In what amounts to a sudden twist of events, leading electric car maker Tesla has slashed its job postings in North America from 3,400 positions to just three. The reduction in postings signals the recent struggles that the company has gone through after a very challenging first quarter, where it laid off some employees and missed some of its financial targets.
The eliminated positions were primarily located in California, Texas and Nevada, according to archived pages of Tesla’s official careers page analyzed by Quartz. Many of these were available as recently as Tuesday for example, but gone by Wednesday. All of the U.S. jobs listed as available are part of the so-called “manufacturing development program” that represents a short-term training opportunity at local community colleges in Texas and California, with the possibility of transitioning to full-time roles at Tesla.
An example of this is the company’s career page, which did not correlate with the LinkedIn profile. Whilst the official page had three jobs available for the U.S., LinkedIn had 35 available, including the three available in the U.S. but 28 across Europe, all in Tesla’s Brandenburg Gigafactory, Germany. Interestingly, new roles were also advertised in the Dominican Republic on Thursday with listing in Mandarin.
Tesla has been hit by a number of challenges recently, from aggressive “hardcore” layoffs to at least six executive departures. The company also had its own set of problems: an immense recall of almost 4,000 Cybertrucks and the growing competition from Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles, which forced Tesla to enter a pricing war.
Moreover, just a few weeks before it was due to start, the summer internship program at Tesla was canceled, an event that only succeeded in piling on the anxiety and uncertainty of several future employees.
Earlier, Tesla said it was cutting its workforce by more than 10%—or around 14,000 people—out of its 140,000 employees as of April. According to people at the company who spoke with Bloomberg, actual layoffs could be even more: over 20,000.
These developments come at a time when Tesla is struggling with financial troubles and huge rivalries in the electric car manufacturing industry. For one to be a worker at Tesla, now the odds have been greatly minimized, and in fact, the competition for the very few existing placements would be quite high.
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