Tesla attracts large crowds of applicants for Gigafactory 3 in special job fair

Tesla recently held a special job fair in Lingang China, to hire the first wave of frontline employees of Gigafactory 3. The job fair, which was aimed at hiring employees for 25 different positions under six departments, was a huge success, with Tesla receiving a massive number of applications from interested job-seekers.

Posts from Chinese social media showed that Tesla seemed to have received far too many applications for its open job listings. The electric car maker initially scheduled the special Gigafactory 3 job fair to conclude at 4 p.m. local time, but due to the number of job-seekers, Tesla ended up accepting applications until three hours after the expected deadline, at 7 p.m. local time.

Reports from electric car enthusiasts in China have noted that Tesla is recently experiencing what appears to be a smear campaign in Chinese social media, similar to what the company is experiencing in the United States. Despite this, Tesla’s name and brand appear to be intact among China’s job-seekers, as indicated by the massive turnout of the company’s special job fair.

The initial posts that were opened for Gigafactory 3 suggest that the company is about to start setting up the factory for Model 3 production later this year. This was hinted at by the departments that Tesla was filling in with the job fair, which includes the stamping workshop, welding shop, paint shop, and vehicle assembly. Job listings for posts such as squad leaders and equipment repair technicians further add to the idea that the company is poised to start fitting Gigafactory 3 with electric car manufacturing equipment soon.

This week has seen Tesla introduce a string of clever teasers in China, each one being designed to raise awareness and excitement for the impending arrival of the locally-made Model 3, which will be produced in Gigafactory 3. Following a cryptic teaser on Monday, a price guessing game on Tuesday, and the announcement of Model 3 pre-orders on Wednesday, Tesla has rolled out yet another social media teaser on Thursday, which seems to be an encore to Tuesday’s guessing game.

Tesla’s Gigafactory 3 has risen in Shanghai at an unprecedented pace. When Elon Musk attended the event’s groundbreaking ceremony last January, the entire Gigafactory 3 site was but a muddy field, attracting mockery from the company’s critics. By mid-March, construction workers inaugurated the electric car production facility’s first pillar. Thanks to 24/7 work and the capability of China’s workforce to operate in an almost surgical manner, a nearly complete factory shell now stands in the Gigafactory 3 site, just two and a half months after the first pillar was set up.