Goldman Sachs Shifts From Annual SRA to Rolling, Manager-Led Talent Reviews

For the better part of Goldman Sachs's modern history, roughly 46,500 employees knew the deal: once a year, usually in spring, the firm would run its Strategic Resource Assessment, cull the bottom of each cohort, confirm promotions for the top, and reset the board. The 2025 SRA cut between 3% and 5% of staff, eliminating somewhere between 1,395 and 2,325 positions. You could see it coming on the calendar. In 2026, that calendar no longer exists.

Goldman is replacing its single annual SRA with a series of smaller, rolling reductions beginning in April and continuing through summer, with business-line leaders setting their own timelines and deciding who goes and when. The scale of individual cuts will be smaller. The cumulative psychological weight on anyone inside the firm will not be.

What the SRA actually was

The Strategic Resource Assessment was never simply a layoff. It was Goldman's mechanism for synchronizing four separate decisions: performance calibration, promotion confirmations, exits, and bonus pool reconciliation. Running it once or twice a year gave the firm a clean governance window to align those outcomes, manage severance and replacement hiring in a single concentrated burst, and simplify the tax and financial planning that accompanies large-scale workforce changes.

For analysts and associates, the SRA was a binary season: either you cleared the bar and moved up with your cohort, or you were out. For VPs, EDs, and MDs, the SRA shaped succession planning and leadership pipelines in ways that could determine whether a lateral move or promotion materialized or evaporated. Critically, bonus pool allocation was often reconciled against SRA outcomes, meaning the compensation committee's final numbers reflected who was promoted, who was exited, and what the firm's overall headcount budget looked like after the process closed.

The predictability was uncomfortable but functional. Bankers timed external job searches, internal networking pushes, and offer negotiations around the SRA window. They knew when the risk was highest and, just as importantly, when it had passed.

The shift to rolling, manager-led decisions

Under the new model, the firm is handing divisional leaders and line managers authority over timing. Rather than one coordinated firmwide event, smaller targeted cuts can now happen across any business line, in any month, as managers act on underperformance signals or respond to budget reallocation pressure. Goldman's January 2026 earnings call saw management flag continued "technology-enabled scale" across the franchise, language that tracks directly with CFO Denis Coleman's December comments about OneGS 3.0, a multiyear AI integration initiative spanning every division and control function at the bank.

That broader context matters for understanding why the SRA model is changing. The 2025 cuts were framed as a standard annual talent process, a Goldman spokesperson called it "part of our normal, annual talent" review. The 2026 approach is different in structure and in rationale: performance management is now explicitly continuous, not seasonal.

Your new risk calendar: what actually changes month-to-month

The most immediate consequence of this shift is that the psychological predictability of the old SRA is gone. Previously, you could tell yourself: the SRA window runs through spring, and if I survive it, I have eight or nine months of operational runway. That calculus no longer holds.

What replaces it is a performance narrative that has to be active and current at all times, not just in Q1. Three behaviors matter most under this new cadence.

*Performance documentation.* Under the annual SRA, a strong Q3 could be partially offset by a weak Q1 in the same review cycle. Under rolling cuts, the most recent signal carries disproportionate weight because managers acting in, say, June are not waiting for a formal year-end review. You should be maintaining a running record of deal contributions, client feedback, and project outcomes, updated at least monthly, so that your performance narrative is never more than a few weeks stale.

*Feedback cadence with your manager.* When managers hold timing authority, the relationship between formal feedback and actual decisions compresses. A mid-year conversation that previously felt like a routine check-in now functions as an informal early warning system. Proactively scheduling structured feedback sessions, specifically asking your manager to name your standing relative to peers, and documenting the substance of those conversations creates a paper trail that protects both you and them if a separation decision ever needs to be justified legally or to HR.

*Staffing and utilization visibility.* In investment banking and asset management, utilization, the degree to which you are actively staffed on live mandates versus sitting on the bench, has always been a leading indicator of vulnerability in an SRA. Under a rolling model, a sustained period of low utilization no longer gets smoothed out across an annual cycle. If you are between deals for more than four to six weeks, that visibility problem is now acute, not seasonal.

The practical playbook: what to ask and what to document

The questions worth raising with your manager directly are not abstract. Ask how your division is thinking about headcount over the next two quarters. Ask whether your current role is mapped to any function that is being examined for AI-enabled efficiency gains. Ask what a "strong" performance signal looks like in the current operating environment, and ask for that answer in writing, even informally via email follow-up. None of these questions are unusual for a high-performing employee to ask, and a manager's reluctance to answer any of them is itself a signal.

On documentation, three categories matter most:

• Revenue and client attribution: Any deal, client relationship, or mandate where your contribution can be attached to a dollar figure. Do not wait for a performance review form to compile this; keep a working document.
• Manager and peer feedback: Save any written feedback, even informal Slack or email notes that reflect positively on your work. These become material if a separation is challenged.
• Scope and title alignment: If your responsibilities have expanded beyond your formal title, document that gap explicitly. Under a rolling model, roles that look redundant on an org chart but carry real operational weight are at elevated risk of being misread by cost-rationalization exercises.

Early internal signals to monitor

Several observable changes inside Goldman would indicate how the rolling framework is being operationalized. Watch for updated manager training materials or HR guidance on documentation standards, which would signal the firm is building governance infrastructure around the new process. Watch for changes to appeals or QA processes related to separations. Watch for compensation committee communications about bonus pool sizing that reference "ongoing headcount adjustments" rather than a discrete SRA event, that language shift indicates the two processes are being decoupled. And watch for any changes to internal redeployment policies, because in a rolling cut environment, lateral transfer options become the most immediate alternative to an exit.

On the compensation side, firms that shift to more frequent, smaller-increment headcount reductions often tighten discretionary bonus pools and use comp levers to encourage voluntary departures from back-office and support functions, rather than paying severance across a single large event. If your role sits outside a direct revenue-generating function, that dynamic is worth factoring into year-end expectations.

Severance, legal protections, and fairness risks

Goldman's 2023 layoff round, which affected roughly 3,200 employees, came with a five-week severance period and continuation of certain benefits, though employees who found new employment before the severance period began received their full payment as a lump sum instead. In New York, state law requires 90 days' notice before a mass reduction in staff; employees should understand how their local jurisdiction defines "mass reduction" and whether rolling, staggered cuts are structured specifically to avoid triggering those thresholds.

The fairness risk under a rolling model is real and worth understanding. When decisions are distributed across managers and divisions rather than calibrated through a centralized process, consistency becomes harder to enforce. Employees and managers should both expect, and where necessary demand, written performance evidence as the basis for any separation, clear appeal routes, and documented HR oversight. Rolling cuts that happen without that governance infrastructure create legal exposure for the firm and practical harm for employees who have no visibility into why a decision was made.

The bigger picture

Goldman's $58 billion in full-year 2025 revenue, up 9% year over year, means this structural change is not being driven by financial distress. It is being driven by an operating model transformation: OneGS 3.0 is designed to embed AI across every division, and the bank has signaled explicitly that roles susceptible to automation are under active review. The April 2026 cuts are framed around performance, not technology displacement, but the two are not entirely separable in an environment where a 30-person team performing a function that AI can replicate at a fraction of the cost is also, by definition, a performance and efficiency problem in management's view.

The employees who will navigate this transition most effectively are not the ones who simply work harder in Q1; they are the ones who treat their performance narrative as a continuous asset, their manager relationships as a real-time information system, and their internal mobility options as a standing contingency plan rather than a last resort.