eFC Briefing: Goldman on Pay Reform

Blankfein recommends shifting more of compensation from cash to stock and elevating risk managers to parity with revenue producers. New York security analyts' group poised to draw hundreds of members to a federal government jobs fair.

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Lloyd Blankfein thinks Wall Street needs to rethink the way financial people are compensated. Among guidelines the Goldman Sachs chief executive suggested in a speech to the Council of Institutional Investors: Only junior employees should be paid mostly in cash, and the percentage paid in stock should increase along with a worker's pay. He also said compensation should reflect a worker's ability to "to identify and create value," according to the Associated Press. And he said financial companies must clearly elevate risk managers so they are on par with "counterparts in revenue producing divisions," reports The Wall Street Journal.

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To laid-off financial analysts, the federal government is starting to look pretty appealing. About 400 people have signed up for a New York Society of Security Analysts job fair in New York later this month featuring recruiters from nine government agencies, including the Securities and Exchange Commission, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and the FBI, reports Bloomberg News. The jobs are attractive because of their stability even though they pay less than private sector positions.

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College lender Sallie Mae plans to add some 2,000 jobs across the U.S. for call center, informtion technology and operations support staff, by returning its overseas operations to the U.S. The publicly traded company, whose formal name is SLM Corp., says it expects to hire these employees over the next 18 months. It currently employs more than 8,000 people at 20 U.S. locations.

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Andrew Luan still works on Wall Street - in a manner of speaking. The former Deutsche Bank trader is now a tour guide for his own newly-launched business: a "financial meltdown tour" of various lower-Manhattan landmarks. Luan traded CDOs at Deutsche from 2005 until last week, when he quit after failing to get a bonus for 2008, according to Slate's The Big Money Web site. He charges $40 a head for his tour. He's the latest of numerous ex-Wall Streeters using creative approaches to re-invent themselves.

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A tougher time-off policy at KPMG, on the heels of a string of Big Four layoffs, is stirring up unpleasant feelings around the blogosphere. A leaked internal memo Tuesday from two KPMG executives cuts the number of paid days off an employee can carry into the next fiscal year, although without changing the amounts employees accrue each year. The memo also says the firm will close for a total of four additional days this summer (surrounding three holiday weekends) and those days will count against employees' balance of paid days off. In response, KPMG says its vacation policies are very generous and are "more than competitive" even with the new restriction. Some Big Four rivals don't let their staff carry any paid time off into the following year, according to KPMG.

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A recent entry into the increasingly crowded field of career-networking groups targeting the jobless held its

coming-out party two wees ago. The 405 Club - cleverly named for the maximum weekly unemployment check in New York State - drew roughly 150 people to a midtown Manhattan pub. Many were seeking jobs, while a small number were recruiters with jobs to fill. Meanwhile, some attendees seemed to approach joblessness as not just an unwanted condition to be escaped as quickly as possible, but as a market to be served. That aptly describes Garrett Dale, who co-founded the 405 Club just weeks after being laid off from his music company marketing job last December.

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Citigroup named a corporate treasurer and a permanent chief executive for Citi Holdings, the separate entity that includes a "bad bank" of troubled assets plus various businesses Citi may sell. Mike Corbat, who has been interim CEO of Citi Holdings since its creation on Jan. 16, was named to the role on a permanent basis. Previously he was CEO of Citi's global wealth management unit. Eric Aboaf, the new treasurer of the parent Citigroup, was CFO of the institutional clients group.