Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang breaks down how he interviews job candidates

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked about his recruiting process in a recent podcast interview.
• Huang said it’s easy for candidates to research a company’s technical questions or come across well.
• But the CEO likes asking reference checks the questions he’d ask a candidate.

If you’re interviewing with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, you can bet your references will be getting a call.

In a recent episode of the “Tech Unheard” podcast, the CEO of the $3.3 trillion chipmaker said that the interview process itself is “not an excellent way” to judge whether a candidate is suitable for a role.

“Obviously, everybody could pretend to have a very constructive conversation,” Huang said. “You could learn a lot just watching YouTube on how to interview.”

Huang said that the company’s technical questions are often shared online, making it “hard” to conduct genuine and rigorous interviews. In an effort to conduct an effective interview, Huang said he likes asking “one in-depth question” and analyzing how candidates reason through it.

Another part of his recruiting method doesn’t involve the candidates themselves.

“I go back to reference checks, and I asked them the questions that I was going to ask the candidate,” Huang said. “You could always make for a great moment, but it’s hard for you to run away from your past.”

According to the company’s corporate responsibility reports, Nvidia increased employment from around 26,100 workers to 29,000 from January 2023 to 2024, with internal referrals accounting for over 40% of new hires.

Huang said that a lot of Nvidia’s successful recruiting comes from being “transparent” about the company’s vision and strategy, which is echoed throughout the hiring process.

Lindsey Duran, Nvidia’s vice president of recruiting, previously told Business Insider that job seekers can expect candid insight into “the good, the bad, and the ugly” about working for Nvidia. Duran, who talked to BI in 2021 during a time of rapid growth in the tech industry, said that the company’s hiring process needed to “move at the speed of light” without “jeopardizing quality.”

Duran said that landing a job at Nvidia is not just dependent on a computer science degree. She highlighted the importance of project experience as well as leadership and communication skills that can be shown during interviews.

“You have to be passionate about the technology, and you have to want to work on really complex problems,” she said. “We’re really driven by the project. It’s not about the title, it’s about the work.”

Nvidia is now one of the most sought-after places to work in tech amid the AI hiring boom. Many of the biggest players in AI rely on Nvidia’s computer chips to develop and train large-language models.

The company’s stock has surged in the last two years and is nearing a record high as two of its customers received the first deliveries of Nvidia’s highly anticipated next-generation Blackwell chip systems. Nviida also participated in OpenAI’s recent $6.6 billion funding round.

With the company’s market cap topping $3.3 trillion and second only to Apple, there are many wealthy Nvidia employees. The company also handed out a “special Jensen grant” to employees earlier this year that boosted their stock awards by 25%, Business Insider first reported.