Nvidia pauses hiring to help cope with inflation

Nvidia has enacted a hiring pause as part of a way to deal with the rising threat of inflation.

The company reportedly communicated with hiring managers that it’s implementing a hiring pause, although job offers in process will continue, as reported by The New Indian Express.

An internal Slack message stated that the company’s leadership wants to take a pause to onboard the thousands of new hires it has recently made. It underlined this is not a hiring freeze, but a pause.

The message added that bars will be raised for the ongoing interviews so that only 10% of those being interviewed will be given offers to work for Nvidia.

“Offers in process – continue. There will be no counters to the offers unless Jensen approves, none,” read the message.

It also said that diversity hiring will continue and there will be no slowdown in this area. “We need to determine if any of your candidates are considered a diversity candidate. If so, proceed as usual,” it said.

"We’ve been extremely successful in hiring this year. We’re slowing for now to integrate these new employees and to focus our budget on taking care of existing employees as inflation persists,” a spokesperson told IT Pro.

Earlier this month, Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, underlined the link between higher wages contributing to inflation.

“Chair Powell keeps mentioning the relationship between the high level of job openings and wage/price inflation,” said Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek, as reported by Yahoo Finance. “He’s not talking to investors. He’s talking to corporate America, and his goal is to have companies essentially institute a hiring freeze and end the cycle of paying up for new hires.”

Powell has centred on the ratio between job openings versus unemployed workers and the core personal consumption expenditures price index, which measures inflation. Colas said he mentioned this ratio several times at a press conference, and added that job postings need to drop from 11.5 million to 8 million to get back to normal.

The hiring pause comes after Nvidia agreed to pay $5.5 million to settle the long-standing civil charges accusing the chip giant of attempting to conceal the impact of cryptomining on its gaming business. The company’s chips had been used to mine cryptocurrency, such as Ethereum, since at least 2018.

The company was found to have “failed to disclose that cryptomining was a significant element of its material revenue growth from the sale of its graphics processing units (GPUs) designed and marketed for gaming” in its back-to-back quarterly financial results in fiscal 2018. This violated part of the Securities Act of 1933, said the SEC.