Each year, after a long and very comprehensive background check, a lucky group of Goldman employees are abducted from their desks, blindfolded, gagged, and led by candlelight through a dark hallway and into a subterranean conference room. Standing on the table before them are Lloyd Blankfein, Gary Cohn and the rest of the management committee, who ask if they are prepared to pledge their devotion to the firm above all else. Those who agree have their nether regions dipped in a vat of gold, genuflect before Cohn's groin, and, at the stroke of midnight, are inducted into the Brotherhood of the Sach. While there are many ways that becoming a member of the club will change one's life, the most important one involves the partaking of astronomical profits on payday. As a result, when people are not invited to join the group, they tend to get very upset. For instance, hedge fund manager David Tepper, who became a billionaire many times over after leaving the firm, was still so upset about the snub twenty years later that he bought and bulldozed the house of the guy who passed him over. Others probably wouldn't have even gone to the trouble of buying the place first, and operated the wrecking ball themselves. Which is why we say in full seriousness that the Partnership Committee might want to watch its back. Goldman Sachs has begun vetting potential new partners and is expected to appoint a smaller number of bankers to its upper echelons this year, according to senior executives involved in the process... The nomination process for new partners ended during the summer. The internal vetting process began earlier this month and is expected to last until mid-November when the new class of partners will be announced. The vetting process is known within the bank as “cross-ruffing”, in reference to a manoeuvre from the card game bridge and typically sees a team of partners deployed to every division to talk to employees who know the candidates. [FT, related]