I applied online. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Tesla (Palo Alto, CA) in Oct 2016
Interview
It was a very bad experience! After my interview, my opinion about the company (that I had a great respect and knew it as an efficient corporate with start-up culture) has changed and my respect was gone!
Very unorganized interview process with a very unhelpful and unfriendly (sometimes even impolite) recruiter.
After more than 2 months of back and forth, I was told that all the interview process went very well and everyone liked me. I was even told that even CEO and CTO have signed my offer and I should expect it any day. (couple of phone interviews were added along the way that were not planned ahead. They happened after the "final onsite" interview because a manager wanted to talk to me and he didn't bother to attend to any of onsite interview meetings).
Afterwards, they did the background check (that put me through a lot and is why makes me so upset!). At the end, one day I have received a call from the recruiter and he told me "sorry, after recent merger with Solar City we are obligated to merge the departments and we can't hire you at this point." Note that merger was happening in the first place that I was contacted by the recruiter and it wasn't a surprise, but they put me through a lot for almost 3 months and at the end there was no further explanation nor respect to my time and.....