Goldman Sachs Bangalore teams from operations and technology visited a leading Tier-1 management institute in India to recruit lateral hires for VP positions. Surprisingly they rejected people with solid IB-Tech/Ops works experience and selected few folks who have almost 0 background in I-Banking. Seems the recruitment team suffers from inferiority complex, and does not want candidates who are superior to them in domain knowledge. This is not to suggest that those candidates who were selected are not talented. But the point is that in any lateral hiring, relevant past work exp. gives strong edge to a candidate. Anyone who demonstrated solid proficiency in I-Banking domain knowledge (by virtue of his/her past experience of working at international locations with I-Banks/Financial Services) was rejected either in first round itself or in subsequent rounds. Those who were selected were not quizzed in depth on I-Banking related stuff because anyway they had no/very little such experience. It is hard to believe that all candidates with strong I-Banking Tech/Ops experience would have goofed up in interview on soft-skills or any other aspect. Hope Senior Mgmt. at Goldman Sachs will take note of this unethical hiring practice. If such hiring practices are followed then the culture of lack of meritocracy (as pointed out in other comments) will definitely be strengthened in coming years which will be costly to the firm. Summing up, it was very clearly evident during the interview process that both Ops and Tech hiring panels were biased against candidates who had substantial international work experience working with leading I-Banks and Financial Software Solution provider firms.