Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon believes that hiring managers “hugely underrate” one element of a job application: work experience. He says that in tough times, doing the work for years matters more than being brilliant on paper.

Solomon appeared on a recent episode of Sequoia Capital’s Long Strange Trip podcast, where he weighed in on what he thought about the popular Silicon Valley idea of hiring for “slope” or raw potential and IQ, over experience.

In response, Solomon praised experience as “hugely necessary” and a major differentiator for Goldman Sachs. “You can’t teach experience,” Solomon said on the podcast. “That doesn’t mean somebody without experience can’t do very, very well.”

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In Solomon’s view, experience results in sound judgment when decisions are difficult to make. At the CEO level, he said that the hardest calls are rarely clear wins and losses; they are instead “51/49 judgments” where neither path is obviously right. 

“If you sit around the management committee table at Goldman Sachs, the level of experience and the judgment that comes from that experience is extraordinary,” Solomon said, “and hugely underrated.”

However, Solomon acknowledged that Goldman is famous for hiring top students, and roughly half of its nearly 49,000 employees are in their twenties. Yet the CEO insists that he doesn’t want to find the single smartest person in the room and is instead content to hire those “in the camp of smart enough.” 

Solomon said that candidates with high IQs who lack other key traits won’t succeed at Goldman in the long term. He noted that these softer skills include connection, resilience, determination and a drive for excellence.

Related: Here Are the Odds of Landing a Summer Internship at Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan

Getting hired at Goldman is notoriously difficult. On an episode of The David Rubenstein Show last year, Solomon disclosed that the bank received over 300,000 applications for entry-level jobs out of undergraduate universities in 2023. The bank hired less than 1% of applicants, or around 2,500 people. In comparison, Harvard University’s acceptance rate for the class of 2029 hovered around 3.6%. 

Solomon said at the time that Goldman was looking for people who “want to win.” They have shown that they have “grit and determination,” he said. They demonstrate both “an ability to succeed” and keep going after failure.

Solomon received a total compensation of $39 million in 2024, representing a 26% increase from 2023. His compensation consisted of a $2 million salary, $8.3 million in cash bonuses and the remainder in stock awards. 

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