interesting to you, and what have you been doing, whether it's school or outside of school, that demonstrates that you have a legitimate interest," Jordan says. "Outside of that, I discourage the folks on my teams from really focusing on the 'take me through' finance questions."

In general, therefore, you have to be well-informed. Not just on current affairs, but on the banking industry and on Goldman Sachs itself. "To stand apart is to know what you're talking about and know that you want us as much as we want you," Tung says. This means that “doing your research is critical."

You may also want to show grit. In a recent episode of The David Rubenstein show, Goldman’s CEO, David Solomon, put one virtue above all others for applicants: tenacity. “One of the things we look for is people that are smart,” he says, “but [also] people that want to work hard, people that believe in excellence.” That means “people that have proven that they’ve got grit and dedication and an ability to succeed.” And that includes “being able to dust themselves off and keep going.”

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