By Carolina Mandl
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Goldman Sachs Group Inc (NYSE:GS) has doubled its diversity recruiting team and increased its budget by $10 million to help meet its goals to add more women, Blacks and Latinos to its workforce, Chief Diversity Officer Megan Hogan told Reuters on Friday.
The bank has added roughly 25 new recruiters focused on hiring diverse employees since the beginning of the year, bringing the team up to 50 people.
Hogan said Goldman Sachs has hired more experienced recruiters who will help advance its plans to have more women, Black and Latino vice presidents.
"It made a lot of sense to expand the team to include people who could reach a more experienced professional audience in terms of years of tenure and have more in depth conversations with them about career paths to the firm," said Hogan.
Wall Street banks are working to bring more diversity to their ranks, which is mainly comprised of white men.
The bank says it wants to have 7% of its employees with the title vice president to be Black and 9% to be Latino in the Americas, while it plans to have women accounting for 40% globally by 2025.
Vice presidents are typically senior roles at Wall Street banks.
In December, 32% of Goldman's vice presidents were women, 4% Black and 6% Latino, according to a regulatory filing.
Goldman has made some diversity progress among the lower ranks.
In 2019, the bank set a goal for 11% of all new analysts and entry-level associates hired in the United States and 9% hired in the United Kingdom to be Black. The bank said it also aimed for 14% to be Latino and half to be women.
Goldman met the targets for campus analyst hiring last year, it said. Recruiting at universities represents 70% of the bank's annual hirings.