Tesla eyes Chinese campuses as it continues hunt for top talent

Tesla Inc is conducting a nationwide campus recruitment drive in China as part of its efforts to get better established in the world’s largest new energy car market.

The United States-based electric carmaker has been conducting job fairs at four universities in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Chengdu to recruit forthcoming graduates to work in about a dozen tier-1 and-2 cities in the country.

“We conducted campus recruitment just as we did last year, with a focus on finding potential recruits for sales, service, IT and intern positions. We have not determined how many people will be hired yet,” said Tesla in a statement. The Tesla job fairs run until this Friday.

There are eight posts available for new graduates, according to Tesla’s page on popular recruitment website 51job. In total, Tesla is hiring people for 79 posts for its business in China.

It has 32 experience centers and eight service stores in the country but did not disclose the number of current employees.

This campus recruitment drive is unlikely to have any direct connection with Tesla’s localization efforts, as most jobs available are sales and service-related instead of engineering and production.

Tesla had confirmed earlier that it was in talks with the Shanghai city government to establish a manufacturing facility.

The company has been growing steadily in China, with its revenue more than tripling from 2015 to 2016. It delivered 13,500 cars in the first nine months of 2017, more than double from a year earlier, according to statistics from the China Passenger Car Association.

The company is now looking to build on its current success in China, home to about 1 million new energy cars by the end of 2016.

On Monday, the carmaker unveiled in Shanghai its largest charging station in the world, which can accommodate 50 Tesla cars at the same time.

To date, Tesla has 700 charging posts in 170 cities in the country, with the number expected to rise to 1,000 by the end of the year.

Earlier this month, Tesla announced that it has modified the charging hardware for Tesla vehicles built for the Chinese market so that they can make use of the public charging infrastructure.