Tesla hires new ‘Chief People Officer’ from Electronic Arts

Following the acquisition of SolarCity and growing overall workforce ahead of the start of Model 3 production, Tesla has now over 30,000 employees. That’s a ten-fold increase over the last 5 years.

In order to manage this growing workforce, Electrek has learned that Tesla hired former Electronic Arts executive Gabrielle Toledano as Chief People Officer, a new c-level position for the automaker.

Tesla had a leadership shakeup in its human resource department earlier this year when Mark Lipscomb, Tesla’s VP of human resources and second most senior HR exec after Tesla’s Arnnon Geshuri, left for Netflix.

Now Toledano is joining Geshuri in Tesla’s HR leadership. She updated her LinkedIn Profile this week and we confirmed the move with Tesla.

Toledano spent the last decade in HR executive roles at the American video game company Electronic Arts, where most recently she held the position of Chief Talent Officer and Executive Vice President of Human Resources.

She currently sits on the board of directors at several Silicon Valley software and HR companies, like Jive, Jhana, Visier, and TalentSky.

When Toledano joined Visier, the company described her as someone capable of fostering leadership talent:

“A 25-year HR professional, Toledano is responsible for overseeing workforce development strategies on a global scale at EA. Many of Toledano’s former direct reports moved into prominent HR executive roles for leading organizations such as LinkedIn, Apple, Dolby, Minted, GoPro, ModCloth, Rocket Fuel and Zynga. (To learn about Toledano’s leadership tips, read her Five Traits of Highly Respected HR Leaders blog post.)

Two senior HR leaders who have reported to Toledano at Electronic Arts include Steve Cadigan, who became the VP of Talent for LinkedIn, and Jeff Ryan, who became the SVP of HR for CBS Interactive, and is now the VP of People for GoPro.”

She is now joining Tesla’s HR leadership, which includes former Google executive Arnnon Geshuri and former Apple executive Cindy Nicola.