GS Goldman Sachs Group Inc

By Liz Hoffman 

Dane Holmes knows a lot of people don't like Wall Street. Not regulators, not the stock market, not the college graduates flocking to Silicon Valley. For the past decade, Mr. Holmes has been the contrarian voice, tasked with presenting a humbler, friendlier face of Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

He ran investor relations from 2007 to 2017, trying to win back investors who bolted during the financial crisis. Since then, he has overseen the bank's human-resources and recruiting efforts, where he has tried to diversify Goldman's majority male, white workforce and make finance cool again as a destination for recent college grads.

At the end of the year, he'll move to San Francisco as chief executive of Eskalera, a startup that uses data to help companies find and keep diverse workers. The son of a white mother and black father, Mr. Holmes joined Chase Manhattan bank through a diversity recruiting program in 1992 after graduating from Columbia, where he played basketball and majored in architecture. (He remains a design geek.)

The Journal talked to Mr. Holmes in his office, where he folded his 6-foot-8 frame behind a modernist desk that stands out among Goldman's typically spartan office decor. Here are condensed and edited excerpts from that conversation:

WSJ: You've had two jobs here, in investor relations and human resources, where you're selling Goldman to the outside world. That can't always have been easy.

Mr. Holmes: I always viewed these as two-way jobs, meaning it was important for me to tell senior management, 'here's what they think about us, here's where I feel like I have really good arguments, and here's where I think we could do better.'

When I was in investor relations, the biggest misperception was that people underestimated how flexible our firm was. They would say 'if XYZ happens, you're done for.' And I'm like, 'no, if XYZ happens, we'll make these adjustments.' We have a culture and business model that allow for it.

On the people side, Goldman Sachs has a reputation of excellence, but some people think that translates into robotic or uni-dimensional. They think this is an investment bank and here's what an investment banker does. Eighty percent of our workforce doesn't fall into that category. I used to play a recruiting game with people when I would go to colleges. I would say 'tell me what your interests are, and I'll tell you what job that is at Goldman Sachs.' You're into art history? Great. We have people who value art.

WSJ: But Wall Street isn't drawing young people like it used to.

Mr. Holmes: Before the crisis, we were growing at 17% a year. People are obviously attracted to that. As you become a Fortune 100 company, it's hard to keep growing at that pace. Throw in the financial crisis and the reputational issues that came along with it, and we had more headwinds.

There's also been this major power shift from employer to employee. When I was being recruited out of Columbia, I went into a conference room and somebody told me what it was going to be like to work there. I had no choice but to accept and frankly, I didn't have a lot of mechanisms to check it. Today, somebody entering that room has a great understanding of what their skills are. They've talked to people who work here. They've been on Glassdoor [a website where employees leave anonymous reviews of their employers]. They come in informed. The whole thing has flipped.

WSJ: There's a big debate happening today, particularly in Silicon Valley, about how much of your personal life you should bring to the office. What's your view?

Mr. Holmes: We want employees to show up as their authentic selves. But you're also hired to do a job. So there's a balance between how much of your personal perspective about what you want to see happen in the world needs to be executed by your company, versus wanting to feel safe and comfortable at work and able to express what matters to you.

WSJ: Speaking of which, millennials take a lot of flak for being entitled and flighty. Fair or unfair?

Mr. Holmes: This whole positioning of the younger generation -- I hate using millennials as a label -- as 'hoppers' is wrong. The hopping is more of a byproduct of having a set of things that they're looking for. If they find it, they'll stay. So the way some companies respond, figuring they're going to leave in two years no matter what, I think is a mistake.

WSJ: You're a person of color. So was your predecessor in this job. Is that a must-have to be a head of HR today? Do you worry about tokenism?

Mr. Holmes: Tokenism only works when you put somebody in a job that doesn't matter. It doesn't work for a high-performing company in a really important job like this one. So, no, I don't worry about that.

WSJ: Part of your job at Goldman has been to convince people to work here instead of going to Silicon Valley. Now you're leaving to go to Silicon Valley. What gives?

Mr. Holmes: I've known Tom Chavez [Eskalera's founder, and the brother of longtime Goldman executive Martin Chavez] for a couple of years. He and I spent time talking about our approach to diversity and how tech can enable that. And he said, 'I would love you to run this company.' At first I was like, 'haha, yes, whatever.' But I thought about it. I've got another 10 to 15 years of real oomph in me and I want to experience something new. And it's about diversity, which I live and breathe as a person.

WSJ: How can technology help companies be more diverse?

Mr. Holmes: Data is a myth-buster. There was this 'informed wisdom' at Goldman that said we have fewer women because they leave for marriage and kids. So we looked at the data we have on certain women to see whether they're actually staying at home [after they leave]. But no, they're popping up in other big jobs. Then we sliced the attrition statistics, and it turns out they aren't different for women than for men.

So then you ask, OK, why don't we have more women at the top of the pyramid? We do this thing called lateral recruiting [hiring senior executives from other banks], which was massively skewing the talent pool.

WSJ: Men hire other men.

Mr. Holmes: Correct. We were replacing women with men when they left. So we need to focus on diverse lateral recruiting. You wouldn't know that without data.

WSJ: How would you grade Wall Street's track record on diversity?

Mr. Holmes: There's no way to look at it other than unsatisfactory. And it's really, really unsatisfactory given the tremendous amount of effort that's been put into it. So we've laid down the gauntlet. [Earlier this year, Goldman set goals of having 50% of its junior employees in the U.S. be women, 11% black and 14% Latino.] It doesn't mean we're not going to make mistakes. But the fact that we've been so public about it is kind of counter to our culture.

WSJ: Right, you guys usually do things and then brag about them later.

Mr. Holmes: Correct. Underpromise, overdeliver. But on this one, we knew that we couldn't facilitate the change we wanted without it.

WSJ: How do you explain the backlash against technology companies? Are there lessons in how banks like Goldman dug out from the crisis?

Mr. Holmes: When you play a significant role in society, like the financial services industry and the technology industry do, you should accept a responsibility that reaches the highest standard of care. One of the problems that Goldman had going into the financial crisis was that we weren't good communicators. We were very defensive. And obviously, you've covered us for a long time --

WSJ: I think you want me to say you're excellent now.

Mr. Holmes: [Laughs] I mean, I don't think if you put the 10-year-old version of us with the current version you'd even recognize it. It's a learning mindset.

WSJ: When I talk to people who leave Goldman after a long time, some of them say they needed a little deprogramming, like one of those wildlife reservations where they get rehabilitated before being released.

Mr. Holmes: This is an intense, driven place and when you're so maniacally focused on what you're doing, in some ways the world becomes small. When you leave, suddenly the world seems big and there are a million things to do. I don't think about it as deprogramming.

Write to Liz Hoffman at liz.hoffman@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

October 17, 2019 08:14 ET (12:14 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.