Nvidia joins hiring slowdown

Nvidia plans to slow hiring later this year, following similar moves from Lyft, Snap, Uber, Meta, Salesforce, Coinbase and others.

“We have been successful in hiring this year and expect to slow hiring in the second half of fiscal 2023 as we integrate our new employees,” Nvidia CFO Colette Kress said in her CFO commentary, which the chipmaker released Wednesday with its Q1 earnings report. Nvidia disappointed investors with lower expectations for its Q2 sales, sending shares dropping 6.5% in after-hours trading.

The New Indian Express first reported on a “hiring pause” at Nvidia on Friday, citing an internal Slack message reportedly sent to hiring managers that instructed them to only make offers to the top 10% of interviewees.

“Onsite interviews (basically any onsite that’s already planned) — continue, BUT, we will raise our standard to the highest levels,” the Slack message read, according to the India-based newspaper. “We were told that leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires we’ve recently made.”

Hiring managers interviewing candidates who are considered “diversity candidates” should “proceed as usual,” the Slack message reportedly read.

In an email to Protocol, an Nvidia spokesperson said the company is also slowing hiring "to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists."

Hiring slowdowns have quickly become the norm among publicly traded tech companies adjusting to a market downturn. Nvidia is the first major chipmaker to announce a pause like this, which isn’t a surprise, given that its fiscal year is on a different schedule than many of its competitors.

No word of a slowdown just yet from Intel — which, unlike Nvidia, manufactures its own chips — and is facing a manufacturing labor shortage dire enough that the company recently decided to allow the re-hiring of employees it had previously laid off.