Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at Tesla as 100% positive with a difficulty rating score of 3 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty). Candidates interviewing for Senior Recruiter and rated their interviews as the hardest, whereas interviews for Senior Recruiter and roles were rated as the easiest.
For my first interview at Tesla, it was a phone screening interview with the recruiting manager, and we went over some of my background and work experiences based on my resume for 15 minutes. He asked me about what makes me interested in Tesla at the end of our conversation. Then, he arranged the on-site interview for my second interview. I had 5 interviewers (some were designers and engineers). I had 1:1 interviews with 5 different people for every 30 minutes and generally asked me questions about what I did for my career and what I can do for the position. Third interview was with the team lead through the phone screening.
I got two phone interviews and one on sit interview with presentation. the total process was less than two weeks to get an offer. The HR process the offer with a reasonable speed and the process was efficient.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
presentation and 8+ 1:1 interviews at the same day
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Tesla (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2014
Interview
Taking advantage of my free month of LinkedIn premium, I sent an InMail to a recruiter working at Tesla, who returned my contact a day or two later. He enthusiastically outlined all the different firmware groups and what they do, and the typical hiring process.
We kicked it off by setting a time/date for an e-mail firmware exercise. They were very basic questions, and I had to send a reply with my solutions attached within 30 minutes. My resume and my firmware answers caught the interest of one manager, and so the recruiter set up a phone interview with him a few days down the road.
The manager called at the appointed time and we discussed the work I did in my current company. The interview took about 45 minutes, followed by a live coding session over a collaborative browser-based text pad web-app. As luck would have it, we experienced technical issues a few minutes in, and I was allowed do send in a text file much like the firmware exercise! Being the honest guy that I am, I quickly completed it and sent it to the recruiter.
The impression from the first interview was quite positive, granting me a second one set a few days later, this time with a senior engineer. We discussed in greater detail about my current employment, as well as projects I had done in school. The recruiter followed up the next day with good news of an almost-all-expenses paid trip to Palo Alto.
The on-site interview consisted of a presentation I had to deliver, followed by a series of one-on-ones with 5 engineers/managers, one of which was a chat over lunch. I gave myself a week to prepare the presentation and to brush up on my software engineering skillset. I don't present a lot, so when I queried the audience about time, I was over the allotted duration by 2 minutes, and I wasn't even done yet! Let me just say.. it's a good sign if they allow you to continue and finish. Every one-on-one session had a whiteboard coding component, ranging from writing functions to finding errors in a snippet of code. Difficulty was relatively easy, there were a couple that gave me trouble, though applicants who haven't done more embedded-related type or work will have a harder time.
I left the office feeling pretty good, though I spent the next week dwelling on things said and left unsaid. Though through the whole process the recruiter was very polite and professional, definitely unlike the entries I read here from 1 or 2 years ago. He followed up a week after the on-site interview as promised.