What Lloyd Blankfein looks for when he looks for staff

In any normal context, 'institutional' sounds ominously like 'institutionalised' and therefore conjures images of people in straitjackets or long-serving civil servants.

Goldman Sachs is not normal though. At Goldman, being 'institutionalised' is positively encouraged.

Goldman chief exec Lloyd Blankfein shared this and other nuggets about his preferred employee types with the New York Times.

Here's what Lloyd likes:

1) Institutional people:

"We want people who are institutional people, people who view their responsibilities broadly. A person who wants to live or die from his or her own performance, regardless of what anyone else in the organization could do, can have a great career. It just won't be a great career here. We want people to respond to the overall needs of the firm. And that screens out a lot of people."

2) Deep people:

"On the issue of depth, we're looking for somebody who has the experience of digging in and mastering a topic. If you can master a topic, you can master another topic. On the other hand, if all you're good at is survey courses, it's not

that useful to us."

[And on the same subject...]

"I'd give a job sooner to somebody who'd shown that he or she could really dig down deep in something - and give that person a job in an area of totally different content - than take somebody who had superficial experience across a broad swath and no deep experience in anything."

3) Broad people:

Being deep is necessary but not sufficient, says Lloyd. "I like people with broad interests, so that they're well-rounded and interesting people, and are interested in a lot of different things."