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No, really. This year, the nation\u2019s oldest university accepted 3.6%<\/a> of its freshman applicants. Per CEO David Solomon<\/a>, esteemed investment bank<\/a> Goldman Sachs received \u201ca little over\u201d 300,000 applications for entry-level jobs from new college grads last year\u2014and they hired about 2,500. That\u2019s under a 1% acceptance rate, give or take\u2014a percentage Solomon takes pride in.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe recruit from a very broad selection of schools and universities all over the world; that\u2019s one of the things that we\u2019ve really tried to expand,\u201d Solomon told Bloomberg\u2019s David Rubinstein<\/a> in an interview Thursday. \u201cWe look for a great work ethic, and majoring in a STEM kind of subject. We have over 10,000 engineers at the firm, so we hire a lot of engineers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n On the whole, the bank looks for smart, hardworking grads who \u201cbelieve in excellence, want to win, and have proven that they\u2019ve got grit and determination and an ability to both succeed, but also when they fail to pick themselves up and dust themselves off and keep going,\u201d he asid.<\/p>\n Those are tall orders, which Solomon knows well. Even the chief executive himself<\/a> was rejected by the bank\u2014twice\u2014before finally making it past the velvet rope in 1999, he revealed.<\/p>\n Armed with a political science degree from Hamilton College, a young Solomon interviewed at \u201ca bunch of banking institutions\u201d in New York City in the early 1980s, and was eventually hired by the Irving Trust Company, a commercial bank, and placed in its training program. \u201cThat\u2019s where I started my career and started to learn about finance, but I did not know much about it before that,\u201d Solomon told Bloomberg<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t Goldman, but not for lack of trying. \u201cGoldman Sachs was one of 40 or 50 firms that I sent a letter to asking for an interview,\u201d Solomon recalled. \u201cIt was one of the 45 that came back and said, no thank you.\u201d<\/p>\n But that wasn\u2019t the end of the road for the banking hopeful. \u201cI also interviewed at Goldman for an analyst position when I\u2019d been at Irving Trust for about a year, and I did well,\u201d he said. \u201cBut ultimately I was turned down in the last interview, by a partner. That would have been in 1985. So I got two rejections from Goldman early in my career.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet Solomon stayed the course. He was recruited to the sales desk at erstwhile investment bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, and then moved to (also erstwhile) Bear Stearns. Finally, Goldman came back around in 1999 and recruited Solomon to make a lateral move shortly after the firm went public.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in a relatively senior position at Bear Stearns. And I really wasn\u2019t interested [in Goldman],\u201d Solomon told Rubinstein. \u201cBut [the company] kept calling and calling and calling. And he caught me on a day where suddenly I said, you know what? I should really look at this. And so in the summer of 1999, about two months after the IPO, I joined the firm.\u201d<\/p>\n But he never had any aspirations towards joining the C-suite, Solomon said; he simply intended to \u201clearn, grow and do more of the business.\u201d And besides, he said, \u201cthere was no way you could come to Goldman Sachs laterally and expect you\u2019d ever be the CEO or a managing partner.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet fortunes are always changing: This year will mark Solomon\u2019s sixth in the corner office. During his tenure, Rubinstein pointed out, Goldman\u2019s stock and market cap have \u201cmore or less doubled.\u201d<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, Solomon is attuned to those major barometers. \u201cWe\u2019re a public company, and we\u2019re here to create value for our shareholders,\u201d he said. \u201cIn the last six years, I think we\u2019ve grown the market cap close to $100 billion\u2026 We\u2019ve taken the average revenues of the firm from $34 or $35 billion to over $50 billion today.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Then there are the more abstract goals. \u201cWhen you\u2019re stewarding a great organization like this, other things are important and lead to growth and improvement,\u201d he said. \u201cThe first is, we are a client business, and if our clients don\u2019t trust the firm [or] the people serving them\u2014if we\u2019re not building trust in long-term relationships and serving them with excellence and distinction\u2014we won\u2019t get those other outputs.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\nStaying on top<\/strong><\/h2>\n
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