Tesla falls in employee ratings after hardship

Tesla had a difficult start of the year and it is being felt by employees who have made the automaker fall in multiple employer ratings.

In a new report, Reuters listed some of the changes for Tesla in those rating systems compared to last year:

• Tesla placed 16th on LinkedIn’s annual “Top Companies 2019” list published in April, compiled from billions of actions taken by its over 600 million users that indicate job interest and demand. It held the fifth and sixth spots in 2018 and 2017, respectively.
• At jobs site Glassdoor, Tesla’s overall company rating fell to 3.2 out of 5.0 stars based on reviews written in the first quarter from a high of 3.6 in 2017, according to historical data compiled by Glassdoor at Reuters’ request. The average rating of the nearly 1 million employers reviewed on the site is 3.4.
• In the first quarter, Elon Musk’s CEO approval rating dropped to 52% from 90% in 2017.
• Tesla’s “recommend to a friend” rating fell to 49% in the first quarter from a high of 71% two years prior, the Glassdoor data showed.

Furthermore, Tesla has also been caught blocking employee access to Blind, an anonymous social network for tech employees to talk about their jobs.

Tesla argues that it remains an attractive employer since it received almost 500,000 job applications in 2017, 2018, and it expects to beat that number in 2019.

The company also notes that Universum named them and sister company SpaceX as “the most attractive employers for engineering students.”

Electrek’s Take

These drops in rankings are hardly surprising. Rounds of layoffs and compensation drops will do that to a workforce.

If there’s an area where I think Tesla could improve, it’s that front.

At this point, it is clear that Tesla was under a big cash crunch during the first quarter of 2019.

When a company’s under financial pressure, they can make their customers pay for it, their employees pay for it, or their shareholders pay for it.

I am of the opinion that shareholders should pay for it, but instead of going back to the market to raise more money at that point, Tesla went on to start a new big round of layoffs, compensation restructure, and changing prices.

In my opinion, that’s making employees pay for it.

The company ended up raising capital anyway during the next quarter and the shareholders ultimately also paid for it after the stock price dropped following all those events.

For all those reasons, I’m not surprised to see more dissatisfaction through those employer rating sites.