Goldman: half of entry-level recruits to be women

Ahead of a deadline to release gender pay-gap numbers in Britain, Goldman Sachs said Monday that it is boosting its efforts to improve diversity at the storied investment bank, setting goals for the first time for hiring black and Latino associates and saying it will tie top leaders' pay and promotions to their progress on those goals.

In a memo to employees Monday, CEO David Solomon said the bank was expanding a year-old goal of 50 percent female recruitment in the crop of analysts it picks from college campuses each year.

It will now include in that goal people hired laterally into entry-level jobs and set goals for several diverse groups.

In addition to having women make up half of all incoming Goldman analysts and entry-level associates - representing 70 percent of the bank's annual hiring - the bank aims to have 11 percent of those recruits be black and 14 percent be Hispanic/Latino in the Americas.

Goldman also announced new steps to address diversity within its more senior ranks, a move that comes within weeks of the deadline to report on its gender pay gap in Britain.

Solomon said in his memo that the bank would now require two diverse candidates to be interviewed for all open roles, ask business unit heads to increase their focus on career progression and consider progress on diversity goals when evaluating senior managers' pay and promotion.

'Experienced lateral hiring has been an important part of the firm's growth. However, it has also been a significant contributor to the dilution of our diversity at more senior levels and we need to address this,” Solomon wrote in the memo.

He added that 'to be clear, we pay women and men in similar roles with similar performance equally.” But, he noted, 'we need to improve senior representation in order to change the results of these measures, and we are confident that the steps we've outlined will help us, over time, increase our representation of all diverse professionals at senior levels.”