Two Wall Street investment banks are easing up in the race to hire their most junior employees.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. won’t interview or extend summer internship offers to college sophomores this year and will go back to recruiting students in the fall of their junior year, executives said.

It is a nod to a softer Wall Street, eager to cast off its sweatbox image to compete with perk-happy Silicon Valley. It is also an acknowledgment that a push in recent years to move up application deadlines isn’t bringing in the kinds of candidates banks need as they try to diversify their overwhelmingly white and male ranks.

“We were contributing to an environment that pressured students to choose rather than to explore,” said Dane Holmes, Goldman’s top human-resources executive. “I want people who want to be at Goldman Sachs, not people who felt they had to say yes to an offer.”

David Solomon, Goldman’s new chief executive, spent his college summers as a camp counselor and, in a recent fireside chat with Goldman’s summer interns, said he “stumbled into” a career in finance. “The world was not as competitive then,” he said.