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Tesla hires head Apple recruiter after losing own recruiter to Apple Car team

Tesla has taken its recruiting of Apple employees to the next level: the electric car and energy company has hired away Apple’s Senior Director of Corporate Recruiting, Cindy Nicola, to become Tesla’s new Vice President of Global Recruiting. Nicola has already noted her new role and start month of May on her LinkedIn profile.

Notably, Apple actually hired away Tesla’s Lead Recruiter in 2014 for its own electric car project, as we noted in our extensive profile of Apple’s automotive related hires. Interestingly, that former Tesla recruiter Lauren Ciminera has already left Apple to work on a new “confidential” project, according to her own LinkedIn page and confirmation from a source…

As a car and energy company with manufacturing, engineering, and advanced software technologies at its core, Tesla has publicly poached several notable employees from Apple over the past few years. In 2013, Tesla hired Apple’s Vice President of Mac Hardware Engineering, Doug Field, to help lead car engineering, while several other Apple user-interface, software engineering, retail, and hardware engineering directors have also left for Tesla.

For his part, Elon Musk has been very open about recruiting from Apple, noting that his company poaches 5 times as many employees from Apple as Apple does from Tesla.  With Tesla now employing Apple’s former recruiting lead, perhaps Tesla will start to look even more like Apple in the near-future.

Cross posted on Electrek.

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Comments

  1. rarabydev - 9 years ago

    *cough* *cough* Nicola *cough* Tesla *cough* Nikola Tesla *cough*

  2. charilaosmulder - 9 years ago

    I think Jobs would have liked the Watch (both the idea and the execution) but I can’t imagine him liking the Car project because it is too far outside Apple’s core business and therefore hurts Apple’s focus.

    I’m not blaming Tim especially because I think he does a great job as CEO thus far, but this is an area where I believe Apple should’t mess with. I love how Apple’s focus results in better products, and I believe the car industry is doing just fine because Tesla is around.

    • Daud Pechler (@d4u) - 9 years ago

      Like competition can do very well — i.e. natural selection as well — why not underlining the importance of the development of more good-looking and affordable EV’s?

    • florinnica - 9 years ago

      I think you might be wrong about that: Steve Jobs talked several times about how badly designed cars are, and it is no secret that this is one of the areas that he always wanted Apple to make a car.

      • Subconscious Guy - 9 years ago

        (I am neither a fanboy nor an admirer of apple-car-concept) I don’t think your remark about Steve Jobs’ opinion in cars is right. According to Walter Isaacson’s book, Jobs liked Mercedes Benz (some models) quite a lot. In early Apple days, John Scully decided to use a different car to pick up Jobs from airport and Jobs liked it. In another occasion, in a debate of closed vs open systems, Jobs was asked to give an example of successful integrated solution other than Apple and Jobs mentioned cars!

      • Julian West - 9 years ago

        It’s a well-known fact that Steve Jobs loved his Benz 550 AMG and had discussed Apple’s design capabilities on cars would bring more taste to it, but he was likely never serious about it — but after seeing a Silicon Valley upstart like Tesla succeed in capturing a lot of attention, I like to imagine Jobs would have totally supported Apple forming an exploratory team on cars. Maybe even more than watches.

      • Julian West - 9 years ago

        …bring more taste to cars in general, not his Benz. He loved it and it probably would have been his measuring stick. I always wonder if Jobs had lived to see/drive a Model S, what he would have thought. “Hey we could do it this well, or better…” wouldn’t be out of character with him.

      • patthecarnut - 9 years ago

        @Julian West it was actually a SL 55 AMG. AMG never uses a 3 digit model number. I’m stickler for the details. :o)

  3. yojimbo007 - 9 years ago

    Not good

  4. They shouldn’t try to piss off the company that could, theoretically, purchase them in an all cash transaction….. and still have $150 billion left over. ;)

  5. tomtubbs - 9 years ago

    Strange their contracts don’t have non-compete clauses.

  6. rogifan - 9 years ago

    So basically companies recruit people from other companies and these people update their linked in profiles. News at 11.

  7. Lars Pallesen - 9 years ago

    I’m just thinking about how much stronger both Apple and Tesla would be if they joined forces instead of trying to thwart each others attempt to build the perfect electric car.

  8. rnc - 9 years ago

    Why doesn’t Apple and Tesla just merge?

    • Musk is an individual with a strong vision and strong convictions. He wants to do things his way. He sees himself as an innovator. Adding Apple to the mix does nothing for his goal of doing it his way. The only tangible benefit Apple could add is money. Musk feels he doesn’t need Apple, or anyone else for that matter. People like that typically don’t want anyone else’s input. Apple would definitely want input. Whether he ultimately succeeds or fails, he wants to do it his way.

  9. patthecarnut - 9 years ago

    Why has “TESLA” taken it to the next Level? They are just poaching back from Apple what was poached from them. I think we all know this is tit for tat and one is not worse than the other.