HomeNewsNewsThe recruitment secret of the world’s second-largest company (Nvidia)
The recruitment secret of the world's second-largest company (Nvidia)
Not everyone might recognize it immediately, but with a market value of 2 trillion (!), Nvidia has quickly become one of the largest companies in the world. What can we learn from how it approaches recruitment?
Nvidie-who? NVIDIA. Meet the American chip company that for a long time mainly made gamers happy with highly specialized chips for computers and data centers. And now it is the world leader in artificial intelligence. In one year, the stock has nearly quadrupled, and the market value now stands at about 2 trillion euros – read: 2,000 billion, with a revenue of 56 billion euros and a profit of nearly 30 billion. The company now employs almost 30,000 people.
NVIDIA now employs nearly 30,000 people.
The numbers are staggering in every way. And that for a company that was originally founded in 1993 with a focus on computer games. To handle the complex graphical performance required by games, the company developed a different kind of chip: GPUs or graphic processing units. These GPUs can handle multiple calculations simultaneously, whereas a traditional computer processor (CPU, central processing unit) usually performs them one by one.
Recognizing a cat
The major breakthrough came in 2012 when researchers succeeded in teaching an AI model, using Nvidia chips, how to recognize a cat. This was more or less the starting point for everything you see happening today with ChatGPT and other AI tools. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has since chosen to invest billions in this technology, with well-known results. For example, training a chatbot like ChatGPT requires tens of thousands of specialized graphics cards. Nvidia is now the global market leader in this field and holds more than 80% of the market.
Mark Zuckerberg needs 350,000 GPUs from Nvidia, an investment estimated at over 90 billion dollars.
According to Tom Simonts, a financial economist at KBC, the entire AI revolution would not have happened without Nvidia. The company has a unique competitive position in the market because they can deploy a large army of fantastic programmers who can optimize the performance of their chips. The demand for these special AI chips will only continue to increase for the time being. The major tech players (of which Nvidia is, of course, one) all want to integrate more generative AI into their own services. A multi-billion dollar order from Meta is already on the way. Mark Zuckerberg has announced that his company needs 350,000 GPUs from Nvidia, an investment estimated at more than 90 billion dollars.
Talent Intelligence
In terms of market value, Nvidia is now among the top three in the United States, after Apple and Microsoft, but ahead of more well-known giants like Amazon, Walmart, Alphabet (Google), Meta (Facebook, Instagram), ExxonMobil, or Johnson & Johnson. But what does this rapid growth mean for recruitment? First of all, it means that there are, of course, many open positions (currently more than 1,100). The selection process is said to be very strict, but the organization always tries to be as transparent as possible about the process and, for example, offers candidates the opportunity to meet a future colleague in the final stage.
Meta McKinney
Nvidia offers candidates the opportunity to meet a future colleague in the final stage.
Part of the success lies mainly in the large-scale application of Talent Intelligence. What was considered an ambitious but distant goal at Nvidia about two years ago has now become an integral part of the company’s HR strategy, marking a significant shift in priorities. This evolution is largely driven by the recognition of the immense potential that data-driven insights and predictive analytics offer in optimizing talent management.
Meta McKinney
The entire field of Talent Intelligence has been the domain of Global Talent Intelligence & Attraction Manager Meta McKinney for just over two years. In September, she will come to the Netherlands to talk all about it. She will explain, for example, how Nvidia, by integrating Talent Intelligence into the core of its business processes, not only improves its HR functions but also meaningfully contributes to the strategic capabilities of the entire company.
“University degrees and work experience are still typical benchmarks for recruiters, but managers who break these trends by seeking talent based on skills can tap into often overlooked diverse and talented talent pools,” she said earlier about her field. “Understanding adjacent skills and skills clusters is crucial as organizations look at career paths and compete for the talent and skills they need to thrive.”
Finding and Retaining
How exactly does McKinney implement this at Nvidia? She will provide more details during the second Global Talent Intelligence Conference in September, where she will be joined by Nickolas Dowler (Digital Transformation & HR Specialist at Nvidia). Together, they will offer insights into how the company uses Talent Intelligence to find the right programmers and, importantly, to retain them.
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