Last year, Tesla Motors was on a roll: the Model 3 couldn't be made fast enough, the Model S had become the de-facto luxury car, and the company was hiring as many people as it could to get cars onto buyers' driveways.

And then supply issues hurt the bottom line as slow Model 3 deliveries manifested in a $700 million first-quarter loss. So Tesla put the brakes on hiring, and new openings plummeted from around 2,400 on January 1 to less than 900 by spring.

But then things picked up — Model 3s were delivered and the company successfully brewed major excitement about its upcoming Cybertruck.

The good news, at least for people waiting on Cybertruck deliveries, is that hiring at the Fremont facility has increased 680% since the spring slowdown.

And in the same week that Elon Musk debuted the funky DeLorean-like truck, Tesla job openings reached — and then outpaced — 2018 numbers for the same time period. As of this week, Tesla lists nearly 2,500 openings on its careers site. That represents a 186% increase in hiring activity since the aforementioned spring low of 871.

Hiring for service and installation positions continues to outpace other job categories as the company scrambles to keep aging Teslas up and running. Meanwhile, manufacturing openings have slowed a bit quarter over quarter, but we expect that to change as Cybertruck goes into production in 2021. According to Elon Musk, more than 250,000 Cybertrucks have been pre-ordered, and the last time we saw the company struggle to get cars on the road, things didn't go terribly smoothly. But this time around, Musk and co have a couple years to hire up in Fremont.

The company hopes to produce 400,000 vehicles yearly at its Fremont facility. In 2016, Elon Musk said the factory would one day be able to put 1 million cars on the road per year. The good news, at least for people waiting on Cybertruck deliveries, is that hiring at the Fremont facility has increased 680% since the spring slowdown.

At its low point, Tesla listed just 51 jobs in Fremont. As of this week, that number is hovering around 400.

Here's hoping Tesla gets it right this time — 250,000 Cybertrucks is a lot of revenue if the company can deliver.

About the Data: 

Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales. 

Further Reading: 

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