Toyota confirmed today that it would hire more than 1,000 employees for its new North American headquarters campus in Plano, but beyond calling the salaries competitive it declined to say how much the jobs would pay. The 1,000-plus figure will bring the total employee count here to 4,000 once the 100-acre, 2.1 million-square-foot facility is fully opened, with move-in by mid-2017. Jim Lentz, CEO of Toyota Motor North America, said 400 employees who are new to the company’s headquarters operation have already been hired here—half of them brand-new employees, half from other affiliated Toyota companies.
“Two-thirds to 70 percent” of Toyota employees in California, New York, and Kentucky have agreed to make the move to North Texas, Lentz said. That’s less than the 70 percent to 75 percent he’d predicted earlier, but still much better than Toyota rival Nissan experienced when it moved its headquarters from California to Tennessee in 2008. The new Toyota positions to be filled here will be in finance, quality engineering, sales and marketing, and information technology, Lentz said.
Among them are “a lot of professional jobs,” the CEO added. But he was reluctant to provide salary ranges, or to say whether the Texas salaries would be on par with those at the company’s former headquarters in Torrance, Calif. “We look at the specific markets we work in,” Lentz said. “The salary ranges in San Francisco may be different from the ranges in Kansas City,” he added, and are based on experience and will be competitive. He urged interested job-seekers to click on toyota.com/careers on the company’s website. The site currently lists responsibilities, qualifications, and benefits for nearly 200 open positions, but no salary ranges.
