Goldman Sachs Puzzled by Lack of Response to ‘Exciting Job Offer for Students’

Human resources officers at Goldman Sachs, a leading global investment bank, have been baffled by the lack of interest in a series of recruiting emails, which they have been sending to Dartmouth Students throughout the summer. Instead of an impersonal resume submission through DartBoard, Goldman recruiters attempted to take advantage of Dartmouth's unique blitz culture and make the process more personal by sending emails to each student. Although they have sent emails to students with subjects such as “Exciting Job for Dartmouth Students” and “Cool Student Job Opportunity!!!”, applications to Goldman Sachs are down 98% from last year.


Rick Donaldson, the HR officer in charge of Dartmouth recruitment at Goldman Sachs, explained the new recruiting strategy, "We’ve been trying to shed our image as an intimidating investment bank so we really took steps to connect with students personally. Our research showed that college students respond to words like “exciting” and “cool” so we were sure to feature those prominently in the subjects of our recruitment emails. I even used my Gmail account so students wouldn’t be turned off by my generic @gs.com email; I’ve heard pretty much all college students use Gmail.”

Donaldson initially sent an email with the subject "Exciting Job Opportunity for Dartmouth Students!" assuming it would be enough when they opened it and saw that it was from Goldman Sachs. When that failed to garner any responses, he decided to highlight some of the main selling points of investment banking by titling his next emails "Competitive Compensation Available!" and "Earn $100,000+ Out of School." He even tried to reach out to more students with "Cool Job in Fun Fast-Paced Industry."

After sending a total of seven emails, Donaldson received only three responses, one of which told him that he “seems like the kind of person that would like to make some money selling Amway products.”

The Goldman Human Resources department was perplexed when these emails failed to attract students, especially since Dartmouth students have responded to emails from Goldman recruiters in an average of 7 minutes in past years. Donaldson hypothesized that the lack of interest was due to populist backlash against investment banks.

Strangely, other investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and Bank of America using colder, more impersonal recruiting methods have seen no drop in applications.

Stanton Anderson '14, one of three students to respond to the Goldman emails, has “no idea why other students haven’t gotten excited about them” and claimed that they were the most exciting blitzes he has received all summer, narrowly beating out a blitz from the Sexperts entitled " ORGASMS" and a tie between all the D2U daily updates, which he reads religiously. Anderson was offered an internship next summer by Goldman "just for the enthusiasm."

Goldman will continue to accept applications until September 15th.