Jensen Huang has led NVIDIA for over 30 years, which makes him one of the longest-tenured CEOs in tech. That kind of longevity requires getting hiring right, and Huang's approach is built on a simple conviction: hire people who are better than you at their jobs, then give them the context to make great decisions on their own.
"I try to hire people who are better than me at their jobs. My job is to make sure they have the context to make great decisions."
Huang trusts reference checks more than interviews. He believes that what people have actually accomplished, verified by the colleagues who worked alongside them, is a better predictor than how they perform in a staged conversation. He looks for patterns across multiple references, particularly from people the candidate did not list.
"The most important quality in someone is intellectual honesty. Can they separate what they know from what they wish were true?"
His interview style favors depth over breadth. Rather than running through a list of questions, he picks one topic and drills down until he understands how the candidate truly thinks. The question might be "tell me about the hardest technical problem you've ever solved," and then he follows every thread. People who truly did the work can go as deep as you push them. People who were merely adjacent to it start repeating themselves.
"Great people want to work with other great people. If you let the bar slip, you lose your best people first."
NVIDIA runs an unusually flat organization for a company of its size. Huang shares information broadly and expects people to act on it without waiting for permission. That means every hire needs to be someone who can handle full context and operate independently. Grit matters too. Huang, who cleaned toilets and washed dishes as a teenager before building a company worth trillions, looks for people who have persevered through genuinely hard circumstances.