THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. **** Saturday/Sunday, October 19 - 20, 2019 |B7
D
ane 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 inves-
tors 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 destina-
tion 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 dé-
cor. Here are condensed and edited excerpts from that conversation. — Liz HoffmanWSJ: 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 big-
gest misperception was that people underes-
timated 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 unidi-
mensional. 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 re-
cruiting game with people when I would go to
colleges. I would say ‘tell me what your inter-
ests 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 grow-
ing at 17% a year. People are obviously at-
tracted 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 be-
ing 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 un-
derstanding of what their skills are. They’ve
talked to people who work here. They’ve
been on Glassdoor [a website where employ-
ees leave anonymous reviews of their em-
ployers]. 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 tobe 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 hop-
ping 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 re-
spond, 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. 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 [Eskal-
era’s founder, and the brother of longtime
Goldman executive Martin Chavez] for a cou-
ple 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, ‘ha-ha, 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 statis-
tics, 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 needHUMAN CAPITAL
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 un-
satisfactory given the tremendous amount ofFor Diversity,‘Data Is a Myth Buster’
At Goldman Sachs, he used numbers to identify hiring blindspots. Next: a tech company that improves diversity with data.
EXIT INTERVIEW|DANE HOLMES
effort that’s been put into it. So
we’ve laid down the gauntlet. [Ear-
lier 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 back-
lash against technology companies?
Are there lessons in how banks like
Goldman dug out from the crisis?
Mr. Holmes:When you play a signifi-
cant role in society, like the financial
services industry and the technology
industry do, you should accept a re-
sponsibility that reaches the highest
standard of care. One of the prob-
lems 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 ex-
cellent 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 mind-set.Dane Holmes
Title:Head of human capital
management, Goldman Sachs
Age: 49
Education:Bachelor’s degree,
architecture, Columbia University
First Job:Washing dishes at a Chili’s
restaurant
Fun Fact:Still owns his first car, a
1965 Ford Mustang that he bought
with his Chili’s wages.MICHAEL BUCHER/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
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